Quote: Originally Posted by dan77733 Anyway, thats pretty much it. Sorry for the long ass book but you said you were curious. LOL.

No worries, I asked for it! You actually had a lot of well-thought out reasons, and a lot of it comes down to personal preference, which I can't dispute. If I may play devil's advocate on a few of your points, though:

#1- Games have been $50+ for a long time. I remember NES games were $50, and most of them could be beat within a few hours or less.

#2- I personally don't think we'll be looking at JUST digital downloads for a long, long time. The last time I looked up the stats, something like 20% of the United States does not have access to broadband internet (even if they wanted to have it), mostly in rural areas. Furthermore, if they stop selling games in stores, stores will stop carrying their systems. Whichever system became the first to do so would have to have massive balls, because if (for instance) MS decided to go all digital and Wal-Mart said "eff you then, we're not selling your systems if you won't have us selling your games", it would be a massive advantage to Sony.

#3- That's another thing I don't see happening, at least not in the next generation of games.

As far as the extra stuff (achievements, entertainment apps, DLC) I would say that you don't have to participate if you don't want to. Of course, with achievements you have no choice...I guess you can turn off alerts so it doesn't interrupt your gaming, but you will still be earning them regardless. And yeah, it sucks when story-based DLC comes out which is overpriced, but I personally just don't buy stuff on Day 1. Even stuff like Dawnguard I will just wait on until it's on sale.

As far as game length, like I said, I remember the NES days of paying $50 for a 2-3 hour game (or at least, having your parents pay that much, ha ha). I'm always surprised when people say that games today don't have the value that they used to, since with every generation they have gotten longer and longer while prices have stayed right around $50-60.

Anyway though, a lot of your points are very good ones (I miss manuals, too!) and many of them are about personal preference- which is "to each their own" territory. Thanks for taking the time to reply.