Optional Extortion

So, in case you didn't know I'm a gamer of both the PC and console variety. Right now as far as consoles go most of my time is spent with my Xbox 360, which is great. I love it. It has great games, a great online experience, Xbox Live Arcade is sweet, and so on. Being an Xbox owner I've often felt jealousy towards PS2 owners because they have access to a wonderful game called Guitar Hero. If you haven't played Guitar Hero it's a game played with a plastic guitar peripheral that looks like something you might have seen made by Fisher-Price as a kid wherein people with no guitar skills (myself) can "shred" to some classic tunes. It's a really fun game and it finally came to the 360, so needless to say I was very excited to pick it up.

The game itself is great and I definitely recommend it to 360 owners (especially if you never owned a PS2 and were therefore unable to play GH1 or GH2). My problem with it has to do with the down-loadable content, one of the biggest draws to the 360 version. Three song packs have already been released for download, each containing 3 songs taken from the original Guitar Hero game. Anyone who followed this game knew from the get-go that one of the major draws would be the option of enhancing the experience with down-loadable songs that would eventually be released, and that's great. My problem (and many other people's problems) is with the pricing scheme they chose.

Right now the price set on the individual down-loadable song packs is 5000 Microsoft Gamerpoints which is equivalent to roughly $6.25 per pack...that's a little over $2 per song. That's right, to buy these covered songs (most of Guitar Hero's songs aren't the actual original renditions of the songs do to licensing issues) you pay more than twice as much as you would pay to download the originals from iTunes. I have no idea why they thought this price point would be plausible but that's what we've been dealt and Guitar Hero fans have to deal with it. Most (like myself) are deciding to avoid these re-packaged songs all together.

A lot of people I think have the opinion that no one should be getting worked up about this because, after all, you're not forced to download the songs...they're optional. Still, the fact that they think they can get away with micropayments of this magnitude is cause for a little noise in the gamer community I think. So if you bought or are planning to buy Guitar Hero 2 for the 360, please vote with your wallet and choose NOT to buy any of the downloadable content and maybe in the future Microsoft will rethink their pricing. Other than that, enjoy the game!