January 12th 2010 5:00 pm PT

@murph17 – Yeap, probably you’re right. I tought that would be something related to Alice in Wonderland.

bloody EA, at the last minute they extend the length of their 800 points giveaway promotion then slash the prices of the things that everyone was buying to be eligible for it in the first place, sneaky

Why are games like Prey 19.99? You can buy it brand new for 9.99 bucks at gamestop, or 7.99 used. if 20 bucks is the lowest that these games on demand are going to be for games that have been out for years, I will never buy one. lower the price of the 19.99 games and i’m sure you’ll see alot more sales. There’s a few I would buy right off the bat, but i’m not going to spend twice as much money for a game. Ridiculous! Lower the price of the origional xbox games would be nice too. Since you can find most of them for about 5 bucks

@PriusGuy-Carcassonne was free a couple of years ago, not sure if you were on Live when that happened. I’ll be honest, I would have never played the game if it wasn’t free but it is probably one of my favorite XBLA games.

You know what, I’m going to just assume Games on Demand discounts are taking a little longer to apply for the European region. There’s NO way you’d discount the ALREADY CHEAPER US prices and not our already more expensive ones. I refuse to believe Microsoft would be that stupid.

Yah I gotta 5 star this for the fact that having this on a bimonthly basis would be awesome.

I thought Prey was reduced? It’s still at $19.99!

Bioshock is still full price here….

I love the scheduled list It really helps with planning and having a heads-up for what is coming

Twice a month is good. Once per month would be even better, but I suspect that internal systems and scheduling will not allow notification that far in advance…

Either way, thank you for the list of upcoming XBLA titles and fingers crossed for PvZ next month

Prices haven’t changed here either. Even if they had I agree with everyone else here who says you can buy the disc at bargain rates second hand by simply driving (or in my case walking) for no more than a half hour return trip. I’m also one of those people who is constantly removing games from the hard drive to install newer titles so I much prefer to have the disc rather than have to download 5 gig every time I want to play one of my older games. (and then clear out a title or two)
Geektopia is right, given the value of the AU $$ against the greenback the prices should be less than what we are paying. This INCLUDES the yearly XBL susbscription fee (currently $79.95AU)especially since predictions are that we will have parity within 6 months. You guys and gals in the states are griping about $29.95 for a “Classic/Platinum” title, we’re paying $49.95 (online). And no last FM. Come one Major, push it for the peeps down under!

No price changes here in good old New Zealand yet either….

@Majornelson (and the Microsoft Marketing Team)
Pretty much all of those games are AU$49.95 here in Australia and US$19.99 in the US.
Price disparity based on how much your regional marketers think they can rip off the local populous will only result either alienating your consumers or justifying us to use alternative means to obtain the content. Take a tip from Google and ‘Dont be evil’.

Major, my hope is to see Games on Demand(360 and pc) able to compete with Steam. The ability to purchase content and play it on either platform would be huge to me.

I thought I might pick up Bioshock as I though it was already $20 and it would be less. I guess it was more because it’s $20 now. $10-15 and I might buy it for convenience. And Civ Rev for $30?! Not that you can’t get $30 out of it, but it’s pretty old and not that popular to be $30.

Thanks for the schedule though. I might get the ME expansions sense I’ve got 500 points lying around.

What is the Jan 19th Game On Demand?! And yes, I NEED a Trials HD deal of the week if you ever want a sale.

When Games On Demand was first starting, I predicted it wasn’t going to gain much purchase, particularly in Australia, due to major bandwidth limitations (nothing to do with Microsoft naturally), non-competitive pricing, regional restrictions limiting our selection and the tiny size of the 360 hard drive (and its associated extremely high price per GB).

There’s an opportunity to correct the hard drive issue with the impending release of the 250GB HDD that is strongly rumoured to be any day now but I have a feeling that at best it’ll be priced the same as the current 120gb which will still make it damned expensive. Selling a 250GB xbox drive for the price of a regular 500GB drive leaves only the casing to eat up the rest of the price and somehow I doubt that really costs so much. Bit of a markup because its a profit area and you’re holding a monopoly? Sure, go for it, more power to you (IS there more power than a monopoly? Maybe some cooler board game like Space Hulk). A LOT of a markup? Yeah I’m a bit less enthusiastic there.

Removing the regional restrictions should be as easy as copying the ISO or whatever the system uses to local content servers and flipping a bit in the database to allow us to buy it. Until and unless we hear a damned convincing reason why Australia can’t get certain titles (which were fine for a disc based release here), the only thing we can assume is that Microsoft are enfocing this “Because we can” which is just a stupid business move. Our money is as good as anyone else’s, in fact its better because it has more pretty colours in!

As for the pricing, if you fail to compete on price, you’re selling on nothing but convenience and a multi-hour download of a game IF you can get it and IF you have enough free drive space on a locked system that you can’t just whack a 1TB drive into is not what I would call convenient. I’m afraid that to get my money you have to start getting consistently cheaper than retail and adopt a model comparable to GOG or Steam with regular discounts and good quality sales.

On the upside though, at least you can FIND things on the xbox marketplace to complain about, its a big plus over the PSN store…

Will be buying Serious Sam this week and Vandal Hearts next week. Appreciate the work you do major (and the rest of the team) in trying to be open. It feels like there is a real sony-microsoft content/price war kicking off. Great for the consumer

This is great. I’m always wary of buying XBLA games in case they go on deal of the week the following week. If this is a regular feature, I need fear no more =) Awesome.
Thanks Major.

Just go buy a retail copy of Bioshock. It’s $20 or less at most stores and you get a physical disc.

Well im happy to see Serious Sam up there, but still no Perfect Dark makes me a semi-sad panda.

Nobody is forcing you guys to buy the GOD games at these outrageous prices, they are just one more available “option”. You can always buy the games cheaper elsewhere.

£14.99 brand new on play.com, and you get to sell it on afterwards

Really Major Nelson last fm is already free and your making it seem like is a gift to use it

for a specific time frame you guys are ridiculous and think consumers are retards.

maybe more like last year i’m paying for live ripoff

I already have one and i’m thinking of dropping ms live for good and i don’t want any charity

i just don’t like the way they rip people off with their shady pricing.