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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.

4 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.

  2. Three Words by BigMeanBear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Magic The Gathering

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  3. 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...

  4. 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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