Thursday, September 24, 2009

Funny SE news

Wow... not sure how, but there is a lot of funny SE news today!.

RMT activities
First up, the obvious... Chocobo Chicks went on sale today. More details at http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/topics/special/090917.html and you can buy it fro the SE Online Store at http://ssl.square-enix-shop.com/usa/category.php?cat=9

The 3rd mini-expansion has a new trailer: Shantotto Ascension Trailer
Doesn't tell you much about it... expect more fetch quest, rare/ex drops again. Sadly, they did not include any information on what item you will be RMTing this time.

Interestingly, the trailer says that this will go on sale in October, but it also says that the expansion will go live with the next version update, which is scheduled for November... Another case of SE trying to get your money before delivering product.

Again, pure electronic product, no incentive to pre-order. Don't give SE your money before they earn it.

With the Tokyo Game Show currently going on, SE released yet another trailer for FFXIV... lots of FMV, which isn't really impressive as we've known that SE is good at CG and has been good for at least the last 10 years. No gameplay footage (or at least, I didn't notice anything) and the text overlay seems... generic... I don't feel any large story or plot behind what's going on here.

I'm... really... not sure what to say about this... The next big innovation is... BILLING! Forget gameplay, forget plot, having fun, cinematics, hardware, controls... the next big innovation is how the hell we are going to charge our customers money, money, money!

Considering how SE can't even stabilize their billing system for FFXI... I'd recommend that they first get the fundamentals of billing fixed before they talk about innovation. You know... credit card, charge credit card ONCE for the product purchased, once a month?

And yes... innovation in billing ~.~ So they want to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to get money from people... not to make interesting or compelling games. I guess XI is where they are being innovative, charging $9.99 per quest, charging another $9.99 for storage.

Who knows... maybe FFXIV will have micropayments! Can you imagine? $2.00 for a chocobo ride, $5.00 for airship? Telebots can charge $1.00 for a Teleport-Holla! RMT would love it!

I guess Microsoft is wasting their time with Project Natal. Billing is where the future of gaming is!

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