In an age where you're used to spending only five, six bucks for a game, it's really hard to go back to the PC and pay 60 bucks for a game, especially if it's becoming increasingly loaded with features and content you'll never make use of.
Like what, the game itself?!
well, I personally have many games that support multiplayer, but on which I have never used multiplayer. That was the example listed, and I would certainly be willing to sacrifice that for a lower price. People who wouldn't can just pay for it.
I can't remember the last time I bought a video game and said, "Gee, look at all this content I don't need!
Maybe not, but I often open up a game, and confronted with a lot of options, must take a moment to discern which is the "real" game; the game as it is meant to be played and which I will find most enjoyable.
Sure wish the game was half as long, with recycled content in place of new areas."
That's not what's on the table here, at least with regards to Stardock's games. If some indy developer wants to go that route, that's their own prerogative, but I imagine market forces would very strongly discourage that behavior.
In seriousness, I can only see a microtransaction based system ending badly. It just creates a lot of incentive for developers to chop content from the game before launch and sell it seperately (see: day 1 DLC, and DLC that is proven to be ALREADY ON THE GODDAMN DISK).
Those sorts of developers already do that. Reactor neither prohibits nor encorages that behavior. It allows it, at most. (At least, according to information that's thus far been released).
In a perfect world, the cost of the base game and add-ons would end up costing what a full game would. In reality, we get overly short $50-60 games with $20-50 of DLC added on later.
Those sorts of games will be able to use Reactor, yes. They currently exist without it, and are supported by people with more money than sense. That doesn't cut into the market for games with deeper and richer experiences, and it doesn't invalidate the fundamental principles of capitalism. If a game is offered with a dearth of content for a high price, it will do worse than a game with a wealth of content for a low price. Obviously advertising/visibility, graphical sophistication, and other factors still play into this. But nonetheless, games are subject to market forces and everything will work itself out properly after a bit. This is what Brad was talking about in relation to the death of the $60 game. That market for high-priced games is going away, because cheaper games with a greater wealth of content are available. The huge AAA games are still hanging ont that model. And for them, it still mostly works. But increasingly, smaller studios are instead putting out cheaper products, or dying.
Even in the console world this is true, as we see Wii beating the more expensive consoles all around.
citing friends who bought Oblivion on a console simply because they were sure that version would work correctly
Nope, console games are prone to major software bugs this generation.
Yeah, but nobody really knew that yet when Oblivion launched. And it's still far less than on PCs, where people often must worry about whether or not their computer is able to play it, not merely whether the game itself has bugs (which I strongly suspect is what was meant.)
