Yeah, or atleast do what Bungie used to do with halo, when the latest DLC was released the previous would become free.

Crackdown cut down on the price of some of its DLC, as well. A few XBLA games were permanently reduced in price, too. It certainly makes sense.

The idea's great in theory, but the problem is that it wouldn't hold with shareholders.

If Bobby Kotick was all about the consumer with giving things as goodwill gestures and suggested to their share holders that the Modern Warfare DLC becomes free when MW2 came out, even though MW1 was still in the top 20 most played on XBL the month after MW2 came out, he would have been shot down for making a revenue stream disappear, no matter how small a stream it was at that point.

And the "More likely to buy their stuff in the future" argument doesn't wash either because more people bought MW2 than MW.

The only way things will change will be if they don't buy it, but even if every single registered user of TPWW past present and future saw this, agreed and had the willpower to follow through with not buying Activision products until they change grabbing for every penny it can, there would still be millions more to convince.

They're a company and a damn profitable at that right now. If we're too stupid to buy, they're very smart in selling.

MS and Bungies principles with their business when XBox Live started were very similar. MS were smart and knew that they had to build a kind of sense of community to not only establish the XBox brand, but also the justify the XBox Live charge and help build a lot of loyalty with consumers, because they'd already seen Sega, Nintendo and Sony have strong followings which helps them a lot.

What you've seen is Microsoft lure you in and now they've got you, everybody has a price, as we've seen by not allowing Valve to have it's DLC free.

The sad thing is that their idea of being more profitable isn't more good products, but instead trying to whack the consumers.

I wonder how long gaming stays recession proof.

I wonder that too. They must know that people will be driven away if quality stays low.

I know they're a completley different company now really, but they must see paralells drawing with the "pump out masses amount of crap and hope it sticks" methodology they're doing now and the Atari led video game crash.

It could be just around the corner, more households own Wii's than anything else and the shovelware they're subjected to could turn some of these first time gamers off forever. Nintendo's keeping up the game quality somewhat, but even they must be drowned out at some point.

I'm not sure they're thinking that, simply because games like Halo and MW2 are selling like hotcakes. FPS are cheap to produce, relatively easy to sell, etc. And several major titles that sell well are shooters. So especially in this field, it seems unlikely they care. People bitch they're paying fifteen dollars for two new maps (and one old one or whatever), but they're setting DLC records off it. Given their attitude, I'd imagine all they're seeing is dollar signs.

After all, I'm not sure we can get here without some serious myopia.