Is The Games Industry Giving You The Shaft?
Tyler Wilde has posted up an interesting piece on GamesRadar enumerating ten ways that the games industry is giving you the shaft. Mentioned are perennial favorites such as paying to unlock content that's already on a given game's disc, whether proclaimed shortages are real or merely a hype-building turn of phrase. The piece is very entertaining and while he makes some valid points, Wilde seems to have a bit of a bone to pick with Microsoft, specifically.
A couple of items that could have been included but weren't, I felt, are the concept of pre-ordering and the ridiculous low-ball trade-in credits offered by retailers like GameStop.
Head over to GamesRadar for Tyler's full write-up and let us here at GayGamer know your thoughts. Are his perceptions dead on? Personally, I think the piece lends itself more to tongue-in-cheek stabs, but then I get accused of being a MS fan boy on occasion so I could be biased.
Ten ways the games industry is shafting you [GamesRadar]
TexCub
Posted to Video Games on 1 March 2008
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: dlc, gamesradar, hype, microtransactions, opinion, preorders, shaft, shortages, xblm
A link would have been nice :)
Took me like 5 minutes to track this shit down. Saving you the trouble:
http://www.gamesradar.com/f/ten-ways-the-games-industry-is-shafting-you/a-20080219115144305067
He mentioned exclusives, but only refered to consolesystem exclusives.
What should also have been included are regional exclusives.
The whole PAL/NTSC US/NTSC J thing should be done away with and they should make games region free.
All this is doing is trying to make you buy 2 or 3 of the same machine.
The whole article has a funny tone, but the only point I disagree with is the argument against the 360's wireless peripheral.
If the wireless peripheral was built into the 360 I wouldn't use it and I don't think that I personally know anybody with a 360 who would use it. But his point on not being able to use a third parties product is a little off because you could use a wireless Router with the 360's ethernet port.
@Nexus: Agreed! Region lock outs annoy me more than any system exclusivity ever could.
@Decompiled: The 360 wireless peripheral issue isn't so much that it's not in the box, but rather that it's a complete rip off. The wireless network adaptor currently retails for $99 while a DS lite (which has wireless functionality) retails for $129. That's completely insane! Even if we wanted to stay within home consoles, the cheapest one out there (Wii) comes with this feature as an in box standard. I understand that it's MS trying to make back the money they lost on selling me the box, but for a consumer it just sucks.
I'm sure if the games industry make a similar list of it's consumers it would be *much* shorter. [ http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/02/opinion_piracy_casual_games_-.php ]
Thanks for the link, Dennis. That will teach me to try and do too many things at once!
When I had a 360 (for a day), I couldn't believe it didn't have wireless ethernet. Price comparisons with the PS3 lost all credibility right then and there. No wireless, and a tiny, proprietary hard drive that was full of demos after one day, and to fix both issues would cost more than a Wii. It's fair to point out that MS is gouging because they are.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the 360 seems to have gone out of production? The Elite at least hasn't even been listed on store websites since November. I can't stop hating and start playing the 360 until the one that's worth buying is available again.