How to Milk a Gamer: Grasp the Teat Firmly and Pull!
Recently I saw a couple of old arcade games offered as downloads on X-Box live that I wanted, so I decided to purchase Microsoft Points for the first time. I sign up, buy my points and proceeded to download the two games I wanted. Then I noticed something I really didn’t pay much attention to in the beginning: The points I bought didn’t exactly add up dollar for dollar, nor did the games I wanted leave me with a useable amount of left over points. I suddenly felt like I was at one of those traveling carnivals where they make you purchase tickets rather than pay cash for the rides, but no matter what combination of rides and attractions you chose, at the end of the day you were always left with a handful of useless, unredeemable tickets! Heck, my puny 50 left over Microsoft Points didn’t even represent 50 cents. I was left using some sort of metric conversion calculations to figure that it was really worth something like 30 cents. Microsoft is not alone in this Three Card Monty mentality.
Remember when you bought a really good RPG for your computer it came with an instruction manual that looked like a small town phone book and weighed more than the packaging and disc combined. Half of the fun was sifting through the manual just to get a feel for what you were about to get into. Now the book that comes along with the most complicated of RPG’s barely covers the loading instructions. If you want to get anywhere at all you have to plunk down an additional $15 for what they refer to as the ‘strategy guide’.
Go into any large gaming retail store and buy a peripheral or additional controller and try to escape without at least one salesperson or cashier shoving an ‘extended warranty’ under your nose saying how you are completely covered for one or more years for a nominal fee. This plea is sure to tug at your worry wart even though you know it is a scam. Go ahead, buy one! Exactly one day after the expiration date you will be back in the store buying another one with the same offer shoved under your nose. But the crème de la crème is the mighty money sink…the personal computer.
Remember when computers were bundled with tons of preloaded software? Although some of it wasn’t useful, the word processors and accounting programs were a good bonus to have. The games included were often out of date or a little lame but, hey, they were a beginning and they were free. Now, the once ubiquitous word processing programs are now only 30 trials and if you want the real thing, you must be prepared to shell out an additional $100 bucks minimum.
You were also pretty secure in the knowledge that with a just a little tweaking (a memory upgrade here, a video card upgrade there), the computer itself would last at least a couple of years before you might consider an getting a new one. Now, you are lucky if your computer is an adequate gaming platform for the next six months (and that’s being very optimistic). Because all of the game developers are given the best, newest and fastest processors and cards to develop with, the game you saw and thought you were getting only looks that good with the $350 video card and the $2000 dual processor mother board.
I always thought that the gamers were hunched over and bleary eyed because of all night gaming sessions but now I know the truth…their chests are sore from all that pulling!
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