I was sitting in front of my trusty laptop, working on some plug-ins for my blogs, with one eye on my screen and the other on the television and I caught a commercial announcing a new map pack for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. I don’t play many games on my Xbox 360 but when I do, Call of Duty Modern Warfare is one of my all time favorites.
When Activision / Infinity Ward came out with the Stimulus Map pack near the end of March, they were charging $15 (1200 Microsoft Points) to download the map pack. I already paid $60 for the game and wasn’t too happy about spending 25% of the original game cost to buy the map pack but I did. What I found is that I had more fun playing the maps that came with the original game instead of the maps in the Stimulus package, which two out of the five maps are from a previous version of Call of Duty. The problem for me is most of the on-line players were only playing the new maps and not many were playing the original maps anymore. After playing the new maps for about a week or so, I haven’t played it since. It’s not that the maps are bad but the $15 price put a bad taste in my mouth and it has turned me off of the Xbox 360 overall.
Now, fast forward to June and they have released another map pack, called the Resurgence Pack, for another $15? What are they thinking? I don’t mind paying developers and software companies for their work, I always have and always will, but this is type of business practice is nothing more than consumer price gouging as far as I am concerned. I know that a lot of people will buy this map pack, maybe even a few million, like when the first map pack was released I would guess. I hope everyone who buys it enjoys it but don’t be upset if they keep releasing map packs every couple to few months for $15 and the $60 game you bought soon costs as much as the hardware it is being played on. If it was $5, I would consider it fair but $15 is just too much to ask of a gaming community that has made them so successful.
When it’s time for me to play games, I will spending a lot more time playing Team Fortress 2 on my PC and much less time on my Xbox 360.
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