Paid avatar clothing.... sigh.

[Jake]

Jeez Louise, is it really that much of a stretch to see why this kind of money making downloadable content would bother some people?

Also I collect too many action figures (yeah, I know it's lame), which there is also a very definitive science to try to buy from the best companies and get quality toys for your money, since they all pretty much end up costing $15 from everyone per figure anyways.

Cheap variants and small changes meant to take advantage of the "must have it all" action figure collector can also really hurt a company. Palisade Toys, if anyone followed them, had suffered from this and many think that is one of the many reasons the company went out of business.

Just because something makes money for someone short term, like LucasArts' new Monkey Island clothes, doesn't necessarily make it a great idea. Does a cheap cash-in such as this hurt the brand in the long run or will gamers not care and those who want will buy? You could argue both ways. (I don't really want to much past this post because I'm in no position to.)

I guess that the concept of the little downloadable add-ons doesn't bother me at all -- I see potential and opportunity in it for fun and/or potentially subversive or expressive content -- but the fact that it's clearly positioned as a cheap cash grab does bother me. The LittleBigPlanet Sackboy add-on stuff is functionally identical to the Xbox avatar store (though it is more closed), but Media Molecule has positioned it as "awesome team-ups to make hilarious things!" instead of "ridiculous financial synergy!" and fans seem to have accepted each of the two systems accordingly (embracing the former, scorning the latter). The thing is, to me that's positioning, not format. For instance, I had a conversation at Comic-Con with Steve Purcell about making Max pelts stapled to bike helmets which you could buy and wear on your head as a sort of weird ceremonial headdress, which I consider to be in a slightly different place than buying an in-game GoW logo t-shirt or something. But, both of those two items would be purchased in the same format, through the same infrastructure. Maybe it's still horrible, but I see more value in one of those than the other, especially if one or both of them was extremely cheap or free-through-achievements.

I guess for me, I am intrigued by the ideas of how someone could use the avatar store, but am depressed and made tired by how people inevitably will use the avatar store. Microsoft's avatar system is cool and extremely powerful and, I think, unprecedented -- a visual representation of yourself which you can augment with 3rd party crafted add-ons, which carries across multiple games by multiple developers and publishers. That's ridiculous. It could conceivably allow for you to dress up in a Coca-Cola costume and run through the Pepsi game taking screenshots the whole time (if soda manufacturers made games that analogy would make more sense). The fact that it's positioned as a pretty crass milk-em-dry platform which, as you said, has the potential to just tire people out on franchises and dilute them instead of boost them up, is a depressing travesty, but I find the actual system itself interesting.

This may be my own ideal of Telltale as a company, but they have never seemed like a company that is overly commercial where sales necessarily take a priority over content. Telltale has much less of the Call of Duty Night Vision goggles extreme type capitalism to more of one which will play fair.

What I'm going to type following this sentence will be completely presumptuous.

For instance, sometimes Telltale seems to go out of it's way to avoid an easy way to make money such as when I get a free episode from a promotion or something and it discounts the cost to buy a whole series.

The case file content for each Sam and Max series was awesome, but I can't help but wonder if the $5 each person paid actually covered that stuff.

The DVDs you get at the end of a series are also "free," with the customer only having to cover shipping costs, so essentially it feels like you are getting a full boxed game with 20 hours of gameplay at the end of a series for a steal at $35 instead of the usual $50-60. This is great to me, but I feel sort of like I'm stealing... I don't know.

Although, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of this is bad or not thought through, since I don't even work there or follow sales figures or know how to run video game company, I'm just a customer. And I do love how Telltale treats its customers. All of these little "gifts" probably increases brand loyalty a thousand fold and equals more money in the long run, so maybe that's the major part of what makes Telltale so commercial that I don't understand. I know that feeling, because when a company makes you love them, you almost want to start just donating money.

I mean if Ubisoft were a small company that made downloadable episodes, I imagine they wouldn't treat anyone this nice.

One of Telltale's goals is to be human beings, and all of those things which you outlined are admittedly pretty awesome. I'm sure Telltale is, on a scale of one to infinity, probably infinitely less commercial than the Big Boy publishers, but we're also measurably far away from being a benevolent two dude indie house. The number of commercially-oriented concessions and considerations is, I'm sure, a hundred times smaller than that at many other studios, but it has altered the way I think about game-making and game sales. My mind naturally tends to at least ask itself about conversion rates, target audience, expectations, platform porting potential, etc, which I would of course never ask myself before having a job at a commercial game company. I also ask myself good questions to ponder or stew on to myself which I wouldn't have asked before, like, will this saturate the market or how can this be practically improved with the resources I have (versus pie in the sky contextless "you should's").

So yeah, Telltale is definitely not commercially evil, but it is a company which makes money by selling games, and ideas in my brain definitely go through a channel of filters and meshed screens which are defined by my perceived realities of gaming as a commercial space more than they used to, instead of an unfiltered idealistic look at what is possible. It's a tough thing to come to grips with and wrangle for me, and this thread's given me a lot to think about.

[James]

:( Paid-for avatar-modifying DLC killed the baby Jesus and rendered the Virgin Mary infertile with cancer :(

By which I mean I think it's pretty daft to spend money on that stuff, but it's similarly daft to care so much about other people wanting to. We're all letting somebody down with our lack of taste and discrimination in some field or other. Perhaps I'm giving up on class and self-betterment, or perhaps I'm just not being absurd and melodramatic. Only Smarties have the answer.

[Garple]

or how can this be practically improved with the resources I have (versus pie in the sky contextless "you should's").

Right On.

[OssK]

Some people were pissed that Ubisoft offered the Epilogue for sale as downloadable content for the recent Prince of Persia. Detractors said that it should have been in the original game, which was also very short. I can see what they are saying, but it doesn't necessarily bother me.

Why it bothered me is because 60 euros for a game is a lot, it's a very big lot. I used to make fun of my friends going "hey dudes, cinema, 10€ for two hours, that's expansive: 5€ an hour"

Now I buy a Prince that gives me 6 hours of game (listening to most of the additional dialogues) for 60€, that is 10€ an hour.

Jake said to me, and he was right, that what matters is the experience and not the lengh, in the case of Prince of Persia I do not regret playing that game. I do however feel angry at the developpers who basically put a cliffhanger at the end, having me waiting for a sequel is ok, but making me buy a 1 hour long DLC for 20€ is really too much, because following the storyline as I am, I cannot skip it. It is not an additional quest, it's what follows, and separating it feels to me as dishonest as unlocking the multiplayer mode that was already inside Resident Evil 5 with money.

When you sell a game, you have to be very careful on what you say it will contain because that is what people are expecting, in Pop's case, a full story was the expectation.

[syntheticgerbil]

Yeah and what I can see that would make or break the argument for or against the PoP Epilogue is whether or not one could find out whether it was taken out of the original game in order to profit off of downloadable content later, if the epilogue was made purposefully for downloadable content as an afterthought, or if it was unfinished, didn't make it in the original game and later released to fans.

I doubt we'll ever find out, but I'll bet Ubisoft won't do it again.

20 euros is definitely a bit much, though.

Edited July 27, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[thorn]

For instance, I had a conversation at Comic-Con with Steve Purcell about making Max pelts stapled to bike helmets which you could buy and wear on your head as a sort of weird ceremonial headdress, which I consider to be in a slightly different place than buying an in-game GoW logo t-shirt or something.

Wait... are you talking about an actual clothing product or a DLC avatar costume? Because if you mean the former... I would buy that in an instant.

If I remember correctly, Sam did something like that in Bad Day on the Moon. Hopefully the purchasable Max pelt would also be slightly gooey and have a faint odour of singeing fur.

Edited July 28, 2009 by thorn

[Jake]

Wait... are you talking about an actual clothing product or a DLC avatar costume? Because if you mean the former... I would buy that in an instant.

If I remember correctly, Sam did something like that in Bad Day on the Moon. Hopefully the purchasable Max pelt would also be slightly gooey and have a faint odour of singeing fur.

Haha since this thread is about paid avatar clothing, I was sadly talking about the latter.

I would also love to sell genuine Max scalps which you could rest on your hand, draw a face on your skin, and pretend it was inhabited by Max's spirit. That would probably be harder to manufacture though.