Despite the fact that it offers more than the silly dress-up-pony mod at a cheaper price, it still feels like a rip-off.
Here’s what you get for your $2 [SPOILERS, I guess]:
1 lame fetch quest (with a crappy, immersion-breaking way of initiating the quest - a note just pops into your inventory - and no additional backstory or narrative development)
access to the Orrey, which gives you a power-spell ("+20 Personality, -10 Luck" was what I got) when you click on it that changes “based on the phases of the moon” (those who were hoping this “phases of the moon” marketing line referred to werewolf-powers or some such thing are sorely out of luck)
I would happily pay $$ for an interesting quest and a new area to explore. But an uninspired ‘fetch these items’ quest and a single (though admittedly cool-looking) room just doesn’t cut it.
Bethesda reportedly sold over 100,000 horse armor mods. Assuming MS let them keep 50% and all of the paid downloads were from xbox live (which seems likely, doesn’t it?), that’s $100,000 for realistically 10 man hours of work. $10,000 per hour. Not too shabby.
Of course they’re pissing off their customers, it’s a gip, and we know it, and they know we know it, and they know we know they know we know it, but there’s too damn much money in it to stop.
I expect lots more of these. They’ll continue to sell well on the xbox360 and seriously, who cares about the PC players anyway?
I’m not at all privy to the details of Bethesda’s operation but it was almost certainly more than 10 hours of work. The testing on it alone, not to mention deployment, is easily several times that I’d imagine.
The interesting thing about Marketplace is that it really is just that – a more pure opportunity for supply and demand is hard to find. Its really unclear to me whether the way for Bethesda to maximize profits is finding a low enough price point to crank these babies out every few weeks like they are doing now, or make larger “mini expansions” at a higher price point and really only directly target the harder core players.
So the Orrey is $1.88. I guess you have to decide if that’s worth it.
Question: Why does releasing additional content piss off their customers? What if they didn’t release additional content? Would that piss off their customers? Or not piss them off?
I’m assuming the mentality is that Bethesda should give these things away for free. As in, assign artists, programmers, and supervisor staff for no return on their time at all, just for goodwill. As if that would influence a single fan to buy the next game, or decide not to.
Not defending Bethesda, per se, just wondering why people think they are pissing off their fan base. Or if they are, and why. And how it relates to available content for download on Xbox Live.
Since when is a game company that set a sales record for their current game and has their last game on the top 25 best selling of all time an indie?[/QUOTE]
You’re thinking of the developer. The publisher in this case is Microsoft, which is possibly the only indy to own multiple concurrent game consoles… as a sideline.
Actually, the publisher is not Microsoft. It’s 2K Games, which means that yurislave is partially right: San Andreas was published by Take Two, which is the parent company of 2K.
Bethesda used to publish their own games, however. Why did they sign up with 2K for this one?
