Price Schemin' and Braid

I played the Braid demo today, sneaking it in between an obsessive play session with Soul Calibur 4 and my impending departure for work this afternoon.

I wholeheartedly recommend you try out the trial for Braid if you haven't already done so. The game's visual design is charming, surreal and more than a little artistic. The core gameplay, a clever rethinking of the standard 2D platformer, hooked me in initially with it's interesting time manipulation feature. Being able to rewind time at any moment makes the game incredibly forgiving, but forms also the crux upon which the games levels and puzzles are designed.

The only things that turned me off about Braid was the silly, overwrought writing and the price tag.

I think at any other time, I would have happily plunked down the Microsoft points for this game. What is the standard for new games these days? 800 points. I could imagine myself paying 800 points for Braid. However, XBLA titles have seen an upwards price drift in the last few months and I'm beginning to question the cynicism behind such a trend.

A couple of months ago I laid out my cash -- 1600 points, was it? -- for the Penny Arcade Adventures and I've barely touched it, let alone finish what is purported to be a mere 5-hour romp. The game is no doubt fun and has fairly high production values, in hindsight I just fail to see why the game justified a 2x price hike over the usual Arcade fare. It just seems to me that Microsoft's digital download service is headed in the direction of Canadian telcoms, where standard services rise in price inexplicably with no supporting improvement in the actual quality or quantity of service. Recently, the pricing structure for SMS messages was changed so that customers now pay a fee for receiving phone messages along with the usual fee for sending. Why? I never got to read any press releases on the subject, but I am sure a well-worded explanation was given to obfuscate the simple fact that telcoms were just interested in higher profit margins on what is franky a very a popular, ancilliary feature.

So getting back to why I decided not to purchase Braid... it's a fabulous piece of work by indie developer, Jonathan Blow and I wish him the best of luck with his debut XBLA release. I sort of let myself fall into the price hike trap with Penny Arcade, however, and I'm not about to let that happen again. I just feel that, on principle, the game is not deserving of a price hike, as good as it is, and this serves as a test bed for the Xbox team to calibrate their pricing and see how much more we are willing to pay for our Arcade games. And let's not be naive here. Braid, just as much as Penny Arcade Adventures, was a highly anticiplated game. It was written up in gaming blogs and showered heaps of critical praise months before release and those sort of good tidings give a company a lot more room to charge a premium price.

Maybe I will change my tune later on, when I find myself bored and without a stack of retail games to keep me occupied. I may remember Braid, think "what the heck" and plunk down my precious points. There are worse things in the world than over-paying $5 for a good piece of entertainment. But for now, I'm quite content to vote with my wallet and not contribute to the sales figures for this game. Greedy execs don't need any more encouraging if you ask me.