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The Nickel & Dime Generation

Posted by Soulskill on from the talking-cents dept.

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.

10 of 358 comments (clear)

  1. DLC by sopssa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's a total of 4 years and 8 months as of right now. That means that I've paid $14.95 a month for 56 months. That's $837.20.

    Considering that's almost 5 years of entertainment and actually a good game, is that really so much. Like he notes, it comes down to $14.95 a month - pretty much every other hobby costs a lot more per month, while still providing less in back in terms of time spent.

    Microtransactions and DLC's is a good way. If you like the game, you get more of what you like. It's not like you *have to* buy them. Patches in my opinion should be for game balancing or bug fixes - DLC's and expansions for things that add content to the game. However some companies, like Valve, release DLC's (TF2, Left4dead) for free on PC too.

    1. Re:DLC by xaxa · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Considering that's almost 5 years of entertainment and actually a good game, is that really so much. Like he notes, it comes down to $14.95 a month - pretty much every other hobby costs a lot more per month

      Hmm... that depends. It's easy to find cheap hobbies: knitting, painting (some kinds), writing, many sports (football, running, swimming), gardening, reading, walking.

      There are also plenty of expensive hobbies: flying/gliding, skiing, motor racing.

      Then there are ones where you spend as much as you like: watching sport or live music are the most obvious -- see a big band/team for £60, or a smaller one for £12 or one that's not very good yet (almost free, or free).

      And ones with a large upfront cost, but very small (even zero) ongoing costs: photography, playing an instrument.

      One of my hobbies is cycling, which for me has a negative cost -- I enjoy cycling to work, which saves me £664 a year on a train pass. I had to buy the bike, but I spent less than that, and the bike will last more than a year.

    2. Re:DLC by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is asinine. The reason a gamer won't be moving to Linux is because wine is a pitiful implementation (as good as it is right now) and doesn't support most games that are forced upon by microsoft and nvidia in collusion to be DX11, etc.

      Lets leave that shit out of it, eh?

      The point is, buying a couple *PC* games is cheaper than buying into MMO's.

    3. Re:DLC by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My wife and I have a policy about our hobbies:

      I don't ask about how much her yarn stash cost and she doesn't ask how much the dive gear costs.

      Separate bank accounts -- the key to happiness.

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      ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
    4. Re:DLC by Capt.DrumkenBum · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My last GF and I had an agreement it went something like this:
      Her clothes == My computer stuff
      Her shoes == My tools

      It worked quite well until she decided she needed the child add on... I still think it is much too expensive.

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      If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
  2. Three Words by BigMeanBear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Magic The Gathering

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    += E
  3. Sneaking in everywhere by Skraut · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As a big hockey fan I picked up NHL 10, to play with friends on their online league, the EASHL. In past years the game just featured "real" equipment that the players in the league wore, and you could chose any of that for your character.

    This year they featured customized "cool" equipment with boost slots. So a piece of equipment could be unlocked with 3 boost slots, and then up to 3 boosts could also be unlocked and added to it. So suddenly if you decided you wanted your character to look like he rides the short bus, you could actually increase your character up to 60 points, which is a major increase, considering leveling up your character fully only gets you about a 75 point increase.

    EA set most of these "unlockables" to some really impossible tasks. Play 4 seasons, manually playing at least 40 games each season and score X number of goals each season. If somebody has a month, they could probably achieve this, but because these would be used in a competitive league, people wanted them now and EA allowed people to purchase them. $3 per equipment, $2 per boost. Maxing out the boost equipment on your guy comes to roughly $40, yet if you don't you're at a disadvantage from those who either have too much time and can unlock, or too much money and can just buy it all.

    I bought one or two pieces to try and keep up, and would probably have bought more but my 360 RROD'd and its given me time to think. I doubt I'll buy a $60 game in the future where the part of the game I'm most likely to play will cost me a full $100, then I'll be fully expected to do it again next year.

    --
    Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
  4. Oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's OK that I've wasted thousands of hours of my life playing games. But now that I've realized I'm spending money too, well, that's just ridiculous!

  5. Second life: did someone say... by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Did someone say microtransactions? You can easily blow $20 a month on buying Linden Dollars to buy clothes and skins and hair and animations and gadgets. Then if you want to buy land that's another $10 a month for a premium account, $20 to actually get some land, plus now you're buying houses and trees and furniture. And that just puts you into "lower middle class". The real status symbol is owning a whole island.

    Private island: $1000 down + $295 / month.

    That's US dollars, not Linden dollars...

  6. People prefer small upfront fees, better TCO by Francis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've noticed that people in general seem to greatly prefer lower upfront fees compared to total cost of ownership (TCO).

    For instance, when AT&T halved the price of the iPhone and almost doubled the cost of the text+dataplan (raising TCO, but lowering the upfront fees), this made consumers happy and there was a bump in sales. We see this in other industries - to many car buyers, they only really consider the monthly payment amount, rather than the total cost of the vehicle, which is why car companies are now pushing 72 month leases. Even in the game industry, many people criticize the Playstation 3 as "too expensive", preferring the XBox's prices. Well, once you add in the cost of XBox Live ($50/year) compared to the Playstation Network (free) the difference is less significant.

    Companies are just getting smarter and more efficient at extracting money from consumers. In a capitalist society, this is really an inevitable consequence. The only solution to this is for consumers to get smarter, and start making better and more informed choices. I am sure this will never happen.

    Subscription services, paid add-on content and endless nickel & diming are the future.

    *Disclaimer: I'm not sure if these observations are specific to Americans, or this is how most people around the world behave.

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    #include <malloc.h>
    free(your.mind);