Conspiracy week II

Wrong. Halo 3 gets updated with 750 points, some of which remain unattainable for a year. Then Mirror's Edge gets updated with 250 points that are harder than the original 1000 AND require you to go back to the original game. Fifa 09 gets DLC. Wait, that's a yearly franchise. That can't be good. Then comes the mother of all bullshit, Gears of War 2 forces you to buy maps that were ready before the game's release, and then gets tacked with a multiplayer achievement that takes about 1000 hours. Then, they do absolutely nothing to stop the huge uprising of cheaters. Today, I'm one of probably a dozen legit Rank 100's, and I can't play a multiplayer game without getting bad feedback because I look like one of the thousands of cheaters.

Then Transformers 2, a movie cash-in, gets DLC. Now, it's pretty damn obvious that developers are just making the DLC along with the game and releasing it later for more sales. Think about this thing from the point of view of someone who completes all of their games, like me or thousands of other people. I buy a game with the intent of completing it, understanding that it takes a set amount of time and effort to complete, and assuming that that single purchase will be all I need to do so. Months later, DLC comes out, forcing me to spend more time and money to get what I originally bought, that is, a completion.

From my point of view, this is like if I bought a phone, then 6 months later, the manufacturer takes away my 8 button and forces me to spend another $20 to get it back. I have a friend who's a lawyer, and I assume a very good one because he's pretty boring, that tells me that this does constitute unfair business practice, but it would be impossible to hold Microsoft or a developer liable because no jury would see things from our narrow point of view. Then again, it took only a failed lawsuit for McDonald's to pull its SuperSize option.

What I'm getting at is that this does technically constitute a conspiracy. Microsoft had a set of rules that clearly outlined what developers can and can't do in terms of gamerscore. All achievements must be attainable without extra purchase, only 250 DLC points per game, etc. But developers openly flaunt these rules, releasing glitched achievements with no effort to patch them, forcing people to buy or play another game to tie-in an achievement, shutting down private servers when they could just patch in a line that makes the servers run off of Microsoft's. But Microsoft looks the other way because this all equates to more money for them. Assholes.