G-pinions

I am really bored of the Xbox Live Marketplace. It seemed like such a great idea initially, but all my idealism has been swept away as harsh reality has set in. I may be a gamer first and foremost but I do understand the dirty under workings of our capitalist society. I understand that most everything you see, including video games, only exist because people can make money from it. Games like Okami are certainly art but it was not made as a charitable project. So you may roll your eyes when I complain about the Marketplace. It only exists as a way to make more money and companies surely are raking in big bucks because of it. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Why does it upset me so?

When Nick was first showing me the wonders of the X360 and it's online store last November, I was in awe. It felt like a major step forward for gaming. The ability to download demos and movies of games I may not have otherwise tried, of having classic and original games in the arcade, of having an online community, was so exciting to me. Video games could be vastly improved by such a system. I looked at the vibrant Halo 2 community, a game that is still being updated, and thought we would see something similar in every new release. I wanted to see tweaks to games when gamers were figuring out what worked and what didn't. I wanted to see new maps available when the old ones felt stale. I wanted to see new content for games that would have otherwise been forgotten. Instead, I see companies shamelessly milking ignorant people.

First of all, I have no problem paying money for these updates. If a game is really fun, I will gladly spend $5 for a few more maps. That is a great way to extend the life of a game. But that is not how companies are using this system. In Godfather 360 (they really should have stopped at 2. Am I right?), EA actually lets gamers buy in-game money. Seems pretty ridiculous, right? Get this: the other versions of The Godfather don't make you pay to use this cheat. You can just enter a button code in the PS2 version and get the same results. But because of the Marketplace, EA can now charge people for cheating. Do they actually think they are enriching the Godfather experience? Of course they don't. EA is deliberately leaving content out of their game, bumping the price up 20%, and then charging people real money to unlock what should be free. How is this even legal?

Lumines Live is the biggest offender thus far. For 1200 points you can download the game. Seems pretty fair, right? I would pay $15 for a puzzle game. It is little more than a remake of a two-year-old PSP game after all. If I were to sell the original PSP version on eBay without a box or instruction booklet, I would probably get around $15. It's the perfect price for Lumines Live. But it's never that easy. Though it is called the Base Pack, which seems to imply you are buying a whole game, it is actually just an extended demo. If you want to play the Vs CPU Mode or experience the full Puzzle Mode, you will have to spend another 600 points. And that's not all. There are more packs coming out next year. They have released an unfinished game on the Marketplace and are charging people for each portion of the game when they finish coding it. If you purchase the complete game you are paying just under $40. For a puzzle game. A two-year-old PSP game. And people are stupid enough to support this.

There are ways to make the Marketplace work. When your only goal is to make more money, though, you are just going to anger potential consumers. The problem is, the average X360 owner isn't intelligent enough to realize how much trouble they are causing with each micro transaction. They do not realize that, by buying a Red Shirt Wearing Tiger Woods, they are only telling EA that it is alright to charge for cheat codes. Anyone who purchased Lumines Live is telling Q Entertainment that we have no problem with them releasing unfinished games.

Well I am certainly not going to support the Marketplace. I am not going to pay $5 for a pack of Gamer Pics or $10 for an old arcade game that I can find in compilations for less than a dollar. This is a network owned and operated by Microsoft. They need to set down rules so companies do not take advantage of this system. They are hurting their own name by allowing companies to rape consumers like this. I just hope Nintendo and Sony are smart enough to stop this kind of crap before EA and UbiSoft take it over.