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<\/a><\/p>\nAngry Internet Man here with a chip on his shoulder and a shoot promo to cut. This pre-order “bonus” video game content bullshit has to stop. Lives are at stake.<\/p>\n
The latest example of this chicanery is BioShock 2<\/i>. If you pre-order the game from GameStop, den of sin and other bad stuff, you get two exclusive<\/i> multi-player characters<\/a>. Well, pardon me for being a jerk and buying the game from Steam (where the pre-order bonus is a free copy of the orignial BioShock<\/i>, as if I didn’t already have that—twice). Now I have to envy<\/i> all the other neighborhood kids who get said characters? You know, I always hated those kids.<\/p>\n Granted, the odds of me playing BioShock 2<\/i>’s multi-player mode are right around zero, so it’s not a huge<\/i> deal, but there is a certain principle at stake here: why the heck should I have to buy—and pre-order, no less!—the game from GameStop to get access to the entire game? Why punish people who choose to shop at a different location?<\/p>\n And this is a benign pre-order bonus, extra multi-player skins. Who cares? Let’s look at something far more malignant: EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2<\/i>. Did you know that unless you pre-order the game from, yes, GameStop, you won’t be able to play a certain multi-player mode for an entire month<\/i><\/a>? Let’s say Wal-Mart is the only store in town; you couldn’t shop at GameStop if you wanted to. So you go over there, ask the nice cashier for a copy, come home, plop it into your PS3, and find out, oh, hey, I can’t play a mode that I paid for<\/i> for four weeks. Awesome! Thanks, EA and GameStop!<\/p>\n (I don’t even understand how that’s legal, buying ostensibly the same product from one store but getting a hell of a lot more with your purchase than the guy who bought the same thing next door. Imagine buying a car from one dealership that included working high beams, but buying it from another store you get jack-shit for lights.)<\/p>\n Dragon Age: Origins<\/i> had some pre-order nonsense<\/a>, too. Basically, you had to buy the game 18 different times to unlock every single piece of “extra” content. What?<\/i><\/p>\n Mass Effect 2<\/i> rewarded armor and weapons<\/a>—not superfluous multi-player skins, then—to people who pre-ordered the game from GameStop. Again, tough cookies, kid who bought the game from Target. You should have done the decent thing and driven an hour and a half out of your way to pre-order the game from almighty GameStop.<\/p>\n Let’s be fair: sometimes all this “extra” stuff is made available to everyone via Xbox Live or PSN after a certain amount of time. In SmackDown vs. Raw 2010<\/i>, which came out last October, for example, Stone Cold Steve Austin was a GameStop pre-order exclusive (notice a pattern?) for a while, but now he can be purchased for 80 Microsoft Points. The stupidity of having to pay for something that’s already on the disc<\/i> (or that could just as easily be included on the disc) aside, I do applaud THQ for at least making him available. Well, “applaud,” more like kick up dirt and say, “Gee, you guys shouldn’t have, really.”<\/p>\n What’s the purpose of this exclusive content stuff anyway? So GameStop can send a press release to Kotaku and JoyStiq and Techland a few days after a game’s release touting how many copies it sold? See, investors, people still buy their games from us! Yeah, of course, because you’re strong-arming publishers to incorporate extra content deals lest you devote precious shelf space to some other game<\/i> whose publisher played ball with us. (I have zero information to that effect, it’s just what it feels like.)<\/p>\n When I buy a game, I want to know that I’ve bought the game<\/i>. I don’t want to find out on CrunchGear of all places that I screwed up because I didn’t buy it at Store A, and thus lose out on armor or weapons or whatever the hell else. Why is this so hard to understand?<\/p>\n So you have a choice, gamers: participate in this charade<\/i> by genuflecting at the shrine of GameStop (and others), thus perpetuating the garbage of “exclusive” content, or take your money elsewhere. That’s the only way it’s going to stop, too: refusing to shop at these stores that offer “exclusive” content, which only serves to harm your fellow gamers.<\/p>\n To arms and so forth!<\/p>\n