With the games industry quietly shifting to the $59.99 price point in an effort to try to "recoup the costs of expanding development teams;" game publishers and developers are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to grasp a portion of everyone's limited income. One of the most prevalent ways that these companies we all know and love are doing this is by offering "extra" content to their titles via download services or larger disc-based expansions. In some cases, this can be simple things like extra costumes or even different costume "colors" for a game's characters, while in other more extreme cases, this can be nearly a completely new game and story, merely set in the same world.
Hop in the time machine with me for a second. A while ago, quite a number of games had to "trick" us into playing them for extended periods of time. The inexplicable lure of extra characters, mirrored racetracks, "sound tests," alternate endings and rocket launchers with infinite ammo kept us punishing ourselves for hours on end to meet that seemingly impossible task of beating a game in a certain amount of time or a certain number of times. Games had to be developed from the beginning with quite a bit of extra content that realistically about 10-20% of the people who purchased the game would ever see; so from a business standpoint, developers were spending a ton of time (read: money) on creating content that wasn't "necessary" for the product to be enjoyed from start to finish for the "average" gamer.
Myself, being the most "average" of hardcore gamers; I admittedly have spent numerous hours peeking into every nook and cranny of a game purchase, while other games with equal amount of content sit quietly on a shelf trying desperately to convince me that I should ravage them like an obsessed neurotic ex-girlfriend with an overactive libido and abandonment issues. Sadly enough, my time is finite. To truly sink the obsessive compulsive side of my personality's teeth into a game, it literally has to make me feel as though it equates to a religious experience... something I've not really felt since the cartridge days. Much like DVD "extras," it takes a story or world I'm completely hooked on to want to experience it's extra special goodie-filled nethers, because let's face it, not all of us have the time (or the spare sanity) to try and avoid two-hundred lightning strikes.
So what if you could bypass all that, pay a fee in currency suspiciously designed to make you think you're spending less money than you actually are, and experience that content from the game's outset? What if there was some sort of optional way to get all the secret hidden unlockable weapons and costumes from the moment you PRESS START, rather than having to wade through hours and hours of repetitive time trials and pressing "x" on every pixel of every wall? Wouldn't that be great?
Well there's not.
What there is, is a mandatory fee that you have to pay in order to experience said content. Going away quickly are the days where your dedication and attention to detail will yield spectacular results, and what you end up getting for your $59.99 is the "basic" complete game, with all the trimmings sitting nearby in a locked glass case tantalizing you with things you could be enjoying if you would just insert your credit card into your game console. Fighting through every round with a "perfect" on the hardest difficulty won't get you those extra costumes, but about 1200 Microsoft Points will. Playing through the story without letting one single character die won't net you the secret unlockable character, but plunk down some extra cash, and you can have him/her/it ready to go before you even break the cellophane. Pre-order the game and you can even have something extra special... but be sure to pre-order it from the right place, as each major retailer will likely provide you with something different.
With some daring game developers now including "downloadable" content on the disc [http://kotaku.com/5492303/bioshock-2s-dlc-is-on-the-disc-to-keep-us-all-together] itself and basically charging you to "unlock" it, you have to start to wonder about the real price point of a "complete" game. While it's one thing to revive a game by offering extra content months to years down the road, to have "extra" content available right from the start, and to charge your consumer base for access to it, is quite a bold move that everyone somehow seems completely okay with. Imagine however, if you had to pay an extra $5-10 for access to the "Star Road" in Super Mario World, or had to pay $1.49 for access to each additional ending of Chrono Trigger other than the canon final one. How would we have reacted to this back when developers were including all this extra content for the price of admission? What if $4.99 gave you access to the extra "Red Mage" class in the original Final Fantasy or access to the "Colosseum" in Final Fantasy VI?
Wouldn't it be nice if we, as a gaming community, could reach some sort of happy middle ground with the developers we constantly shell out our money to? What if we could "work" for our rewards or buy them? Oddly enough, from what someone was telling me, though I have no first-hand experience... this is similar to the Farmville model. Supposedly, though it's making money hand over fist, Farmville offers nothing in the game for purchase that can't be unlocked through dedicated gameplay. What if games like Mass Effect or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 adopted a similar model? What if by getting all possible endings netted you a "voucher" of sorts for the extra character? What if getting to a certain status in Modern Warfare 2 gave you a code to download the additional maps? What if developers started rewarding dedicated gamers rather than punishing them by charging them as much as possible for the experience they love so much?
Sadly enough, it seems that gaming prices are not going to go down, and what you get for what you (initially) pay out will continually diminish as games get more "expensive" to make. While it would be nice to have the option to still unlock this "additional" content through repeated gameplay, in economics, it would make little to no sense to offer something for free when people are willing to pay for it.
In short: I blame you.
... and by you I mean me.
Hop in the time machine with me for a second. A while ago, quite a number of games had to "trick" us into playing them for extended periods of time. The inexplicable lure of extra characters, mirrored racetracks, "sound tests," alternate endings and rocket launchers with infinite ammo kept us punishing ourselves for hours on end to meet that seemingly impossible task of beating a game in a certain amount of time or a certain number of times. Games had to be developed from the beginning with quite a bit of extra content that realistically about 10-20% of the people who purchased the game would ever see; so from a business standpoint, developers were spending a ton of time (read: money) on creating content that wasn't "necessary" for the product to be enjoyed from start to finish for the "average" gamer.
Myself, being the most "average" of hardcore gamers; I admittedly have spent numerous hours peeking into every nook and cranny of a game purchase, while other games with equal amount of content sit quietly on a shelf trying desperately to convince me that I should ravage them like an obsessed neurotic ex-girlfriend with an overactive libido and abandonment issues. Sadly enough, my time is finite. To truly sink the obsessive compulsive side of my personality's teeth into a game, it literally has to make me feel as though it equates to a religious experience... something I've not really felt since the cartridge days. Much like DVD "extras," it takes a story or world I'm completely hooked on to want to experience it's extra special goodie-filled nethers, because let's face it, not all of us have the time (or the spare sanity) to try and avoid two-hundred lightning strikes.
So what if you could bypass all that, pay a fee in currency suspiciously designed to make you think you're spending less money than you actually are, and experience that content from the game's outset? What if there was some sort of optional way to get all the secret hidden unlockable weapons and costumes from the moment you PRESS START, rather than having to wade through hours and hours of repetitive time trials and pressing "x" on every pixel of every wall? Wouldn't that be great?
Well there's not.
What there is, is a mandatory fee that you have to pay in order to experience said content. Going away quickly are the days where your dedication and attention to detail will yield spectacular results, and what you end up getting for your $59.99 is the "basic" complete game, with all the trimmings sitting nearby in a locked glass case tantalizing you with things you could be enjoying if you would just insert your credit card into your game console. Fighting through every round with a "perfect" on the hardest difficulty won't get you those extra costumes, but about 1200 Microsoft Points will. Playing through the story without letting one single character die won't net you the secret unlockable character, but plunk down some extra cash, and you can have him/her/it ready to go before you even break the cellophane. Pre-order the game and you can even have something extra special... but be sure to pre-order it from the right place, as each major retailer will likely provide you with something different.
With some daring game developers now including "downloadable" content on the disc [http://kotaku.com/5492303/bioshock-2s-dlc-is-on-the-disc-to-keep-us-all-together] itself and basically charging you to "unlock" it, you have to start to wonder about the real price point of a "complete" game. While it's one thing to revive a game by offering extra content months to years down the road, to have "extra" content available right from the start, and to charge your consumer base for access to it, is quite a bold move that everyone somehow seems completely okay with. Imagine however, if you had to pay an extra $5-10 for access to the "Star Road" in Super Mario World, or had to pay $1.49 for access to each additional ending of Chrono Trigger other than the canon final one. How would we have reacted to this back when developers were including all this extra content for the price of admission? What if $4.99 gave you access to the extra "Red Mage" class in the original Final Fantasy or access to the "Colosseum" in Final Fantasy VI?
Wouldn't it be nice if we, as a gaming community, could reach some sort of happy middle ground with the developers we constantly shell out our money to? What if we could "work" for our rewards or buy them? Oddly enough, from what someone was telling me, though I have no first-hand experience... this is similar to the Farmville model. Supposedly, though it's making money hand over fist, Farmville offers nothing in the game for purchase that can't be unlocked through dedicated gameplay. What if games like Mass Effect or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 adopted a similar model? What if by getting all possible endings netted you a "voucher" of sorts for the extra character? What if getting to a certain status in Modern Warfare 2 gave you a code to download the additional maps? What if developers started rewarding dedicated gamers rather than punishing them by charging them as much as possible for the experience they love so much?
Sadly enough, it seems that gaming prices are not going to go down, and what you get for what you (initially) pay out will continually diminish as games get more "expensive" to make. While it would be nice to have the option to still unlock this "additional" content through repeated gameplay, in economics, it would make little to no sense to offer something for free when people are willing to pay for it.
In short: I blame you.
... and by you I mean me.
