$60 is a lot of money. Even if you do the rudimentary math and conclude that you're only paying a few dollars per the amount of hours you get out of a videogame it's still a lot of cash to lay down over and over again. But what can we do? This is what games cost now and it isn't going to change... or is it?
EA Canada senior producer Jason DeLong believes that games are going to be getting cheaper down the road, with the upfront cost of a game being less, but more and more extras coming tacked on later. "I think that we’re going to start to see – maybe not in the next year, but in the near future – games go down the route of smaller up-front experiences and lower prices at the beginning, and then the ability to extend the game through episodic material or future feature material. I think that’s a direction we’re probably heading in," he told GameInformer in a recent interview.
I'm all for cheaper games and episodic content, but if developers start getting it into their head that they can basically release a game in pieces then that is bad news bears. That's just the conspiracy theorist in me talking though, I'm sure EA and all the big companies out there have our best interest in mind.
Software Price Drop for 2010? [GameInformer]
Matthew Razak is Destructoid's Associate editor and co-founder of film site
Flixist. He began as community member "cowzilla" and was since sequestered to write brainy features material. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife.
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Contest:
2:00 AM on 01.04.2010
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publishers could pull additional disc based release,the perfect example for this case is GTAIV: Episodes from Liberty City
I am, however, a fan of shorter, cheaper games (Like Portal!) and DLC.
Basically, what I DON'T want is exactly what they're doing with Fable 2 on Games on Demand. The first "section" came out months ago and there's no sign of them releasing the next part any time soon. It looks like it will be over a year before the entire game is available for download, and that is just plain stupid. I hope this experiment is a failed one.
i'll keep it short: NFL 2k5 $20 first day of retail. Full game. Madden had to buy out NFL license. EA sure knows how to maximize profits huh? EA can suck it.
At the end of the day, I'd rather be insulted by paying too much for a (bad) game than slowly fucked from behind through DLC. But, so it goes.
That's exactly what this is about and is exactly what is going to happen. All gaming is turning into a service, that is the goal. No more illusions of ownership, no sir.
The worst part? It's the consumer making it happen, not the "evil" publisher. The mainstream folks want this.
I don't care how important the devs think the initial experience is, make a complete one, or you'll be showcasing minimal experience if this kind of scamming continues. This is why I consider Resident Evil 5 a joke.
Well, to be fair, 2005 EA is vastly different from 2010 EA, in terms of greedy profit-mongering. They've dropped down and Kottick led Activision in to fill the mantle.
Episodic content wouldn't be so bad if you used it to lower prices and wait times in between games, as long as 'episodic' means you release a complete and mostly self-contained 'chapter' of the game at a time, not '10 dollar time trial mode' and '5 dollar co-op mode', or Fable 2's on demand approach of small, incomplete segments. But then there's Half-Life, which proves that episodes don't always cut down production delays in between games.
If anything, it would be nice to only drop 30 dollars on a game that turns out to be shit instead of 60.
I'm all for this, provided EA don't suggest what Ubisoft have been doing as of late. By that I mean putting the ending on a £10 piece of DLC, which is just stupid.
Then again, I don't want to see companies using this as an excuse to take a long time with small games. Or maybe I just wanted to mention EP3 here. Yeah. That's probably it.
Hate to break it to you Razak but that has been happening for a while now. Like others here have expressed i'd rather wait for a GOTY version that getting shamelessly scammed.
What really bothers me is that this is just the tip of the iceberg as currently these trickery is easily noticeable to experts by analyzing disc content, but when digital distribution kicks in in full force? then well get really shafted as companies will be able to cut and then sell huge chunks of the original game without anyone really noticing.
that basically happened to me. I bought collector's edition Fallout 3 on preorder. Then all those DLCs came out that cost almost as much as my original purchase! Now I'm getting a second copy of the GOTY edition (since when I bought it on sale, it was still cheaper than all the DLC standalone).
Last time I get a Bethesda game Day 0 again. If you wait a while you have a better chance at having great mods ready for you as well.