Alright, alot of information has gone up that I can't really comment on, but I have a question to Aqizzar: Earlier you mentioned something called "Razor-and-blade" selling or something or other. Can you explain what that is to me?
It's not perfectly applicable really, but I was referring to
an old marketing concept, where you try to trick the consumer into coming back and buying something over and over, making money on what's really a minor part of the product. The name comes from the original disposable-blade razor, where you got the actual razor frame cheap, but then got gouged on the blades for it, to make an easy pun.
I see the same kind of model running through the Downloadable Content system like wildfire, especially buyable content made available the same day as the gamebox itself. $5 or less for extra Dragon Age quests, or car skins, song packs, or horse armor, or whatever, doesn't seem like much at any one time, but if you parse it out and get addicted to buying things you can wind up paying twice as much for what would have been one complete purchase not ten years ago.
It's basically the application of the Korean "a la carte" MMO subscription model. Like eXteel or Guild Wars, you get the actual game for a flat fee, if not free, but you have to pay a little bit here and a little bit there for stuff that any rational person in days before high-bandwidth connections would have assumed an inherent part of the game you shouldn't have to buy separately at extra cost. The pricing, availability, and in some cases perceived necessity of extra buying features (I'm looking at you Star Trek Online delux editions) is observably growing. I'm increasingly wary of games that have the same relative amount of content as other games, but ship as essentially bare-bones shells and then charge you extra to own what's really the complete product you should have gotten up front for the original cost or at worst a bundled expansion pack, like it was in the good old 1990s.
Objectively, I don't begrudge anyone trying to make a buck, including video game producers. They've just gotten considerably more brazen and shameless about trying to nickle-and-dime the customer for all you're worth, since the bandwidth and Internet infrastructure now exists to streamline the process.