How do they get away with it?
September 29 2:02 P.M.
Over the years, video game companies have pulled some pretty audacious stunts in pursuit of the contents of your wallet. Now that the industry's bigger than ever, they're getting more and more creative. Here's a few recent moneygrabs that leave us wondering: how do they get away with it?
Xbox 360 wireless adapter
Wireless adapter for the PS3 or Wii? $0 -- they're built-in. USB wireless adapter for the PC? $20 or so. USB wireless adapter for the Xbox 360?
$100.
Why the insane mark-up? Beats us, but Microsoft has been getting away with this one ever since launch. Tech-savvy consumers have other options for getting their 360s onto a wireless network, but if you're not willing to read up on the intricacies of 802.11g (and assuming wired isn't an option for you), you're going to have to open up your wallet or miss out on the wealth of fun to be had on Xbox Live. Relief -- of a sort -- is in sight: the adapter is tipped to drop to a still-insulting $80 in the near future as they release a new version.
Microtransactions
Remember when you could just walk into a store, buy a game, and that was the end of it? With the growth of purchasable downloadable updates and game tweaks, modern video games can be expanded well beyond their original capabilities (like, say, with Burnout Paradise's series of outstanding content downloads)...or exploited to nickel-and-dime gamers for features that really should have been in the game to start with.
Several publishers have been tempted by the extra revenues this strategy can offer, but easily the worst (and most recent) offender is EA Sports. Take Madden 10: some of its purchasable downloads give your team boosts like immediate injury recovery, temporary stat boosts, and perhaps most egregiously, the $5 "Elite Status" -- which unlocks the game's toughest difficulty level for online ranked play, among other things. Nice, but didn't we already pay for this game once?
$130 to plug in your PS3
A wave of facepalming and headshaking swept the blogosphere when this Best Buy poster made the rounds this month. It offers to install, configure, and update your PS3 for the tidy sum of $130. Or, you know, you could read the manual. Or consult this nice audio-visual tutorial. Or give your neighbor's kid a few bucks to talk you through it. Or just figure it out as you go along. In short, anything to avoid giving the Geek Squad what's nearly half the price of the console for a five-minute job.
Xbox Live Points
There's nothing inherently eye-popping about having to add credit to an online account before you can buy downloads. There are quite rational and sensible reasons for it, we're told, having to do with credit card minimums and other tedious things like that.
But why is the Xbox's online store priced entirely in Microsoft moon money, where a dollar is worth four-fifths of a "Microsoft Point?" Because they're under the impression that we won't really notice how much things cost, we assume. In fact, the only good thing we can say about it is that it's single-handedly taught an entire generation the lost art of how to multiply and divide by 0.8.
Downloadable games that cost the same as retail
Online distribution's all the rage this year. Take Sony's PSP Go (launching this week), which ditches conventional game distribution altogether in favor of downloading games from Sony's online store. Downloadable games are just like games on disc, except you get, well, less: no box, no manual, and no smiling retailer. Plus, you can't resell them or trade them in. That'd be great...if they cost less than standard retail products.
But they don't. They cost the same. Where does the money once spent on box, manual, and retailer cut go, we wonder? And what's the incentive for Sony (and other exclusive online distribution channels from Microsoft and Nintendo) to cut prices? Better hope you like the convenience of downloadable games, because you sure ain't winning on price.
Used game trade-in values
Here's an exercise for EB Games or GameStop shoppers: the next time you trade in a stack of games, take a stroll down the shelves and check out how much they're going to sell your old games for. Chances are, it's much, much more than the paltry sum you're getting back. Outrageous markups are the stock in trade for the used game biz, and they only get away with it because they think you're too lazy to list them on eBay, or call a pawn store, or put them on Craigslist, or...or anything else, really. You're not, are you?
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/how-do-they-get-away-with-it-/1358619
