Finally my wait is almost over! The EU release date of Rock Band has been revealed! From here this post is not pleased.

Firstly: the release date - 23 May 2008. The US release was on 20 November 2007, which is 6 months earlier. Well done there for getting the game out in a timely fashion.

Secondly: the price - in the US, the full package including drums, mic and guitar costs ~$170. In the UK they are not releasing a full pack, but are releasing an instrument pack seperately to the game. To buy both costs £180 (£50 game, £130 instruments), ~$360.

The best metric I have seen of this so far is in the Rock Band forum where somebody said this:

In the US, Rock Band costs around 50% of the price of a Premium 360. In the UK, if this pricing is accurate? Closer to 90%

To be good and take off VAT we still roll up with £148.50, ~$300. Not as bad, but still a significant rise. While this is personally annoying, as I don't really want to drop close to £200 on a computer game, it does strike me as rather foolish and insulting.

Foolish as it prices all but the hardcore Rock Band fans (which includes myself - I will probably buy the pricy package when it comes out) out, which includes precluding the non-hardcore buying any downloadable content. There have been various articles examining whether DLC is the pure profit hog that it seems to be to me, so it could well be that the estimates of DLC profit have been balanced by the big price hike (you know you're in trouble when the number of pounds for your product is greater than the number of dollars).

Insulting as it points out again that in the eyes of a large publisher like EA the UK and the rest of Europe are not anywhere near as much of a concern as the North American market. We have a very late release with no communication from the publisher followed by an unexplained price hike that slaps the chunk of those who have been making all the free advertising noise who can now not afford the game.

Yes, I know it's just a game. Yes, I know that the vast majority of the gaming market are now more casual gamers that don't really care about or follow the gaming industry. Yes, I know that in the grand scale of things this is nothing. However, it still pisses me off rather a lot.

It's an interesting thing to analyse though. The series started with Guitar Hero coming in at about £50 - only about £10-£15 more than a game on its own. Guitar Hero 2 was fixed about the same point, with the XBox 360 coming in at £60 due to its games having a higher price point. Guitar Hero 3 started out at £70 on the PS3 and XBox 360 and £60 on the PS2 and Wii, with the price evening out to £60 over christmas. All through this the game was pushed as affordable and Guitar Hero 3 added the DLC, priced at a level where the more casual gamers would happily pick up new content and drop some cash in the publishers bank accounts (although much more in the US due to the less favourable Microsoft points exchange rate to pounds rather than dollars). So far it has been squarely aimed at a wide swathe of the market, based on the pricing of hardware/software bundles and also the downloadable content. It sold to the hardcore gaming market as well (who then went on to dominate the online scoreboards), but the majority of players were definitely the normal people who like to play a few games for fun. After GH2 the development team put together a "contractual obligation" followup (the expansion pack-like "Rock The 80s") and then moved to EA, leaving the license behind. Activion had Neversoft knock up GH3 and Harmonix quietly toiled away at EA, crafting Rock Band. It's at this point that it seems that EA have stepped in and got things (in my opinion) wrong. Rather than positioning Rock Band in the same area as Guitar Hero has been, with casual gamers served as well as the hardcore, they've pushed into a rather mixed market. The initial outlay is now high (even in the US, although not as high as the EU announcement) and the continuing content is cheaper than that for Guitar Hero. So, they probably aren't going to attract as huge a crowd over from Guitar Hero (especially on the PS3 due to the peripheral incompatibilities) and as such won't sell as much of their reasonably priced DLC - a weird mix of selling a game to the hardcore, but tailoring the in-game sales to the casual gamer.

One group who I think may not be too happy about this are the retailers - a £180 package is not going to fly off their shelves. I had a chat with the manager at a branch of Game a few months back and he recommended that I preorder just because they wouldn't have space to store many copies, which is another concern. Although it could be a contributing factor to the high EU price if Activision worked with the retailers to set the price - not many units storeable, so a higher price point?

While writing this rant Play.com have added the game and peripherals kit to their site, at £40 and £100 respectively, undercutting the overall price by a good £40, and dropping it down to the level that most people were expecting the game to debut at. As yet there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a response by other retailers, with only the game being up for preorder, with no sign of the peripherals. Outside of the theory that Play have either made a mistake or are making very little on the sales, there is the slightly more conspiracy theory-like idea that maybe Activision has worked with the retailers to deliberately set the prices so that they can all compete against each other with seemingly deep discounts. I suspect that Play's lessening of exposure to VAT combined with their normal discounts have got together to give the reasonable price, but the reaction of the other players will tell.

I suspect that someone somewhere at EA has done projections and found that profit on projected sales + attached DLC sales for the £180 price point will at least equal that for a lower one and as such business-wise it makes perfect sense to go for the higher price point. However it isn't sensible on a goodwill front. EA are already hated amongst a good proportion of the hardcore gaming community and there hasn't been that much surprise at either an increase in price (although the size of the price increase has been a shock) or a delay (although, again, six months has been a bit more than normal) and this just adds to the continuing tales of EA not looking after their customers. However, now that the market has become a wide open casual playground (which I have often ranted about. Executive summary: 'I used to be special because I played computer games. Now the normal people do and I'm not as unique as I was. WAAAH! I want my geek heaven back!'. Not the best of arguments and used *mainly* in jest...) how much does a company like EA care about the hardcore gamer? The market segment for the frothing internet fanboy grows smaller by the day and is increasingly one that they can ignore with relative impunity, as the major games media falls slowly into their pocket. They are a business though, so when I stick my corporate slave hat on I can see where they are going and agree, but when I sit in front of my telly with controller in hand it pains me.

Time for me to get down to Game and change my preorder now that Play.com have my credit card details...for now.