40 Days #37: Treat the Xbox Live Marketplace more like a retail store and have sale events

On one hand I really like the convenience of digital content delivery through the Xbox Live Marketplace. A few button presses, and you have a new game available to play.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of Cheap Ass Gamer - a site that revolves around finding deals, steals, and all sorts of discounts. People discuss weekly retailer ads, post coupons, point to online sales and discounts, and generally talk about combining all these resources to make sure you get great deals on games. It's a fun "game" to play in real life, and the site has saved me a ton of money over the years. In fact, I hardly ever buy any game at its full retail price without at least getting some sort of freebie incentive. However, that habit hits a brick wall when it comes to purchasing content on the Marketplace.

You see, Microsoft's online store hardly ever really has any "deals" per se. Sure, last August they had a two-day sale on a few Arcade games, but that hasn't happened since then. In December they created permanent price drops for several games by launching the Arcade Hits program (an Arcade equivalent of the Platinum Hits line for full games), but nothing new has been added to that roster in months.

Since digital delivery is the way of the future (and it is), gamers need to be able to take advantage of the sort of promotions that retail stores are commonly offering. I am not talking about a weekly list of deals like the big chain stores, but why not monthly sales that drop the price of some content for a few days? It could even be on a regular "scheduled" basis: say, every last week of the month some content will go on sale, and gamers can look forward to it.

There could be "Capcom days", "Oblivion days", "puzzle days" or any other way to bundle together a few pieces of content and discount them. All Oblivion content 20% off perhaps? Or how about a "buy 2 games, get one free", even if it is from a specific list of games. Something, anything, Bueller? Sony's PlayStation store not only provides a much more flexible pricing scheme for games to begin with, but the company has also been holding sales like this more regularly.

After all, Xbox Live constantly has some sort of community events, free Gold weekends, and so forth, so couldn't some discounts be tied into them, and perhaps be "brought to you by" whichever company is sponsoring the event?

We are getting to a point where a number of XBLA games are actually getting sequels (e.g. Mutant Storm, Assault Heroes), so why aren't the original releases any cheaper? Surely the value of those games must have actually dropped, despite their digital delivery method.

Same thing with some of the promotional themes and gamerpics that tie into things like movies - the movie itself can be old news, perhaps even already be available to download from the Marketplace, yet the themes still cost as much as they did initially. The mind boggles.

And I am not even saying anything about other areas of the Marketplace that need sales and bundles desperately. Old TV shows on sale? Buy a whole season of a show as a bundle, save 20%? Nothing happening in the video store either.

Whose fault is this anyway? Does Microsoft not want to "complicate" things too much for simple-minded consumers? Do the content creators not want to re-negotiate lower prices, even though it could lead to another spike in sales? A combination of both, or just greed all around?

If digital distribution is to be taken seriously, buyers need to be able to see value in the content being offered, and that is really hard to do when you are looking at a bunch of obsolete bits that first came out a year or more ago, yet still cost the same today.