This kind of thinking really bothers me. This is the reason that reality shows took over TV; why bother paying writers and actors when we can just film "regular" people acting like idiots for free? Thank God for HBO; they realize that paying a lot of money for a product can actually make a product that's higher quality. I'll take Band of Brothers, The Wire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and True Blood over American Idol, Jersey Shore, The Bachelor, Jon and Kate Plus 8, Dancing With the Stars and The X Factor. Guess which cost more to produce? Guess which are more profitable?
The responses in this thread are clearly upset at the greed in the industry, and that's fair. But I have to say, it's hardly fair to say that the greed is solely on Microsoft. We, as consumers, demand certain things from games; they must be engaging, they must push the envelope graphically, they must have a multiplayer component, they must have a cohesive single-player storyline, they must be well written and acted and they must cost less than 60 dollars. So a company pours tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into developing the latest and greatest game. What do gamers do? Use a service like Redbox or Gamefly or buy the game used or borrow it from a friend or download it from a torrent site, all of which equals no revenue to the company that spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing it. We're seeing the most technologically advanced gaming that has ever been produced, graphics that could have been a Pixar movie 20 years ago are being rendered in real-time, and we're bitching that the cost of games is exactly where it was in 1992? How absurd is that?
If you're really not willing to pay $60 for the cutting edge of gaming, that's your right. But it's also going to mean that gaming companies aren't going to realize profits, and they're going to turn away from grandiose projects like Skyrim or The Old Republic and start doing nothing but cookie-cutter annual sequels (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Black Ops: Doube Secret Probation Edition: Part 6: Hyper Fighting) or silly apps like Gillbot mentioned that can make them millions with very little overhead. Is that what we want? That seems like the death of gaming to me, and it's dying because we are fickle shitheads about the products that are being produced. We complain that they aren't putting enough in there, we complain about the price of it all even though prices have not risen in decades, we complain about the finished product and then we get it from sources that guarantee no money goes back to the producers. And then we complain when they want to nip that in the bud. Fuck us but we're a demanding little group of whiners aren't we?
We've all had bad experiences spending too much on a game. It sucks. If you spend 10 bucks to see a bad movie, yeah, that's a bummer, but it's just 10 bucks. $60? That's no small chunk of change. I remember blowing $70 on Clayfighter on the N64, and that game was an absolute stinker. But for every experience I have over-spending on a game, I have at least 5 where the exact opposite is the case. I have spent a total of $75 on Counter-Strike in my life (HL for $20, CS as a free mod, CZ for $5, CS: Source with HL2 for $50), and I have spent tens of thousands of hours playing it. That's a per hour cost of less than a penny for a game that's brought me over a decade of enjoyment. I paid $40 for Skyrim a few weeks back, and I've put in enough hours that I'm under 50 cents per hour for the cost of that game. When was the last time you could say that you had hundreds of hours of enjoyment from a movie? Why do we hold our video games to an impossible standard?
