Slashdot Mirror
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.
They may just get a seat.
One of our current federal senators is Seven Fielding, of the christian political party called Family First. http://www.stevefielding.com.au/
That fool got his seat with only 1.8% of the primary vote. The remainder were on preferences.
As an example of a company crippling its games, I heard Windows 7 will include Micropayments for it's classic games. For instance:
Soltaire, Spider Solitaire, and FreeCell come with only half a deck. 99cents for a full one per game.
Minesweeper has only the small board. 99cents for the medium and large ones each.
Pinball, in an effort to be more true to life, will charge you 50cents per game.
Knowing Microsoft this will probably expanded to other areas of the operating system. Maybe, we can pay 2.00 to have images display on our screens, or 1.00 per hour for use of the windows calculator. Start menu clicks going for 5 cents each for a limited time!
Pfft... If Microsoft really wanted to rake in the money in micropayments, they'd start charging for every BSOD.
:o
I think they could double their gross income that way.