E. Randy Dupre wrote:You're mixing up hardware and software like they're the same thing. They're not.
A better analogy than the vehicle ones is something like, say, a film. I buy a DVD. I start watching it and discover that half an hour is missing from the middle of it. It then turns out that the missing half an hour is actually present and correct on the DVD, but I need to pay the publisher an extra tenner in order to be able to watch it.
Basically, it comes down to this: the RRP of this game in the UK is something like £43.00. Traditionally, if you paid RRP for a console or PC game, that payment meant that you could access all the content on the cart or disc (all the content that was intended to be playable, anyway, rather than unused sprites or whatever). In the case of this game, if you want to access all of the content, you're looking at an extra £14 or so. If you go back to the old model of payment, that effectively means that the RRP of the content on the disc is now £57.00.
Capcom clearly want their customers to pay £57 for all the characters on the disc, so instead of being sly cunts about it, they should have made the RRP £57 and have everything available without having to download an unlock key. Only, they knew full well that if they released it at that price point, barely anybody would have bought it. So they staggered the payment - to all intents and purposes, you're paying for this game in installments, like it's some kind of hire purchase agreement. Only, you didn;t realise that was what it was when you went in - you thought you were buying it outright.
I guess it goes back to the change in the way that the end user agreement was worded a while back. You no longer own the software, you own a license to use the software. Very different things.
Except that this has been done for a long time on the software side of things too... Lots of softwares have different versions like "Home/Pro/Ultra" and while I can't be certain that all the missing features are simply locked or need a different executable for it to work on every software, I can imagine that some are simply locking stuff to the user.
For example, on Windows 7 Home Edition you don't have access to the Group Policy Editor, which means you can't create a shutdown or logoff script and some other things, so you would need at least Windows 7 Professional to have the GPE and be able to execute those scripts. But those features are implemented on the OS, you just don't have access to the GPE and need to mess with the registry if you want. It is not the best example, but it's the example I can think right now of something that's already on the software and if you want it you need to pay or hack it to get the feature you want.
The movie analogy I don't think it's the best. I don't know if this has been done, but I can see some company releasing two editions of the DVD (something like the regular edition and the director's cut edition) with the same content on disc but different menus so you "can't" access it in order to achieve that.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think it is right what Capcom has done, I am just pointing out that stuff like this exists for a long time and people seem to be okay with it. But there are different ways to do the same thing and that article at ArsTechnica shows that people react differently depending on how it's done.
It's something that's new to this last generation of gaming, but, as I said, it's the direction that the games industry has been taking, so it didn't surprise me. I don't think that all those stuff like exclusive pre-order items are any better than what happened with this DLC. Almost every game out there has some degree of market segmentation and it seems to be a trend, with more companies doing it and people accepting it, this is just getting closer to the segmentation that happens on other industries, which is not a good thing.
