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.

Comments

If you can't afford it. then...

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:If you can't afford it. then...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. The only problem with the entertainment industry is that unlike the housing, transportation, energy industries, if a mass of people vote with their wallet then some companies will write it off as piracy increasing as opposed to people being turned off by gouging and making a monetary vote.

As it is right now, I don't buy any new blockbuster game not only due to its price, but due to the fact that if I wait two years I can get a "gold edition" or a "game of the year edition" with all the content people were nickel and dimed for at 40% of the price of the standalone game.

Why single out games?

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:Why single out games?

[plasmacutter]

Because companies intentionally cripple games and then charge you extra to get the full game. THAT is why. When you pay for HBO, HBO doesn't leave out certain shows that you have to pay extra for or only show you 3/4 of an episode and you have to pay extra for the rest of the episode. When you buy a car, they don't sell you the car and then say "oh, well you have to pay another $5,000 if you want a FUEL tank. What? You want to be able to turn it on? Well that's another $4,500 for the ignition!" That kind of garbage is the problem with DLC.

When you pay for cable though you don't get all the channels. You have to pay for HBO, Showtime, ESPN sports packages, then there's pay-per-view, on demand fees, and lets not forget a separate category for HD feeds.

When you buy a car you don't get all the features either. You might say "oh those aren't necessary", but I hear stories from my mother about cars and HOMES without air conditioning a few decades ago.

Do I think the practice is abusive? hell yeah! It should be fought tooth and nail too!, but this article makes it seem unique, which is far from the case.

Re:DLC

[AK Marc]

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.

Gamestop caused this.

[BiggestPOS]

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!

Ridiculous FA

[flibuste]

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.