Lot's Wife Edition 1 2017

The Price Of Gaming
edition one
lot’s wife
My partner and I recently made the pilgrimage to EB Games in Chadstone. Not
to buy anything, but to cancel our pre-order for the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo’s newest
console. We looked at our respective bank accounts and decided we couldn’t justify the
$500 that the system would cost us. $500 is rent for a month, or the bills for half a year, or
a year of myki money. Choices like this are common for us; we’ve picked a hobby that costs
money. It just feels like video games cost so damn much.
In truth, gaming has always been expensive. No home console has ever cost less than
US$250 at launch. The ‘Australia tax’ slaps up to 88% extra on to the recommended
retail price of digital products. Downloadable content (or DLC) for games is now entirely
pervasive within the industry, and very little of it is free. Add to that the fact that
videogames are ludicrously expensive to produce, and so the prospect of squeezing extra
money out of consumers is attractive for publishers. But it feels like additional costs are
being built into the business model of modern gaming, and they are becoming increasingly
difficult to avoid.
Types of Additional Costs
Additional costs take many forms. One of the oldest is the expansion pack, which adds
anything from new items to entire storylines to an already released game, and often cost
almost as much as the original. Recently however, The Sims 4 publisher EA Games came
under fire because they were allegedly cutting content from the base game in order to sell
it later in expansion packs. A recent and small example is the inclusion of a butler in a
recent expansion pack for The Sims 4, a feature that was available on launch in The Sims 2.
Whether or not this was actually cut from the base game of The Sims 4 is pure speculation.
Regardless, EA have released no less than seventeen content packs for The Sims 4 since
launch. All of these together will cost the Australian consumer AU$420. You want the full
experience? Be prepared to fork out the cash.
Another form is micro-transactions; small purchases (typically less than $5) that enhance
the game in some way. Micro-transactions can be anything from cosmetic content that
alters the appearance of something in game, to ‘pay-to-win’ content that actually gives the
player some kind of advantage. Micro-transactions in major release games are generally
frowned upon – many feel that paying for a fully-priced game should rule out needing to
pay for extra content – but micro-transactions are common nonetheless. Gaming giant Call
of Duty: Infinite Warfare contains micro-transactions in the form of random caches, where
players can buy a bundle of mystery (supposedly cosmetic) items. But it turns out some of
the weapons given in the random drops have better stats than those the player can earn by
simply playing the game. And keep in mind, Infinite Warfare is a multiplayer game. So now
the costs aren’t even in simply owning a game, they lie in being able to experience it in a
way that is fair.
One of the newer forms is the pre-order bonus. Purchase a game before it releases and
receive certain content that will never be available any other way. The benefits for the
publishers are clear; if someone pre-orders a game, they’ve essentially bought it before any
reviews of the game are published. Unfavourable reviews are circumvented because they
simply don’t exist yet. In certain cases, this model has been pushed to the extreme. Deus Ex:
Mankind Divided pissed just about everyone off with their tiered pre-order bonus structure;
the more people who pre-ordered, the more pre-order content everyone would get. At the
highest tier, the game would actually release an entire week early. Many perceived this as
the publisher holding consumers ransom. You want the full experience? You better hope
everyone else does too. And if you didn’t want the value of your purchase in the hands of
countless, faceless others? Simply buy the Collector’s Edition, which contains all of the preorder
content – for US$150US. Within weeks the pre-order scheme was cancelled, and the
developer issued an apology.