Alright, I can understand the idea of selling extra content for games. That sounds perfectly reasonable. However with-holding essential game content and then trying to sell it to the gamers as additional content is just bad business. Sure microtransactions are a relatively new concept and they're just testing the waters right now, but they should use some common sense.

To recap.

Buying armor for your horse in Oblivion. = Good

Having to buy the tutorials in Madden = Bad

Lumines on Live = Ugly

I personally don't really like the idea at all. Especially making people pay for tutorials in Madden, I didn't hear about that before this topic. Thats wrong.

Not sure how they will get folks to pay for some of the more essential things. Especially if people can "play" throught the tutorial and give cheats/hints learned through it. Heck, from the sound of things, it seems they'll plan on withholding the game directions or even keyboard mapping.

But I do know there are also game support lines that peeps call to get help in getting past a certain point too, so guess if there is a chance they'll make money from it, they'll try it. Doesn't MS Windows kinda operate on this premise? You buy the basic operating system and then have to download all the hot-fixes to plug the security holes or fix the programming code problems? It won't be long that they'll consider "selling" those.

They started cracking down on this a bit, actually. They do that "Genuine Advantage" thing for windows, something that scans your system and if for whatever random reason (and I do mean random reason) they think that it isn't a "secure" copy of windows, or something that was illegally obtained, you have to go through a friendly 3,000 step program to allow you to get updates, many of which include saying "No, this is a real copy, I'm not spending 400 dollars again."

I had to do that for work. It sucked.

Today's Penny Arcade does a pretty good job of summing up this topic: