Just Buy It
I love downloadable content, think it’s a great idea. For just a few bucks, you can get additional levels and goodies for your games, extending their life and your enjoyment. Even better, you can snag some pretty cool, original games that often times are more fun than their more expensive disc-based counterparts. Or buy classic games you enjoyed (or missed) in your gaming youth and give them another go. What I don’t like is gambling, and that is far too often what buying DLC turns out to be.
Understand, I’m looking squarely at the PS3 and Wii here. Microsoft, against all logic, actually lets you download and try most things on their Live Marketplace before you plunk down your cash… er, Points. Nintendo and Sony? No such luck. You want to play it? Buy it. I’ve held off on several promising titles just because I wanted to try the game before coughing up the cash. Latest example: World of Goo. Heard great things. Even Scuzzbuster raved about it on this site. But, no offense to Scuzz, I still want to try it before dropping the dollars. Make sure I’ll enjoy it. There’ve been several PlayStation Network titles I’ve wanted to play, but without being able to give them a test run, I’m not willing to part with the money.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Geez, you cheap bastard, just buy the game. So what if it sucks? It costs like four bucks. What are you out?” Well, four bucks. No, the economy’s not so bad that a four-dollar loss would ruin me, but it does chap my ass to throw money away on something I may not enjoy at all. And with DLC games now running into the ten- to fifteen-dollar range, I’m even less likely to take a chance on an untested purchase.
So come on, Nintendo and Sony, let me try your games and I guarantee I’ll buy more of them. But if you keep making DLC a crap shoot, I’ll keep my money for something that’s a little more of a “sure thing.”
What’s the Powerball jackpot up to…?
Technorati 
Del.icio.us 
StumbleUpon 
Digg 
Facebook 
Mixx 
Reddit
Tags: 360, Downloadable Content, Gaming, Playstation 3, Wii
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
4 Responses to “Just Buy It”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
December 18th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
This really plays more into the limitations of the Wii with a measly 512 meg of onboard memory, not only do you not have enough space for demo downloads, you don’t even have enough space for the stuff you do download. Sure, you can expand out 2 gig with an SD card, but you can’t access the SD card actively, just move stuff on and off of it.
I’ve got burned on XBOX downloads before, but ultimately, it is a better system. Keep in mind though, of the three platforms it IS the only one you have to pay yearly for. So you ARE paying for the demos, just in a different way.
By the way, World of Goo has a downloadable demo for MAC. It’s still 5 bones cheaper on the Wii than it is on PC or Mac.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I really don’t mind the $50/year fee honestly. I think this goes for cell phone games too. THey are from $6 to $12 a pop and most of them dont have trials or previews. Just too much money to flush down the drain on something you might not like.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Yes, there is a free demo for World of Goo on the PC. You should try it out.
I didn’t realize there were no trial versions for these downloadable titles on the PS3 and the Wii. That sucks.
December 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
To be quite honest, he’s got a good point. It’s one thing to take $5.00 gamble on Wii Ware or an XBL arcade title, but GOO is a $15.00 gamble (unless you DL the demo on another platform). That’s a pretty big risk to take with little or nothing to go on but ScuzzBuster’s fine and thoughtful review.