Gran Turismo: HD - Introducing Microasstractions

Agreed 100%. This is classic FUD without knowing more details like: A) How much will the initial game cost if at all; B) will they offer any car or track “bundles” which offer more conent for a lower price; C) will they offer a complete version at a reasonable price.

This sounds similar to what Test Drive Unlimited is doing and as a casual racing fan I’m all for cheaper prices.

I don’t think I’d ever buy such a ridiculously priced game. However, I kind of see what their trying to go for:


You’re buying some cars and tracks to play with for price X. The whole game doesn’t cost $1000 or whatever. You can just play with what you bought and that will be the whole game. If you want to collect other cars and tracks to play with, that will obviously cost you additional money.

When you consider how much money it would cost to buy the entire HotWheels collection, the GT stuff isn’t nearly as expensive. I understand that video game items aren’t something you can hold or resell. However, the experience of piloting a Lamborghini in a realistic environment is far cooler than rolling a miniature one down a plastic track.

I love this quote:

Yeah, just imagine… let your imagination run wild and free, to that place above the clouds where racing games don’t fucking come with any cars and you have to pay nine hundred bucks to get them.

Dude, an actual Lamborghini collection has more in common with Hot Wheels than this scheme does. There’s no cost involved in replicating the cars and tracks once they’re made, because they don’t, like, actually exist. That’s why video games don’t work this way. Seriously, you might as well have just said “compared to actually collecting and modifying race cars, GTHD is a steal.”

Edit: Also you have to sell it more, or you won’t get that promotion.

I would have no objections if you could “test drive” cars for free first.

Yeah, good point. This is a good argument for anything that’s ridiculously expensive: that Ferrari won’t cost $250,000 for most people, because most people aren’t going to buy it! If you don’t buy one, it doesn’t cost you anything!

Sony must have a grand marketing plan that none of us can even comprehend. A plan that takes “bad PR is better than no PR” to a whole, new galactic level.

Phil Harrison’s mind must resemble that scene in Being John Malkovich where John Malkovich goes into the Malkovich hole – just on a continuous loop.

I imagine that if we were to view what goes on in Phil Harrison’s head we would all instantly go stark, raving mad.

Is Sony getting paid for doing all of Microsoft’s XB360 marketing? I was on the hedge about getting a PS3, but they just up and solved my conundrum.

GT4 has 721 cars and 50 tracks. There were a bunch of slight variants in that list, and not all of the tracks are real-world ones, but that’ll probably be the same in GT:HD.

It obviously took them a lot of effort to put all of those in GT4, but I doubt it made the game unprofitable for them. Unless the art and modelling development costs for HD-quality versions has skyrocketed…

Maybe they’re deliberately doing this as a money-squeezing effort to fund the development of the ‘real’ GT5 in order to avoid the inter-generational content drop a la GT3’s much-smaller car list? Who knows, I have no idea what their balance sheets look like, but I can’t really blame Joe Gamer for being miffed when he’s gotten the same kind of value before.

Maybe one of those X-Plane kinds of things, but here’s one that is a couple hundred bucks: The Sims.

Arguably, since the sport itself doesn’t change significantly, people have spent more than $600 on Madden over the years.

What does it cost to make a single Hot Wheels car? I don’t know, but I’m assuming it can’t be much. Now what does it cost to render a car for a video game, complete with authentic handling, physics, sound, and animation? About the same, I’d imagine. Manufacturing the actual toys and packaging them may cost the company a few cents per unit. Really, the profit margin is very high though. The difference between cost of materials for little plastic toys that sell for $8 and a virtual one aren’t that different.

Also, go fuck yourself, asshole.

World of Warcraft.

Did you hear the one about the 360 and the guy bent over the barrel?

Nah. You could experience all of its content within a month.

We are still about $400 off. If you use the Madden example, you could argue that I’ve already spent $200 on GT.

I get $50 + $180 (2 year subscription) = $230.

Actually, I though you paid for WoW’s content in blood and bad relationships.

This is really the last straw. There will be backlash over this one, even if the pricing isn’t accurate.

Fact of the matter is, regardless of pricing, that a company has directly said that what we used to get for the price of the box, is no longer what we’ll get.

30 cars and 2 tracks? Well, I won’t buy it. How many people play Forza/GT without trying to unlock and acquire as many cars as possible? How long do you play to do it? How many stick to only two tracks?

A large part of the fun in games like GT, for me, and I suspect, others, is collecting the cars. Hundreds of cars. They were all there, in game, ready to be had. But now, instead of collecting them via skill, I have to collect via my paycheck.

Fuck that. You know, everything else Sony has done has left me kind of meh. But now they are actively being stupid, and they are finally making me angry at them.

If this is the future of games, I’m going to sell all my consoles.

Yeah, it should be $50 + $180 + half your shit in the divorce proceeding.

Let’s say the projected numbers of cars/tracks are 5x what the last GT had. (So 10 tracks, 250 cars). That seems vaguely in the ballpark (at the least).

Last version of GT was $50. This version with this model would be somewhere between $150 and $200. For the same amount of content.

That’s why people’s panties are in a wad.

Another issue this raises concerns the online racing. What happens to the available reaces when everyone out there has a mish-mash of courses they’ve purchased? I assume they’ll have a filter to find races that match your content. But how will they handle a group of random people in a room rotating through tracks? Will they scan for what everyone has or will they force you to pony up in order to join in?