A Braid Premium Theme was released on the Xbox Live Marketplace on Thursday at the standard 250 Microsoft Points price tag though the Braid team are not happy with it. Despite the money they will earn from the theme, a blog post on the Braid Blog states they wanted “to make it free.”

“Unfortunately, we had to charge the standard Premium Theme price of 250 Microsoft Points (which is about $3.10 in American money). We want to make it free, but Microsoft doesn’t like giving things out for free.” The blog post continued: “But if you do buy it, you can be secure in the knowledge that you own one of the few Premium Themes that is not an advertisement — there is no text in the Braid theme anywhere.”

Accompanying the blog post is a bunch of screenshots of the theme to help you make your mind up about purchasing it. A similar incident occurred in 2008 when Microsoft priced the Xbox Live Arcade title at 1200 Microsoft Points, instead of the 800 Microsoft Points the game’s creator, Jonathan Blow, desired.

http://www.consolemonster.com/newspost.php?id=0000004725

I can see both sides of the argument.

The Braid devs should be able to forgoe recieving any money for the theme, but MS should not be expected to host it on their servers without recompense. It would be good if it could have been offered for cheaper though

@ scottie: that's true, but does that mean that a dev can't ever give something free to the fans of their game? Or does MS have things that are free on their service?

If so, then why can't this be (especially since the dev wanted it to be free)?

It annoyes me aswell when you can have 10.000 free themes on an other console while you have to pay for those on X360 >_>.