Its exciting when a developer patches your favorite game isn’t it? Back in the day at the arcade, you’d come in and see Street Fighter II: Championship Edition instead of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and tell all your friends about how much faster the game was or which little things were changed. What made that experience in addition to recent online patches so great though? Answer: We didn’t have to pay extra for them. When you saw Championship Edition, the arcade owner flipped the bill for the new machine, you still plunked down that one quarter.
Once developers began to patch their games for free via Xbox Live or Playstation Network, I thought we’d seen an end, at least on this half of the world, to a brand new game as a patch. However in late 2009, Halo III: ODST was released in what I imagined would be a can of worms. For the rest of the year no retail patches were made available and so I was happy until Capcom announced that my own favorite series would be receiving such an upgrade in Super Street Fighter IV to be released this April. Now while I’m trying to be upset I can’t really be with Street Fighter it is after all the most notorious video game series for this sort of thing, so I swept my rage under the rug.
The last straw came when I heard rumors and rumblings of Modern Warfare II taking this approach, now nothing is confirmed, but the very idea that the Call of Duty series can get away with this and worse yet the fact that Bungie and Microsoft were already successful with this strategy thus reinforcing the fact that Infinity Ward’s record breaking Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is more than capable of repeating recent history is quite unnerving. Now for the scariest part, if I realize that Modern Warfare II can release a full on $40-$60 retail upgrade, they have people paid to realize this very same fact, which could be an extra step in the direction of a retail upgrade.
Final Fantasy XIII has done this in a different way by releasing Final Fantasy XIII as a universe to set other titles in, and we already know of Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Final Fantasy Agito XIII. That’s pretty expansive, but if video games continue on this path at some point we will as gamers say “I want to keep up with the latest in my favorite series, but my wallet simply can’t.” Some gamers forget that while publishers and developers are fans of our great hobby, they are also a part of a business and they are ready and willing to take advantage of our love of the game, which is not to demonize anyone, but business is business.
That’ll do it for Thoughts From the Dojo#2, check back again on Tuesday for #3 and thanks for reading if you’re a regular on your way to becoming one.
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