Sunday, July 26, 2009

The Price of Gaming

The 360 ushered in the price of the next-generation software- instead of paying 49.99 for new titles we started to pay 59.99. Sony followed suit...

If gamers are willing to pay it the industry will make it the standard. Is the reason Wii games are still 49.99 because they are in 480p? Why wasn't there a change in price between the 16-bit and 32-bit era? Wasn't the shift between Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 bigger than the shift between Halo2 and Halo3?

The justification many have of why xboxLive is 50.00/year is because it is a much better experience than PSN- not really the interface, but the Gamertag integration. This feature is convenient...but is it REALLY worth 50.00/year? Just because that one system is better than the other does that warrant a 50.00/year charge? The PS3 is a lot better than the Wii and their friend code system, so should Sony charge 25.00/year since they are better than Nintendo's online offering but not as good as Microsoft's?

If Sony introduces a seamless ID integration system similar to Live will they follow suit like they did with charging gamers 59.99 a title and charge users 50.00/year for PSN? Hopefully for gamers PSN gets better without the excessive fee and it forces Microsoft to waive its Live membership charge.

Or...Microsoft can introduce more features to Live and just like how games increased in price, so might the xboxLive membership fee- imagine paying 100.00/year on your xbox720.

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