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The Nickel & Dime Generation
Phaethon360 sends in a piece that looks at how quickly game costs can add up these days, now that DLC, microtransactions and standalone expansions are commonplace, writing, "If you were trying to the think of the most expensive games to play, Rock Band or a monthly-fee MMORPG would come to mind. But Halo 3 is right up there, too." It's reminiscent of a recent post at IncGamers where the author tallied up how much he'd spent on World of Warcraft over the past several years, and was astonished to realize it numbered in the thousands of dollars.
The only game I regularly play is GranTurismo, and with version 5 they're going to introduce micropayments as well, appearently if you want to buy all cars and all tracks, it will set you back several thousand dollars. Come on! With GT4, you got all cars and all tracks in the single payment! It's just a total rip off. Makes me think twice about actually buying it when it'll come out and that with my favourite game ever. Any other game with micro payments would not enter my house hold.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Don't play the game. It is only a game.
I can see whining and bitching about prices for things that we need to function in modern society. Homes, Transportation, energy, food etc... But video games just let the market decide what will happen if it is too expensive and you don't want to pay that amount then don't buy the game. It is only a game you don't need it. If you think you do then you are a shill to marketing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Be ready for nickel and diming across the board. I see strategic war games on Steam selling sprite packs for $2.50.
Browsing around yesterday, I knew that when I saw a "Buy today and get four landmarks free" advertisement for CitiesXL (MMO SimCity) that if I were look into its pricing scheme a bit more, I'd be in for a doozy: $9 a month to play with "free" content each month, followed by add-on packs called GEMs. Right now people are in an uproar over it because the general impression is that people will need to start paying the monthly fee to have access to mass transit in their single-player cities, something many consider an essential part of a city/world-building game as opposed to an optional add-on.
In my mind, ignoring facts that I'm sure will prove otherwise, nickel and diming all started with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion's horse armor for $2.50 :)
It's reminiscent of a recent post at IncGamers where the author tallied up how much he'd spent on World of Warcraft over the past several years, and was astonished to realize it numbered in the thousands of dollars
TV services will add up to thousands of dollars in ONE year, not several.
If your hobby is auto tuning or off-roading that souped up sports car or SUV will gobble through even more money a year in parts and gas than the afore mentioned TV bills.
Is your hobby reading? Only a fraction of titles are available in the libraries of most municipalities, this means at least as much as WoW a month if not more.
The point is this is nothing new. Every generation has had its "nickel and dime", it's the nature of all hobbies.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
>>>>>I've paid $14.95 a month for 56 months. That's $837.20.
>>
>>pretty much every other hobby costs a lot more per month
Yes but it's not necessary to spend all that cash on just ONE game. I bought DDR for just $20 and it still entertains me all these years later. Why spend hundreds of dollars when a single twenty will give just as much fun?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
wonder what his /played totals? I can't look at mine. The money is nothing compared to the time wasted. Generally I think of WoW as saving my entertainment dollar. What other entertainment could you possible find for $15 a month. Heck Netflix costs more. Of course if you want to go crazy add in the net connection, the new PC every couple of years, the junkfood for raiding, and the gym membership that you got to take off the raiding pounds (but have never used)
Any XBox 360 game is expensive if microsoft continue to charge users to play online...
Well it's all because of those damn pirates. I mean if people would stop copying games, usually kids and others who don't have the financial means to do otherwise, or even those who wouldn't pay for it anyway, then money would magically appear in their pockets and they would be willing to spend this magical money on games. Then all the games in the world would be cheap! Because that's how unfairly treated EA and Blizzard and Microsoft are, struggling in this harsh and cruel world to barely make ends meet.
Not following? Me neither.
Disclaimer: I'm not for or against piracy, I keep my worthless morals to myself, and you keep your worthless morals to yourself. I'm just exposing bullshit.
I am the lawn!
It's easy to find cheap hobbies: knitting, painting (some kinds), writing, many sports (football, running, swimming), gardening, reading, walking.
I play soccer. I spend more playing that in a recreational league (the cheapest one in the state that I know of) than on a WoW subscription. I enjoy reading. I admit that I don't work at keeping reading costs down (I'm often buying books and then giving them away to others), but I spend more on books than a WoW subscription. Swimming? Where do you swim? Swim once a week at a pool and you pay more than WoW, own your own pool and you are way way above that. Every gardener I know pays more than a WoW subscription for their hobby. If you like popcorn, WoW is cheaper than one movie a month. Wow, as hobbies go, is cheap. You have to work hard to find hobbies that cost less. 5 years of WoW is still less than what my coworker paid for his PS3, and he pays 3-5 times WoW's subsctiption on top of that in games.
Learn to love Alaska
People *used* to primarily treat good games like books, after you read it, on the shelf it goes. Sure you might not read it again anytime soon, but knowing you have the option is comforting.
With more and more "casual" gamers buying more and more "awful but severely marketed" titles that offer no lasting replay value, the idea of a "long-term rental" utilizing GameStop as a middle-man, means EA can sell the downloadable content to 5 or 10 different people per disc instead of just 1! Burn-out Paradise is a prime example of this. Sure you can snag the disc for $15-$20 at your local used disc dealer, but after you install and update the game, you'll discover huge sections of the world closed to you (and cars unattainable) until you fork over $20 here and there for download-able expansions!
Even better, if you buy all these trinkets and ever lose the disc/sell the game then EA still has a bunch of your money for bits you can no longer use, and the chance to sell them all over again to someone else!
What, me worry?
This article is ridiculous
The guy has 2 * 2 accounts with his wife, buys WoW normal AND collector editions, goes to BlizzCon and then finds out it costs quite a bit of money?
There are many articles worth nothing and this is one of them.
People are still using Second Life? I thought that died off years ago.
People are stupid. If you tell someone it's $500, they'll say "Holy crap I can't afford that." If you tell them it's 25 easy payments of only $49.99 they'll think it's a lot cheaper.
This is not rocket science, it's basic arithmetic. Unfortunately, the average American failed basic arithmetic so it might as well be rocket science.
Subscription based payment makes a lot more sense for MMOs because you're constantly using their server whenever you're playing. At an abstract level, separate from the question as to whether or not I'm getting good value for my money, just the basic concept makes some sense to me. I'm continually using their resources, and so I give them a few bucks each month.
At my job we use AutoCAD and Autodesk basically forced us into a subscription the last time we upgraded. So now instead of paying a big chunk of change to upgrade all of our licenses every few years, we send off a smaller (yet still significant) amount of money each year. The yearly subscriptions add up to about the same amount of money as we'd spend in the old bulk upgrades, but it's just one more thing that has to be remembered and budgeted each year. Autodesk pretends that we're getting a good deal, because they throw in a few minor pieces of software that nobody really has the time to learn, and because with our subscription we get "free" upgrades to each yearly release. Never mind the fact that we still only plan on installing new versions every few years because it's a big hassle. The subscription model makes very little sense from our point of view, we just plain don't like it. Unfortunately, we're pretty much at the mercy of Autodesk, because moving to new software would be an even bigger hassle.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"I'm going to take a wild guess that you get more out of reading a month's worth of books than you do out of playing a month's worth of WoW."
Why? Because reading literature is inherently respectable, while video games are inherently a waste of time? What are you getting out of either activity besides enjoyment?
You're sitting in a room by yourself, consuming the creative output of somebody else. I'm sure you think it makes you more interesting and better than someone doing the same while also interacting with other people, but I don't see why.