What’s up, PC gamers! How about Apple’s RAM prices though, right? No. Sure. Tough crowd. But I only bring it up as a prime example of a practice called price discrimination.
When a business brings their product to market they don’t actually know how much you’d be prepared to pay for it, so they make their best guess. And then they tack on optional extras, which you buy because you were prepared to spend more on the original product than its retail price. Or you don’t, and some other schmuck does. The bottom line’s the same: people who would have bought the product for a higher RRP still wind up paying more.
Apple’s exorbitant RAM prices are price discrimination 101. But, to bring things circuitously back to the headline, this example also neatly describes the games-as-a-service model. For almost a decade now, game publishers wanted you to keep playing and playing their new title, please. For ages. They do so because the longer you keep playing, the greater the probability you’ll spend more money on it. You can call it something else, like a ‘player-driven ecosystem’, dress it up in a limited edition seasonal skin and trot it out onto an E3 stage, but that’s really all service games amount to. Spending more money on extra bits of the same game.
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