Microsoft Announces "Game Room," Confirms Natal For Late 2010 120
Microsoft has confirmed that their upcoming motion-control system, Natal, will be released during the 2010 holiday season. The announcement was made during CES, alongside news of "Game Room," a service that will act like a virtual arcade, bringing classic games to users of the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows Live. It's due out this spring with 30 games to start, and will gradually ramp up to over a thousand titles. According to Kotaku, "You can buy a game for between 240-400 Microsoft Points, or if you really want that old arcade feeling, you can pay 40 Microsoft Points and play the game once, like it was 1985 and you'd just dropped a quarter." Another interesting bit of news is that subscribers to AT&T's U-Verse will soon be able to use the Xbox 360 as their set-top box.
Re:Credit suck (Score:4, Interesting)
Easier for who? It's impossible for Microsoft to do realtime conversion and show prices in your local currency? You know, since they have to do that any when when you "buy" points?
Re:Credit suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Whilst this is true, it also has the "nice" side effect of making it easier for them to bill more in countries that will tolerate it.
I don't know the exact pricing for points, but you could take the price of 1 point in the USA, convert to GBP (using a lousy exchange rate of course), add 17.5% for VAT and then throw an extra markup on top (because you just can [wikipedia.org]) and reflect that in the price of a point in the UK.
So $10's worth of points in the USA at a poor exchange rate should be around £7 + VAT = £8.23. Yet they could get away with also charging £10. A nice 66% markup.
Net result, is that you can screw people in the UK over without them really realising that they're paying far more than they would in the USA - despite the fact that everything is served from servers in the USA and therefore there are no additional costs involved by doing business in the UK*.
(* or if there are, they've already been covered by the business elsewhere. It's not like this is a new country for Microsoft)
Re:Credit suck (Score:3, Interesting)
And frankly, that annoys me too. I see a game announced on a US site and I have to check what they're asking for it in my local currency (it's arbitrary, not exchange-rate based). Points can be simpler.
And then I have to add a whole $10 to my "wallet" anyway, inevitably resulting in leftover credit. No differences there.
Re:screw your "points" (Score:1, Interesting)
Where's the micro-payment option where there aren't transaction fees added by the bank/credit card companies? Remember those fees? The ones that banks slap on ATM uses? The ones merchants fork over to credit card companies? The ones PayPal slaps on?
Cheaper for the service providing companies to sell you their own micro-transaction currency so they only get hit with the fees once per purchase of their micro-transaction currency.
I don't like the idea of such points and don't use them myself but the reason they're used isn't based on being seedy or scammy. It is based on practicality.