Comments on: Lumines Live: The DEFINITIVE Reason to Hate Microtransactions

By: In Defense of Micropayments

In Defense of Micropayments — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:17:31 +0000

[...] willing to pay), games like Lumines on Xbox Live Arcade have been sold off piecemeal and suffered no small amount of venom as a [...]

By: In Defense of Micropayments « My Test Blog

In Defense of Micropayments « My Test Blog — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:27:50 +0000

[...] willing to pay), games like Lumines on Xbox Live Arcade have been sold off piecemeal and suffered no small amount of venom as a [...]

By: Liquid_Mind

Liquid_Mind — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:54:29 +0000

I know that guy didn’t seriously just dis Night Trap….

By: Drfred

Drfred — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:00:27 +0000

Then noone would buy it Steve-o because 1200 for the first demo part was bad alone on xbla standards. I heard Doom was 800 points. They could have made the second part free. It’s a rip-off however you look at it.

By: Steve_o_3000

Steve_o_3000 — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 23:24:18 +0000

Isn’t it due to the fact that the game is too big for a single download? Live arcade games can be no bigger than 50 meg, and that’s how big both downloads are. I’m pretty sure if it were just one big download, you’d be charged the same amount as the two part download the game is right now.

By: Drfred

Drfred — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:29:22 +0000

I hate that I personally won’t see any benefit from ad placement but lying to the consumer and microtransactions are on a completely different level of evil that we should boycott. ODT I commented on your 365 post. I’d tell you what I said but I suspect you have already recieved enough flak for your opinion.

By: thomas

thomas — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:49:37 +0000

A big push is occuring in the videogame market by non less than the marketing gimps for in game Ads (aka spyware and spam) and ‘microtransactions’ (aka game blackmail… want to play the real game.. pay up.)

It almost reminds of of the ‘multimedia’ junk that was Sega Cd and that awful time period where they wanted us to view movies and make decisions (aka night trap) . They forced it down our throats and in turn we puked it up on them and banned most of the game. Thus hurt profits.

we need to ban game black mail and game spyware.

By: blah

blah — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 06:03:46 +0000

Live Arcade games are required to be less than 50MB.

Note the size of the two Lumines downloads and you can quickly see why it is broken up into two pieces.

Or you can keep crying and freaking out about it.

Either way.

By: O D S T

O D S T — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 02:29:58 +0000

I know that the whole microtransaction nickel and diming is not that cool, but honestly for the first 1,200MS points u get a fully functioning game with a challenge mode and a timed mode. This is 2twice as much as geometry wars had for 400MS points. 800MS points was the amount for Mutant Storm reloaded. 1,200MS points might be a little pricey but i daresay that it’s a FULL game. Everything else is extra…

PLUS there’s XBL challenge. the only thing that i can see that was missing is the VS CPU mode which who needs if u have xbl, and advanced mode, which i have no idea about.

I don’t see what all the bitching is about…

By: D'Juan

D'Juan — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:16:47 +0000

Brad, I don’t think you get my point with this article. I don’t think that charging over $20 for a Live Arcade game is all that bad, if people are willing to pay that much.

My point with this, though, is that if you’re going to charge a total of 3000 MS Points for a game, make it 3000 points to begin with. The way it is currently just nickels and dimes for content that should be a part of the game, inappropriate because with that $15 download, it’s expected to be an entire game. If they charged the 3000 points from the beginning, you would get you the entire game from the initial download.

So it’s not about the game being as expensive as it is – costing more than it’s PS2 and PSP bretheren when it has more content is understandable. It’s about paying for something that you can’t enjoy for more than 10 minutes without paying MORE to unlock what should be a part of the game you already paid for.

Does that make more sense?

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:46:33 +0000

I love that when the game retails for $50 on the PSP at launch, it’s okay. But if it’s over $20 on XBLA it’s a rip off. I too wish they would have made it more clear what the ‘full’ game was, but it’s hardly anything to be outraged over.

By: Johnvanjim

Johnvanjim — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:41:58 +0000

I second the above.. I was excited about lumines, but charging that much for gimped content on a game that’s already out on multiple platforms through a platform that has no packaging costs. That’s not a good deal at all. I’ll wait the year until it drops to $20 for everything and snap it up then.

By: Drfred

Drfred — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 04:30:17 +0000

I wish gamers as a whole were informed about crap like this and decided as a whole to boycott crap or atleast if MS found out about this they said hey screw you guys were taking you off XBL.