| @mrstickball: You likely understand that losing money as a strategy isn't going to lead far. As a gamer i'm interested in whether the games companies make money or not, since making money is the requirement for getting games in the future. I do agree that DLC and DD titles have become important for the devs/publishers due to profitability issues, but i would bet that most of the gamers play offline. As for playing for the high score, the "high score" -type of games are on the Wii. Now, gamerscore isn't a bad idea at all, but there's one general flaw in it; it's essentially a "how many games i've played" list, not really a "high score" list. "Online" consists from a number of things, but i do understand, that for 360 owners "online" is very limited term. If you were asking how long does it take with Wii to get to play online, it depends on a game. Brawl takes ages, but for example Mario Kart takes maybe up to 3 minutes to get to play the game. In a friend match, if everything is ready, about a minute less. Frankly, i wouldn't be happy at all, if SMG of TP would have extra levels for a cost. I would be pissed, for not to have them included into the game in the first place (of course, if the DLC would arrive a year or two after the games initial release, that would change the whole thing). |
1. But as a gamer, what do you care more about - the games, or the companies' profit? Most of the time, profits & good games go hand in hand (as they are with the X360 now). I understand your logic, but at the same time...Nintendo's profits aren't bringing more core AAA games to the Wii.......Are they?
2. Again, with 60% of Xbox 360 owners having their consoles online...Survey says a lot use the online components, even in the least bit. A good example of profitability thanks to DLC features would be Namco's 'IdolM@ster'. They reported that IdolM@ster made $3.2 million dollars in DLC alone. That's amazing given the Japanese userbase for a X360 exclusive (that'd be like selling an extra 50,000 units with the vast majority of revenue going to your company).
3....Have you actually played a lot of games with/for gamerscore? Most achievements are based on doing certain things like racking up lots of points, finishing a game, and competing insane tasks (such as 100,000 kills on Gears of War 2).
4. You give 2 examples of Wiii games - one takes ages to play online, the other...Not so much. With the vast (and I mean vast) majority of online X360 games, it takes a matter of a minute or two. The usage of multiplayer online with X360 games is vastly more robust for almost any given game, than the Wii counterpart. That's pretty big, considering how many people play games online (at this moment, more than 80,000 people are playing Halo 3 online).
5. So you've always been mad at PC expansion packs, right? Most gamers enjoy more of a good thing. Furthermore, not every developer has the ability to push 100% of what they want out at release. Many games that have DLC have tons of great content added for free, or very affordably that would have most likely killed sales due to changed release dates, and budget overruns.....Halo 3 maps, CoD4 maps, and N+ maps would be good examples. As well as Shivering Isles - do you really expect SI to be included in the base game of Oblivion when it launched?!
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
