CHROMEHOUNDS CONTENT NOW AVAILABLE AT HIGH PRICE
Here's the deal... Sega has released 10 new items for their Xbox 360 game Chromehounds via the Xbox Live Marketplace... at a cost of 100 points ($1.25) per item. See? and we thought "horse armor" was bad...
The problem here is that Chromehounds is an online game, and if these items make any kind of a difference in the competitive balance of the game, we've just entered a whole new realm of "broken" in gaming. When the industry allows greed to grow to a point where the way to win games is buy buying what you need and not by skill, we've lost something.
Rather than ramble on and on like I usually do, I'm going to just re-post something I put up in the comments section of Major Nelson's blog on the subject. Supposedly Microsoft was taking a close look at what people thought about the situation, and I figured that I wanted to throw my 25 cents into the machine for good measure. The fact that somehow the Major's blog removed all my paragraph formatting and turned my post into one big blur is another story.
Of course, I'm rambling again - so I'll stop now and get with quoting the post. Enjoy.
"I too feel like the Marketplace is coming to a crossroads. We're seeing more and more of these transactions as time goes on, and I'm beginning to fear that this is only the beginning. You have to begin to wonder how much content will be withheld from titles in the future on the basis that the money can be made up on the back-end. How long before a game is incomplete without spending the additional money?
When the idea of the marketplace was first announced, Microsoft used Forza as an example. At the time I thought it was a HORRIBLE idea as buying new parts for your car would potentially change the game from being about skill to being about who is willing to spend more money.
I don't play Chromehounds, so I don't know if these add-ons can be used in the online portion of the game, but if they can, then something is definitely wrong here.
People can say "If you don't want it, don't buy it" all they want, but when those purchases still can affect a player whether they've opted into an additional purchase or not, the idea of downloadable content becomes a negative in my book, not a positive.
As an example, let's take PGR3. If a car was made available in a "pay" pack that was head and shoulders better than any other car in the game, what would that do to competitive balance? Would you want to race when you knew no matter how well you raced someone who spent an additional $5 on a car could always beat you easily? - That's what I'm worried we're on the cusp of - the consumables concept just pushes that even further. How long until we start having to pay for things that are currently free?
Add to that the fact that with downloadable content we're entering into an age where games are hitting the market with bugs (see MLB2K6 and Madden NFL '07 (yes the one that's not out yet - if you aren't aware, it's going to be patched at launch or right thereafter due to issues with player fatigue) that SHOULD have been caught in the testing process, but for whatever reason aren't.
When I talk to people who prefer console games over PC games one of the main reasons I'm given for that choice is that the console game market doesn't have the bugs, need for patches or costs of constantly upgrading that the PC game market carries with it. Looks like that's changing too.
Getting back on track, I'll sum up my thoughts on this one as such;
The idea of paying an additional $12.50 for 10 simple items in a game is extremely disappointing to me as a console gamer and Microsoft customer. I'm sure Sega is trying to recoup some costs on Chromehounds as it isn't the red-hot seller they felt it would be, but this is the absolute wrong way to go about it - the price point is just too high - and it could set a bad trend within the marketplace." - G.P. "NYLatenite" Fornasiero
We'll talk about Microsoft's plans for "consumables" soon, but I'd like to know what your thoughts are regarding the direction downloadable content is taking? Give a post in the comments section and sound off!
Posted by nylatenite
at 8:39 AM EDT
Updated: Saturday, 19 August 2006 8:49 AM EDT
