The march of technology is supposed to make things better for consumers, but these days it seems videogame makers strive to find new ways to take more of our money and give us less in return.
We are not communists here. We want publishers to make financially prudent decisions so they can continue to deliver games that fuel our addictions. But some bone-headed business moves benefit everyone except us.
Here are the worst offenders:
Xbox 360’s Expensive Memory
Want a bigger PlayStation 3 hard drive? Buy an off-the-shelf laptop drive and slap that baby in. Need more room for all the WiiWare games you’ve downloaded? Hot-swap a generic SD card. Running out of space on your Xbox 360 hard drive?
Bend over.
The biggest hard disk you can buy for Xbox 360 is the 120-GB model, and it costs a whopping $140. For purposes of comparison, that’s the MSRP of Western Digital’s terabyte drive. Need 512 MB of portable memory for your Xbox? Only $40, which would buy an 8-GB SD card.
GameStop-Exclusive Powers
In Sony’s
inFamous, Cole McGrath learns electric superpowers by frying enemies. Except for the Gigawatt Blades power, which he learns by you paying money to GameStop.
Giving out plastic tchotchkes in return for putting down a reservation fee on an upcoming game is a nice touch, but working out a sweetheart deal with a retailer to hold back in-game abilities unless a player hands over five bucks ahead of time is downright sketchy. Not to mention the fact that if you miss the preorder deal, it’s impossible to unlock the content at any time thereafter. GameStop gets more preorders, Sony gets advertising sponsorship and the rest of us get a gimped game.
Old Game, New Price
We can argue all day about whether paying $8 for a Super Nintendo game download is worth it, but at least that’s the highest any game publisher charges for 16-bit relics anymore. Except for Square Enix, which took the 1995 game
Chrono Trigger, slapped it onto a Nintendo DS cartridge with only the barest of extra features, then charged $40 for it — 10 bucks more than a standard DS game.
Icing on the cake: Complaining about the game’s sales, as if it’s consumers’ fault for having the audacity to spot a raw deal.
PSP Go
Aren’t game machines supposed to get
cheaper over time? Sony’s new PSP is microsized in every way except the price: $250, an $80 premium over the current model. The only advantage is the smaller form factor, and we doubt that the smaller screen counts as a gameplay plus. Otherwise, the Go’s features are downgraded over the original PSP’s — no disc drive, no swappable battery pack (and no upgrade to the expected battery life to counteract either of those).
So why is the price the same as when the unit launched in 2005? Sony says it’s because retailers are taking a bigger cut off the top, since they won’t be making money on sales of game discs. No matter who is to blame, consumers lose with PSP Go’s price. With any luck, the accompanying shift to downloadable sales will make the PSP’s software catalog cheaper than retail, but we’re not holding our breaths on that, considering…
Downloads Priced Same as Discs
There aren’t as many test cases here yet, because few console games have been released in both downloadable and disc versions, but the data we have is disheartening. It’s much, much cheaper to sell a downloadable game: You don’t have to print a disc, and middlemen don’t take a cut. Win-win, right? More like win-lose.
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue costs the same $30 as a PlayStation 3 disc or a PlayStation Store download. The disc is undeniably more valuable, since it can be resold. If the prices are the same, digital versions give gamers less for their money. (At least the IRS isn’t taxing downloads —
yet.)
Guitar Hero: Smash Hits
The ability to download in-game content was supposed to revolutionize music games, because you could add new songs to keep the experience fresh. The makers of both
Guitar Hero and
Rock Band have embraced song downloads, but the gulf between the two companies’ approaches is staggering. Harmonix gives gamers a better deal: The company lets users add hundreds of new songs to existing
Rock Band games on an a la carte basis, while Activision has minimized downloads while churning out disc after redundant disc.
Prime example:
Guitar Hero Smash Hits, a $60 collection of previously released
Guitar Hero songs that won’t work with older versions of the game. The result?
Guitar Hero players end up paying more for segregated song lists.
Nintendo Sitting on Games
Want to play the latest game in the
Fatal Frame series? Too bad. It’s just one of many Wii and Nintendo DS games that Nintendo holds the publishing rights to, but has refrained from bringing to America.
Disaster: Day of Crisis, Mother 3, Soma Bringer and
Another Code are other examples.
The rationale is almost understandable: Releasing niche titles like these is fine for smaller publishers with lower overhead, but Nintendo is the world’s biggest game publisher, and needs to focus its energies on surefire hits. So why not license these games to smaller publishers? Why hoard publishing rights to so many quality games, especially when titles like
Disaster are better than 99 percent of Wii shovelware? (To say nothing of the stranglehold that the company has on Virtual Console classic game releases.)
Region Locks
Releasing games only in certain regions wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the region locks that restrict game machines to playing software from a single territory. Concerns about language barriers and international shipping already keep the vast majority of gamers from buying titles from other regions, so arbitrary regional lockouts only serve to annoy those who want to experience games from all over the world. Nintendo DS, PSP and PS3 have the right idea — the vast majority of games for those machines aren’t region-coded. If only Wii and Xbox 360 would follow suit.
Funny Money
The biggest rip-off of all is when game publishers take your money and give you nothing in return. Want to buy a $2 app on the Nintendo DSi? Sorry, you’ll have to pony up the $10 minimum charge for 1,000 Wii Points. Why should we give Nintendo $8 to sit in escrow while we wait for it to release something else we want on the download service?
At least Nintendo uses a comprehensible exchange rate. Xbox players aren’t so lucky: Ten bucks gets you 800 Microsoft points, a ridiculous exchange rate that makes it more complicated than necessary to figure out how much you’re really paying for the digital doodads you’re piling into your virtual cart. Thanks, Sony, for using real-dollar transactions in the PlayStation Store — even though you can only add funds to your “wallet” in $5 increments.
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