One of the biggest scams in gaming is major console manufacturers’ adoption of “point” systems for online commerce. To buy any games or upgrades over Xbox Live or the Nintendo Wii network (whatever you call it), you have to purchase blocks of points, set at arbitrary values that quite deliberately don’t match any form of real world money.
Why is this a bad thing?
First, you can never just pay the right amount for the item you want to buy. If you want to buy a game that costs 800 “points”, you have to buy a package of 1000 “points”, and Microsoft holds onto 200 “points” worth of your money until you come back next time. You can’t get it back any other way. The equivalent would be Coles only accepting fifties, refusing to give you change but promising to let you put it towards your next purchase.
(Just to rub it in, the multiples that Microsoft sells the points in – 500, 1000, 1500 – quite obviously don’t correspond with the standard price of content on Xbox Live – 400, 800, 1200. That’s not an accident.)
Second, the reason behind forcing to consumers to use “points” instead of proper currency is to make it difficult to determine just how much it is that you’re spending. Consumers have a pretty good idea in their heads of what they’re prepared to pay for games and downloadable content, defined with reference to other real-world entertainment products. All of which are measured in real-world currencies. The thing about make-believe currency like “Microsoft points” is that it feels like spending Monopoly money, and is harder to value properly.
Obviously the idea is to trick you into spending more money than you would have if they expressed the price in a form with which you were familiar.
So, in summary: they force you to spend more than the actual price of the item, and they conceal that price from you as much as possible.
It’s an entire system of commerce based on deceit.
And that’s where the industry is moving. Isn’t that wonderful?
UPDATE: I had originally included the PS3 in the criticism above, but am informed by people who actually have one that it lists products in real-world currency.
May 28, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Doesn’t PSN just have a $ price to their downloads? Looked at downloading old mario games on the Wii and the prices were ridiculous.
May 28, 2009 at 7:03 pm
PSN is in dollars, but you have to move funds to your ‘wallet’ first. so you end up with $0.75 left over in most cases.
May 28, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Really? I haven’t got a PS3, just a 360 and a Wii, although I’ve had plenty of experience of Sony’s shittiness in the past – so I’d assumed they were pulling the same crap as the other two. I will amend the post.
June 29, 2009 at 4:32 pm
[...] Gaming ripoffs that Wired has noticed, too Wired notices several of the ripoffs we’ve talked about recently – from digital downloads that are not cheaper than the physical product (or in fact more expensive) to funny money. [...]
August 22, 2009 at 10:45 am
[...] because there are negligible distribution costs, would have almost entirely been profit. At 800 points it would have been an impulse [...]