TrueEnglishGent

AH! AVATAR MARKETPLACE.... HOW MUCH??

Now hopefully you Xbox 360 owners out there have updated your consoles with the latest dashboard update from Microsoft. Having been discussed enough by the gaming media already, I shan't go into what exactly was in the update as you no doubt already know. But what I do wish to talk about is the Avatar marketplace which was introduced with this latest firmware. Now the update as a whole wasn't exactly a big deal, in fact it was only the improvements made to Netflix for you Americans that probably even made this worth discussing.  
 
But we can't forget about our little avatars now can we, for they now have their own little marketplace for Xbox 360 owners to waste their money on. I don't wish to sound to down on this new feature, as I do appreciate the free clothing they have offered over the months since the New Xbox Experience officially launched. But it's hard not to get a little angry about it, especially at these types of prices. I'm sure many of you have already checked out the marketplace and seen some of the over the top prices for virtual clothing. Now I don't judge you for buying virtual clothing, but at these sort of prices one must either have to much money to spend or be missing a few brain cells.  
 
Ok, even that sounded a little unfair and I apologise. I wrote about this to some degree a few weeks back where I talked about buying virtual content. Now virtual content makes perfect sense even though we gamers often find ourself paying over the odds for it. But virtual clothing for an avatar that won't make your experience any better, in fact possibly make it worse for some makes little sense. Of course this is a choice, I could choose to buy virtual clothing or I could not. It's fair, but it's the overall prices of some of these cloths that causes me to shiver with anger. Maybe not anger exactly, but something very similar. Thankfully many members of the Giantbomb community would agree with me in saying that it's kind of a waste of money when you truly think about it.  
 
One can hope that we eventually see some reasonable pricing put in place, but let's be honest the chances of Microsoft doing that are slim. I don't hate the whole avatar thing, in fact I've even grown to enjoy it. I just hope we see some restraint by Microsoft every so often. The fact that some pieces of clothing cost half as much as a full-fledged Xbox Live Arcade game is insanity. It's fully understandable that programmers, animators and designers need to get payed. But what about us gamers who already pay for a yearly subscription fee for Live, games that cost on average fourty pound sterling each and we can't forget theres a recession on right now.   

 I realize I'm sounding like a moaning git, some might say it's what I do best. But it does anger me. There was real hope that Microsoft would price avartar clothing fairly, but what were we smoking. This is Microsoft afterall and they'll do anything to get more money off us. This is one of the reasons I have very little loyalty to the massive American technology company, they give me no reason to be loyal to them. But it's not all bad, the new introduction of achievement like clothing awards (or props for that matter) is a smart and quite exciting new addition. Hopefully this will eventually get into full gear, right now I believe Splosion Man is the only game to support this feature and I don't own that XBLA game just yet.  
 
For those that have bought avatar clothing off the marketplace I hope you enjoy them I really do. Maybe I might eventually see something I have to own and spend some of my precious Microsoft Points on some virtual clothing. But right now I'm happy to stay away and pray that Microsoft don't see this as a chance to charge us even more. It would also be nice to see some future clothing stay free, for events such as Christmas, Independence Day or any other memorable and much loved event. We'll have to wait and see how that exactly develops. But for now I guess we need to put a smile on things, and maybe even spend 400MS points on a t-shirt with a big smiley face on. That would make things better! 
 
Thanks for Reading! 
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