That sound you hear is the average price for Xbox Live Arcade games raising by five bucks. Or maybe it's just the guy with the jackhammer out in front of my house. I can't really tell anymore.
Dan Paladin over at The Behemoth dropped the world a line from the Castle Crashers dev blog with the confirmed price for the company's upcoming brawler:
Hello everyone on the internet!
The price for Castle Crashers will be 1,200 Microsoft points. This month’s only online multiplayer XLA game launches on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008, so get ready to grab some friends and prepare to smash stuff!
Domo arigato Mr. Roboto
Thank you
Love you
-dan
As a member of this "Internet" he speaks of, I think I speak for all of us when I say "hooray" and "dude, awesome, I will buy this immediately" and "thanks for not charging $22.50 for your game."
But this also further bucks the rapidly eroding trend of developers charging 800 points (ten bucks) for their original content on XBLA. I don't mind paying $15 for a great game, or a game that seems like it's some sort of worthy cause. Braid was a great game, plus its success sends an interesting message about the viability of small-team games, so $15 was no big deal there. Hell, I was happy to pay it! Castle Crashers certainly seems like it's going to be great, and The Behemoth seems like it's solely constructed of totally radical guys, so $15 doesn't seem out of line to me at all.
But what'll happen when every other developer gets this $15 price point in their head and games that might have seemed passable at $10 start releasing at $15? Will it rock the Xbox Live Arcade service to its very core, leaving nothing but rubble and bad feelings? Will the PlayStation Network and its often-random-looking price structure survive because it's been keeping people guessing since it launched?
Or am I just being overly dramatic and fretting about nothing? You tell me--do you think we'll all be asked to lay out $15/week for new games by this time next year?