The question is simple: would you pay $0.99 for each premium car in a DLC GT5 Store?
I have somewhat mixed feelings about that, but not for the ignorant arguments against microtransactions.
In a way, a dollar for a single virtual car is kind of ridiculous considering that it's normal for a racing game to ship with upwards of a hundred or even several hundred cars, not to mention all the other content. Looking at FM3 as an illustration (since they also sold DLC car packs later), the game shipped with over 400 Premium cars, and if you figure a buck each that would put FM3 at over $400 dollars worth of cars, but the game shipped for just fifteen percent of that. We definitely got our money's worth.
However, they subsequently released monthly DLC consisting of ten car packs, and I believe they were ten $10 each, or a dollar per car. I even bought two or three of those packs, mainly for certain specific cars like the Audi R15. I didn't feel so bad about spending the cash at that point because Turn 10 gave me so many Premium cars already and so many hundreds of hours of gameplay that I almost felt obligated to throw them a few more bucks.
I actually like the idea of buying them one car at a time better, because that way you're only paying for the ones you really want and saving the money on the rest. So, if there was a car available that I
really wanted, I wouldn't mind throwing a buck at it, but I don't know that I would actually go through with it. It depends on if there's one that I really, really want.
NO!
Microtransactions for single game objects/data/etc are the worst thing ever occurred in modern videogaming.
Ignorance.
1) They generally do nothing to harm our gaming experiences. As an example, I just got around to playing through Mass Effect 2 (had it since Christmas), and it has DLC available for it. However, I purchased none of it, but that content didn't effect my experience with the game in any conceivable way. It didn't hurt me at all that I never got it, but if I had got it there would have been no harm in doing so.
2) 99.99% of gamers fail to understand how expensive it is to make video games, and that most video games (including many good ones) fail to earn back the money the developers sunk into making them, let alone turning any meaningful profit. You hear about the games that sell several million copies, but those sorts of sales aren't anywhere near standard. Even most good games do well to sell a million units.
You also must understand that even when you buy a game for $60, that
isn't sixty bucks going to the developers of that game. Various folks will get a cut of that, besides just the development studio. So, if a game does manage to sell as well as a million copies, even at $60 each that
isn't $60 million going to the game's developers, but it still cost them tens of millions to make that game. Then, many of you cry about the cost of everything and refuse to pay full retail price and instead buy used, which sends exactly $0.00 to the folks that made that game.
Developers need every single dollar they can get. DLC (microtransactions) help give them more dollars. The alternative is to ratchet up the cost from the shelf, maybe to $80 (for example), but you folks already bellyache about how $60 is too much. The next alternative is for developers to spend a lot less money making games, which means poorer production values, less emphasis on graphics, less work on advanced physics, and so forth, but then you'll whine about that, too.
Gamers want developers to spend $50 million on a single game but then sell that game to them for a handshake and the developers simply eat the losses all the time.
