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After announcing that the versus mode for Resident Evil 5 would be due in the next few weeks after the game's launch Capcom have defended their pricing for the versus mode.
It seems that many gamers have become disillusioned and bitter towards Capcom, and downloadable content in general. Whilst charging for extras that could be construed as being withheld from the retail disc to be sold as DLC at a later date is speculation at best, we think there's probably more than meets the eye to the story.
To play devils advocate, it's easy to immediately lash out and point the accusing finger at publishers/developers for charging for these extras, but the reality is none of us know the procedures or costs these extras incur. We all assume that these should be offered free of charge, and looking at some content which is, and others which aren't does create a somewhat blurry vision of why content is being charged for.
We asked Capcom to offer some sort of explanation as to why the Versus mode has a 400 point price tag attached, and here's what they had to say on the matter.
Although Versus mode makes use of the assets that exist in the game, the functionality is not currently in the game and is above and beyond the initial scope of Resident Evil 5. We have never included a versus mode in Resident Evil before, and as well as the costs of development of the feature, there's also additional bandwidth costs associated with it.
I hope this helps clarify the need to charge for this additional feature.
Well there you have it. In all honesty, Resident Evil 5 is packed full of features that seems to hark back to the old days of when stuff was unlocked in-game (extra modes, additional costumes, movie viewer, character artworks etc) . So really we shouldn't complain. However, We think Capcom have perhaps gone about the downloadable content in completely the wrong way, and it's understandable why people are getting annoyed at their actions. In future, Capcom really need to show gamers that they are not being unscrupulous capitalists, but rather providing extras for the fans - and at the end of the day, extras are better than none at all regardless of the cost.
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Date: 2009-03-13 |
| Posted by: Robert Cram |
| Source: |
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