For Christmas I received Starcraft 2. In case you hadn't clued in, I run slightly behind the curve on the purchasing of games business. My disappointment is overwhelming. I haven't played it yet. I'll probably like it. But I opened the box, and found the following: sleeve with cd two guest passes for WOW two guest passes for SC2 Why does this disappoint me? Because prior to having spent ~3 hours installing the game (it took so long I'll play it tomorrow after work), I found my book & map that came with Baldur's Gate 2. Not collector's edition, or anything fancy. Just the normal damn version. A giant book, explains characters, classes, and all kinds of things of that sort. Now, if I want those things? I have to buy the collector's edition. Usually at around 1.5 times the price, if I buy it new. Currently, the SC2 collector's edition is $360 on Amazon, brand new, or ~$200 on Ebay. I'm officially a nostalgia gamer, and no longer part of the mainstream crowd. My biggest fear? That such gamers are nearly extinct. </rant>
This is done with printers, too. The company selling the printer (or the game) really, really wants you to spend as much money as possible on their newest and "best" product, and forces you to pay out the ass to continue using their older items (or get the most out of their older games). Example - I had an HP printer I bought in 2007, that could scan, copy, and send faxes. Buying ink was no problem up until around 2010 (i don't print things often), and I was told that series was a "relic," and the cartridges cost over 60 dollars. Coincidentally, the HP4400 I have now cost less than the ink I was going to buy for my old printer, and came with ink. I'm sure the cartridges for this printer put it in relic territory too, but it's all I need in a printer/scanner/copier at home. Hell, so was the one before it. This is something that can be extended to most branches of the market, I think. Cars, power tools, hand tools...pretty sure the list can keep going. We've always lived in an age of "NEW IS BETTER!"
I'm not sure if that analogy applies. DarkFool is upset because Starcraft 2 didn't come with a cool book. He wasn't forced to buy Starcraft 2 as a result of this absence. It also doesn't have anything to do with "New is Better" (which doesn't make sense, since SC2 still hasn't finished its full development cycle, and won't until they release the second expansion). The reason we don't get neato books with our games anymore is that the game developers aren't as "art-house" as they used to be. BG2 got to have a book because the company that made it had both the money and the will to produce it. Instead of paying a writer to make a 200 page manual, companies are now using that money to pay for the expanding number of employees required to make the games. I don't know if we've actually lost the amount of literature we think we have, though. It's true that we no longer get funny cases like the Zeus manual (which was written as a prose narrative), but those thick, useful, entertaining manuals weren't actually all that common. And a lot of the manuals that weren't filled with interesting fiction were simply integrated into help menus within the game. RPGs have gone in the direction of producing actual novels for their product. Civilization 4 and 5 both have 250 page manuals (and their physical copies are slightly thicker than Civ II's). What we're really missing out on is recipes. We'll never get those back.
