mycatharsis.com

The wave of the future, charging you a little bit for every thing under the sun, as opposed to a lot for just some of the things (or , more accurately right now, in addition to charging a lot for just some things) is already irritating people.  Trustygamer vents, and rightly so.  His Elder Scrolls IV example sounds especially egregious.  Charging people $2.50 on top of the already increased $60 price tag for the game itself, for content that doesn’t add to the game, but merely fixes an error in the original release?  So not only are game prices increasing by $10, but now you can no longer expect a working game for that price either, but rather should be prepared to shell out even more just to make it workable?

Ugh.  In our increasingly plastic-dependent world, this kind of thing is only going to become more and more common.  When it’s used in creative ways, I think microtransactions can be a great thing, and a cost-effective replacement for standard pricing models.  My current web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, is a great example of that.  Unfortunately, the model adopted by video game companies, where it’s really taking hold, seems to see microtransactions as strictly a second revenue stream, with no reduction in base price for the consumer.  Instead of a way to save the consumer money, and thus bring in more customers in the long run, too many companies simply seem to choose to throw everything they can charge for into the ‘microtransactions’ pile and still soak the customer for the full price of a game.  Until consumers start voting with their pocketbooks on this, it’s only going to get worse too, I’d bet.