Next Gen Im going Retro

[Colin]

Why is it that in 1990 I could buy a Mars Bar for 35p and now it costs me 70p?

What's inflation got to do with it? When I bought games in 1990 I didn't then have to go back to the shop and pay to get my cartridge updated to get the full game I'd paid for.

[originalbadboy]

Why is it that in 1990 I could buy a Mars Bar for 35p and now it costs me 70p?

I suppose they could just sell me half a mars bar and I could pay a Microtransaction to complete it.

Its called inflation, something that has happened every year to my waistline since the 1990's as well!

When talkig about videogames of course the price has gone down considering they were upwards of ?60 back then, and you got a lot less for your money too.

People forget that small detail.

[Sketcz]

Maaaan not the old DLC argument again! I want everything and I want to pay nothing!

Evil, I usually agree with most things you say, but I disagree with this.

As others have said - if you drop ?40 on a game, you deserve to have the full thing. Hell, charge extra if you can't recoup costs, but I want the entire game on the disc without needing to pay more.

I brought up the DC DLC stuff as an example of free stuff, but I don't like it. When I played Skies of Arcadia, I couldn't find the DLC to download and so I couldn't even access the extra bosses. I only got them when playing the GC port, I think.

I get frustrated with derailment arguments of "Oh you gamers are so entitled you want everything for free."

No.

I just want fairness. If your dev costs are so high you need to nickel and dime your customers, just charge an extra ?10, but given me all the relevant content. Don't put an extra chapter on the disc, and then charge me extra to unlock it. Especially since in 10 years time the servers might close and that content will be locked out forever.

I have a disposable income. I don't need Steam sales coupled with single use discs, and I don't need to budget versions of games with locked-out content. I'm happy to pay full whack (or just buy it second hand), but I want things up front, transparent, and - here's the clincher - permanent. Something which can be experienced in its entirety in centuries to come. You can do this with... Final Fantasy III on the SNES. You cannot do this with ME3 on the Xbox.

I want to bury my game deep under ground /
Locked up not making a sound /
The little disc all shiny and round /
Some day to be dug up and found /

bambambammmmbammmamamabamabmambamabmabambamabmbbaa amabma...

/guitars

[dataDave]

When DLC was first explained it was made out to be a way to 'extend' gaming experiences to stop them from becoming dull.

You know, like updating a game which may be a year or two old with some additional levels or features. Like the old PC expansion pack model.

Same day DLC, or soon after release DLC, is just a bit ****.

you got a lot less for your money too.

That's debatable.

[originalbadboy]

I just want fairness. If your dev costs are so high you need to nickel and dime your customers, just charge an extra ?10, but given me all the relevant content. Don't put an extra chapter on the disc, and then charge me extra to unlock it. Especially since in 10 years time the servers might close and that content will be locked out forever.

The counter argument to that though is that you are giving people the choice, they can buy the game at ?40, and if they want 'that bit extra' they pay the extra, otherwise they don't. I don't see a problem with that, as long as the game is at least 'complete' as you say.

Something which can be experienced in its entirety in centuries to come. You can do this with... Final Fantasy III on the SNES. You cannot do this with ME3 on the Xbox.

Of course you will be able to, as long as the DMCA don't step in and ruin the entire internet.

[dataDave]

Of course you will be able to, as long as the DMCA don't step in and ruin the entire internet.

Or if Bioware sell out to Sony/fall out with MS.

Or simply decide to pull DLC.

The counter argument to that though is that you are giving people the choice, they can buy the game at ?40, and if they want 'that bit extra' they pay the extra, otherwise they don't. I don't see a problem with that, as long as the game is at least 'complete' as you say.

Did you not read what he said about ME3?

[nakamura]

Games have a RRP of ?49.99, it's just retailers that sell them for less. The prices may not have changed since the cart era but production costs have decreased hugely. Factor in the most games, even the smaller titles sell a lot more then clearly games turn more profit than ever.

I remember when Striker came out on the SNES. It sold around 50,000 copies in the UK and was considered a huge success.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, it has now become built in to the model rather than a way of extending a completed game and that has created a conflict of interests. It is now not about creating the most awesome game experience that can be sold. It is about how to monetise content in a way that creates more steady revenue from the same people and, unfortunately, the way to do that does not always match giving people the most awesome game experience. It becomes a balancing act with what they can get away with. That is not in our best interests and, often, just plain sucks.

I adore the look of Bioshock Infinite but the season pass and coins thing has put me right off. Will I get it? Yep, eventually. Look for my posts in the First Play thread a few years from now when the GOTY edition gets a sale on Steam.

On a somewhat related note, I was at a talk on gaming and apps yesterday by people who were from a company who make their money on in-app purchases and trying to get people to buy their way to high scores. They were talking about their metrics and how they measure what people are actually okay with or enjoying and I asked them if they read what people say on message boards or blogs. The guy said that people who post there are usually moaners and they don't represent their actual customers.

Yeah, I thought. That's true. I'm usually one of them.

He had a point though, as the SimCity chart position versus games blog and message boards comments shows.

[originalbadboy]

This whole 'future generations won't get to play this or that' is complete bollocks though. In all fairness I couldn't care less if when I am dead others won't get the pleasure. You think they will care about SNES games when they are running around in their holodecks of course not.

And 'physical' media whether that be cartridge, cd or cassette won't last forever, even they will break eventually. So at some point these things will be lost in time. In fact the 'digitisation' of games will actually ensure that games will still be around in hundreds of years. If it wasn't for MAME and PCB board donors some arcade games would already be lost to history due to the rarity of some PCB boards.

Anyway .. I digress, that's not what we were talking about ...

[Sketcz]

This whole 'future generations won't get to play this or that' is complete bollocks though. In all fairness I couldn't care less if when I am dead others won't get the pleasure. You think they will care about SNES games when they are running around in their holodecks of course not.

What a disturbingly blinkered view.

Thousands of years later and we are still reading and making use of ancient legends and stories, some of which were passed on not through papyrus originally, but orally.

I'm not saying that Lufia II is going to become akin to the poems of Homer, but you cannot make that judgement. You cannot state with absolute certainty what will and what will not be valued in the future.

It is always better to stay on the side of preservation. Especially since in this case, it simple means not locking something out from the disc.

You're basically saying: "Well, I don't care nowt, and probably no one else will, so **** it, let's just burn this stupid fing down, innit."

How can you make that judgement call?

No one believed MS would close the servers for the original Xbox, but they did. They will close it for the 360 when it suits them (probably soon after the next system is out). We are living in a dangerous storm of corporate greed and lack of preservation. Right now, if it weren't piracy, a lot would be lost as you state.

I might be dead by the time this happens, but people will lament the nature of DLC, and it will be up to hackers to somehow cobble together bits and pieces of data in order to provide people with a complete experience in the future.

[originalbadboy]

What a disturbingly blinkered view.

Thousands of years later and we are still reading and making use of ancient legends and stories, some of which were passed on not through papyrus originally, but orally.

I'm not saying that Lufia II is going to become akin to the poems of Homer, but you cannot make that judgement. You cannot state with absolute certainty what will and what will not be valued in the future.

It is always better to stay on the side of preservation. Especially since in this case, it simple means not locking something out from the disc.

You're basically saying: "Well, I don't care nowt, and probably no one else will, so **** it, let's just burn this stupid fing down, innit."

How can you make that judgement call?

No one believed MS would close the servers for the original Xbox, but they did. They will close it for the 360 when it suits them (probably soon after the next system is out). We are living in a dangerous storm of corporate greed and lack of preservation. Right now, if it weren't piracy, a lot would be lost as you state.

I might be dead by the time this happens, but people will lament the nature of DLC, and it will be up to hackers to somehow cobble together bits and pieces of data in order to provide people with a complete experience in the future.

LOL .. All I said was I wouldn't care after I am dead ... because well I will be dead, did I ever say that peeps in the future won't have ANY interest in historical items .. no I didn't, because of course they will. You obviously didn't read everything I wrote as I clearly stated at the end about MAME and PCB boards preserving potentially lost games.

I'm not being funny here, but you seem to be somewhat conflicted as one minute you are saying you hate the idea of everything going digital, but at the same time you want to preserve things for future generations, you can't have it both ways. For video games to be preserved for all time at some point they will have to be digitised.

Yes DLC (and games in general) is a concern if its not available for future generations, of course that's a concern, but as stated I am not going to be bothered once I am 6 foot under.

[dataDave]

I'm not going to care about my family after I'm dead, either.

[originalbadboy]

I'm not going to care about my family after I'm dead, either.

Just generally , or whether they need to be preserved for future generations?

[Golgo]

^ Sketzc makes an important point (never mind the rest of your "I don't care I'll be dead" petulant teen nonsense). The increasing dependence on fragile digital licensing and media for all kind of content (games, music, films, photographs and correspondence [email, facebook]) is likely to end up in a memory apoco-cataclysm. We need stuff to remember stuff. Maurice Halbwachs predicted this in 1950 (actually he didn't as he'd been killed in Auschwitz, but it's explored in his posthumous book/notes 'The Collective Memory').

Edit: I do worry about people recording their lives in digital form, with all photos/correspondence dumped into iCloud and Facebook, etc. What happens when these empires fold? All the memory is gone. When I'm 85 and dribbling into my soup, at least I'll be able to dig out photos of old girlfriends, fire up a few dusty old synapses, and attempt a crafty wank - if my gamer's arthritis permits it - while the carers aren't looking. Who's going to wank over the old games when the servers are turned off? That's what I want to know!

[Brad]

Same day DLC, or soon after release DLC, is just a bit ****.

I remember various gaming podcasts stating this as a concern when it first happened. Well, it happened and now it's normal and it's bull****. Mind you, it's not like there's a shortage of games to choose from so it's easy to just boycott these tactics and buy the games that don't do this.