November 2nd 2009 3:00 pm PT

Should have been 1600 for the whole lot, like Sam & Max.

first

ill pass btw.

yawn.

Fans of W&G get good stuff. Everybody else gets to keep playing Borderlands.

The problem is pricing across the board.
One day I would hope Microsoft realize the prices they are charging for game additions and most importantly little things like clothing for avatars etc are just plain killing them.

If they charged far less and churned out more, they would make a killing off of items but seriously, 3 and 4 dollars for an avatar outfit?

3 or 4 bucks for a premium theme? Sony gives these things away for free. It is hard to compete with free.

You can even download the code to make your own themes on the PS3 – I’m all xbox360 even though I have a ps3 (it just serves to stream content to my bedroom, the 3-360′s are elsewhere in the house) but the cost of the micro-transactions is ridiculous. How a shirt for over a dollar for an avatar can be classed as micro I don’t know and 4 bucks for an avatar outfit is far from micro – half of the xbox live arcade games are around that price, how can an avatar costume that does nothing be classed in the same price range as a full arcade game??

Hey, The Brit, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Simple. Speak with your money as your words will often fall on deaf ears.
Also, in regards to Sony, they’re just as bad with their own premium themes and their HOME avatar mall that has a price on nearly everything.

What a bad week. No buy for me, no demo too. Sorry.
C’mon, only one franchising this week. 2400 MS Points… Fans or not, hope the game will not sell well.

What about Vandal Hearts? Should have been out on October 31st but nothing…

Kid would love it (me too) but way too much $$, esp when COD:MW2 is coming soon.

It’s interesting Larry posted that first link, which leads you to the official Telltale site where the complete W&G collection sells for $35 (on PC, and includes extra content). The same content on XBLA is a total of $40.

Folks in marketing for XBLA really need to make sure they are price equivalent with other platforms. This isn’t the first time its happened, and its in line with the “30USD=30 Euros” mentality MS has been displaying recently. What currently converter are you guys using anyway?! :-\

@Chux

You’re exactly right.

Don’t worry Chux, tomorrow we get Dragon Age: Origins too!

Geen82:

You missed the point by a mile. It’s not that I don’t like it, I do and I’m sure thousands of others like it also but wont buy it because it’s completely outrageously priced.

it’s a matter of principle. The old ‘if you don’t like it don’t buy it’ arguments is ridiculous also. If these items were not so outrageously priced Microsoft would sell a lot more than what they are now.

It does not take the designers that long to whip out some of this stuff. The model is already there, it’s just a skin with changes.

The bottom line is if they restructured their pricing I can almost guarantee they will have more people buying the stuff.

Granted, you take something that costs $3 and drop it to $1.50 you need twice the amount of people purchasing it than you did before just to hit the same sales figures but the point is, they would get those people because now it doesn’t feel like a blatant rip off and it becomes more of a fun idea again.

I guarantee they would attract a slew of new purchasers if things weren’t so over priced.

Seriously, just W&G games, not caring about other gamers this week? What about those of us who aren’t fans of W&G? I don’t even know why I keep buying points for arcade titles, 90% of the time the points just sit while I wait. This is very sad.

@Brit: How are they “outrageously priced”? Yes, it costs $5 more than it does on the PC, but that’s hardly outrageous. If you’re a fan of point & click games or Wallace Grommit then you’ll find a lot to like with these games, I’d probably still recommend the PC version. But they’re very amusing, long and challenging. Better than the majority of shlock that gets released. (XBLA and full retail..) Telltale most definitely deserve the money for their work.

I want Perfect Dark and Plants Vs Zombies!

yes i am waiting for a bus,i wait and i wait and i wait for one to come,then all a ******* sudden 3 come along at once!!!
-
with Dragon Age:Origins and MW2 this week and next,i will just be getting episode 2 for now
-
when you first(accidentally?)announced the second episode about a month ago Major,that would of been the perfect time

@WinterSnowblind

I wasn’t talking about the W&G games, i think they are pretty cool. The subject got onto the pricing of stuff and I was saying there needs to be an overall restructuring of content in general – mainly the little stuff like avatar clothes, the toys like the halo warthog that dont do much of anything but are near the price of an xbox live game.

That pricing model is just wrong. And, I am betting they are losing a lot more money because of those prices than they could be making if they priced them correctly.

All 4 Wallace and Gromit games for 3200 Points.
Or Battlefield Bad Company and Dead Space for the same price.
Hm, Microsoft. What is a better value?

3200 for four episodes of Wallace and Gromit or eleven episodes of Sam and Max. Or indeed zero points and playing something fun instead.
Not to mention that Telltale’s ports are shoddy too.

This is a really a bad week… Even last week was better.

W&G are great…the movies, the Original XBox games, and the one that’s already been released for XBLA. I may have to consider getting another.

gief Serious Sam HD, now!

The problem here is that if they are as long as Episode 1, they are pretty short compared to 1 episode of Sam & Max, which makes them quite expensive. Its a shame they did not bundle them together in the same way.

That said, I do not think it will put me off buy I will not buy them all at once.

@Exu
What exactly is shoddy about the ports? They are straight ports, thats all. Sure I wish they would fancy the graphics up a bit (as these were written to work on fairly low-spec PCs) but I wouldn’t call the lack of that shoddy. A shoddy port is when the frame rate is unbearable and it crashes all the time, which these games do not.

Could they be better? Damn right. But I would rather have a straight PC port than not have not have one at all as I really cannot be bothered with PC gaming anymore. (not to mention I mostly use Linux these days)

@The Brit – Sony charge for themes too. They also charge for stuff you buy for your avatar that’s only usable within HOME. Last week on PSN the game was Zombie Apocalypse, a game that was on Live weeks ago, but it’s £7.99 on PSN. On Live it’s 800 MS Points (£6.80). This happens all the time, PSN gets games later but for some reason they cost more. If you think you’d have it better with a PS3, then get rid of your 360 and get one, but as an owner of both I can tell you that you wouldn’t. You can use your own background images for the dashboard BTW.

[URL=http://www.pingtest.net][IMG]http://www.pingtest.net/result/2362470.png[/IMG][/URL]

http://www.pingtest.net/result/2362470.png

I always had the impression that Sony had better prices, and deals, on their online content than Microsoft. Just recently picked up a PSP, and after browsing the Playstation store I’ve been disabused of that notion ;p
I don’t know what the differences between the pricing structure on the PSP vs the PS3 are, but if what I’ve seen is any indicator, the grass is NOT greener on the other side of the fence ;p

I’m a huge fan of these sort of games, but i’ll be leaving this out till the price drop, sorry Microsoft, but you need to sort your prices out.

I do understand theres fans for this series as I stated in my last post, I just want to know Major why gamers who are not fans of this series didn’t even get one arcade game to decide on buying this week?

What’s more concern though, to me, at least, are the prices of Games on Demand. Heck, in Australia, this service is not going to raise a bar beyond anything but fairly over priced Digital goods. Especially when you factor in all the benefits of having a store bought copy. As for live games, they are fairly well priced, BUT, Gold members should be entitled to further discounting though… Just as an incentive to promote the membership, even further. Now that Sony is catching up with their services and all and providing it free of charge.

I haven’t bought an Xbox 360 game since Street Fighter IV’s release… and the only other one was Turtles in Time on Arcade. Just a hunch, something tells me that the Xbox 360 is no longer such a sound investment, considering the lowered price of the PS3. Hrm…

Still, I love the Xbox community and something about Gold Live… perhaps it’s because I, like all Gold members here, are paying for a premium so it’s justified in that way.

Gyromancer?

@The Brit: Fair enough, if you’re just talking about things like avatar accessory prices I can totally understand. I just can’t understand why people would be badmouthing this game, I’m not a huge fan of Wallace & Gromit myself, but I can still appreciate a great point & click series, especially when they’re so rare these days. It may not be Monkey Island but they’re still pretty darn good – and yes, while they may seem expensive, it is essentially a full game. Much, much longer than the majority of stuff you’ll see on XBLA.

Sounds good from an achievements point of view. I’d rather pay 800 for each set of 200 points than 1600 for everything with just 200 GS points spead over the whole lot. I think Sam & Max should have been split up and made episodic so people could buy an episode cheaply and only keep buying the episodes if they felt the quality was kept up – not to mention the extra achievements that would be available that way.

Last I checked it was games I was buying, not achievements.