Bethesda announced a $1.99 add-on for Oblivion yesterday.
Horse armor.
It works out to $2.99 if you buy it for the 360 version via the Marketplace.
There are also two additional $1.99 downloads coming next week--Orrery (Mages Guild Inner Sanctum) and the Wizard's Tower. It doesn't take much mathematical ability to figure out that Bethesda is going to be offering, cumulatively, hundreds of dollars of add-ons for the game.
And all I can say about that is get used to it.
This was a long time in coming, even if it feels sudden. In a business sense, someone was going to figure out that they needed to create revenue streams for offline games beyond the point of purchase. This is the just first trickle of a long, long wave that's rolling in. And there will be times when this wave is poison, when companies hold back content that we think is essential to the core experience, and try to make us pay for it separately after we've already paid for the game. Believe me, it's coming, and it's going to piss all of us off.
That's clearly not what's happening here, though. It's not like Bethesda released half a game, or they're the only source for game mods. They released a robust, terrific tool for the modding community. If they made it impossible to mod the game, and they totally controlled all additional content, then that would be a pisser, but they didn't. They haven't released a tool to import/export 3D models yet, but they did with Morrowind and they've done nothing to make us think they won't this time as well.
This is a great idea for Bethesda, really, except they screwed it up. Three dollars for two sets of freaking horse armor? Don't let their arguments about what other things cost on the Marketplace confuse you--that is a stone cold rip-off. It's obscene.
Here's what they should have done, and it would have made them 10x the money: equipment or character-related downloads are ninety-nine cents. Period. Content downloads (a new town, a new ruin, etc.) could be $1.99. People would have gone nuts over that horse armor for ninety-nine cents. At two or three dollars, though, they feel cheated--and they should. Bethesda could release literally hundreds of pieces of armor or weapons or new spells. Easily. That price for a single item is utterly ridiculous. Are we supposed to, over time, pay three hundred dollars to get everything they'll release for this game?
I've got no problem with Bethesda charging for these things. It's a good business decision on their part. It's a lousy business decision in regards to pricing, though, and if they're not careful, they could start pissing away the enormous amounts of goodwill they've generated by releasing a high-quality, wonderfully deep game. One thing I think gaming companies really don't understand is that the the gaming community has a fairly digital notion of loyalty. When a game is released, we collectively decide if the developers are "on our side." If we think they are, then the love affair begins, and we're incredibly loyal. If we think they're not, we're brutal. Absolutely brutal.
Right now, it's still a love affair with Bethesda. Even with the horse armor. And I don't think they're going to blow it--but this was clearly a misstep.