During my viewing of Live Free or Die Hard, I witnessed Microsoft’s amazing ability to toss around dollars. Within the first five minutes of the movie, a young man is killing Locusts on a television for a good three to four seconds. Right after that, his entire house blows up, which is a little negative re-enforcements for us gamers. Mid way through the film, Kevin Smith is yelling at Bruce Willis while, yep, the Gears of War title screen is blinking behind him! How much did these cost? Who knows? Someone’s soul, maybe. Don’t worry, fanboys, Sony gets some love, too. A walk on character asks the Apple dude, “Hey man, you wanna go play the Killzone 2 DL?” Yes, gamers, its true. We’re making it to the big leagues.

The Gears of War maps we’ve been hearing about for months are up for a surprise release this week, and the news on price is what’s been hinted at for a while now: immediately upon release, the Hidden Fronts map pack will release for 800 points, which is 10 dollars in non-MS money (and which works out to about 2.50 a map), and 5 months later, in September, the maps will be made free. I will probably buy these; I don’t think 10 bucks for half an expansion pack is unreasonable, and while yes, I understand that Epic “wanted them to be free”, Microsoft published the game and funneled an enormous amount of money into the project. Combined with their role as publisher, and as platform holder, and as retailer for the content essentially, their desire to sell the content is just as valid as Epic’s desire to give it away free, even if you wish Epic had won out. What’s more, Microsoft has committed to the content releasing for free in the Fall.

And yet, the bitching has already started. There continues to be a sense of entitlement amongst certain areas of the internet that claim everything should be free, although I never heard any complaints that fLow, a title which existed as a flash game for free, cost money. I can understand that mentality, but in this case I don’t agree with it. Not only in this case can you apply the “don’t like it, don’t buy it mentality” here, you can later apply the “don’t want to pay, so get it free in a few months” mentality. So why are people upset? I want opinions, people.

-Aegies

So Epic is finally releasing their Annex game mode available to all you hardcore Gears players out there; essentially a variation of Capture the Flag, it also introduces the welcome addition of respawning to the mix. Like everything else about Gears, there is a twist to respawning though: rather than arbitrarily reappearing 5 seconds after you die, the game brings dead comrades back in waves every 45 seconds or so, which is definitely an interesting catch, and is still friendly enough to make the game more fun for people that have a tendency to get head-shotted early on in matches. The patch also sees some slight weapon rebalancing, including a more powerful Lancer, which is very welcome for those of us who get sick of running around with shotguns. However, there’s been no word on the previously rumored patch that will make multiplayer achievements in the game available through both Ranked matches AND Player matches, which is what might really be enough to pull me into Gears online more often. I understand the need to keep ranking separate from matches where people can conspire to rig that system, but for achievements, it seems more than a little arbitrary to force me to play with assholes to get those achievements. Anyway for more information on the gameplay details of the new gametype and weapon balancing, 1UP has a finally-unembargoed-preview up.

Perhaps more interesting news in Gears of War territory today is the internet furor over comments made by Epic Head Tim Sweeney on last Friday’s 1UP Yours podcast, which some people interpreted to mean that Microsoft was prohibiting Epic from releasing maps that had been finished for quite some time already because of Epic’s inclination to release them without any additional charge. I can understand why this would piss people off, because I like free things too. However, the bizarre sense of entitlement people seem to have for content that was not-negligible in cost to produce does confuse me from time to time. Anyway, Mark Rein has a history of being open with the community, and in an official post on the Gears’ forums, he announced (via Joystiq) that Microsoft and Epic had made a “Bungie”:

Epic thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to give the maps away for free and Microsoft thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to sell the maps. So what we’ve agreed to do is to put these maps on sale at a reasonable price then make them free a few months later. They did this with the original Halo2 map pack and it was a huge success. Lots of people bought the maps and lots of people downloaded them when they became free. That’s what is going to happen and it seems like a fair compromise for both companies and a win-win for Gears players.

Why does Epic not have control over this even though we created this content on our own time and our own dime? Quite frankly Xbox Live Marketplace isn’t our store. It’s Microsoft’s store. Like any retailer they have the right to figure out what goes on the shelves of their store and what price they sell it at. They spend the money to operate the store and deliver the content. They’ve also spent billions of dollars to create and build Xbox and subsidize it’s the price so you can afford it and we can make games for it. As our publisher, they also invested tens of millions of dollars marketing Gears of War, and have done an awesome job for us, so they have a right to a good return on that investment.

As Tim Sweeney and I said in the podcast, we want the download economy to work – it is something the industry needs, something we hope to use in the future, something that will help bring more variety to end-users and ultimately could help bring prices down for end-users. If we had to put this map pack on a disc and sell it in retail it would be more expensive to end-users and maybe we wouldn’t have done it because of all the extra work and cost involved.

There are still sure to be a number of pissed off internet denizens, some people on this site included, but considering the realities of the vast amount of money that Microsoft invested in Gears and in the Live Marketplace, I think that this was probably the best compromise that could have been made. I don’t know if I’ll buy the new maps, but I’ll have that option, and if I decide not to, I can wait a few months. However, I do think that Microsoft is missing the good PR that would result from caving and releasing the maps for free, especially after the poor online reception of the Elite announcement and the shenanigans surrounding Live on the Windows platform.

-Aegies

So Luke Smith reports that their inside souce, Quatermann, has revealed some new rumors regarding two of the better 360 titles for 2006, Dead Rising and Gears of War. Supposedly Dead Rising will have a co-op mode added to the “Platinum” edition of the title as well as a co-op add-on available “for a price.” GoW on the other hand, will supposedly be getting some new downloadable content very soon.

What exactly is this new content for Gears? And how much will it cost us to buy the co-op add on for Dead Rising? I am sure it will be sold over XBL and I would personally be willing to bet it will run you around 1200 points. As for the Gears content I suspec this content will not be free, like the last release, but I have confidence that Epic will make it worth your money. What do you guys think it could be?

Chufmoney