The Value of Things

When a buddy asked me recently how much I would pay for an upgraded Boston track pack for Rock Band 3 my answer was something like, “If they made me pay anything at all, I’d be incredibly pissed.”

This led to a short discussion about whether or not it was okay for Harmonix to charge you for songs you’d already bought, considering they would have to rework the song with the new RB3 stuff. Which is a topic they have yet to really address.

The issue here is that old Rock Band and Rock Band 2 DLC will continue to work with Rock Band 3, but won’t have any of the RB3-exclusive features such as keyboard charts, harmonies or pro difficulty. I’m actually fine with this. It makes total sense, and I’m just happy my umpteen-hundred dollars of existing music isn’t going to evaporate. Conversely, new DLC released after RB3‘s ship date isn’t going to function in the old games. Hilariously, I’m fine with this as well! RB3 songs have a lot of extra features, and the game is much more than just the slight overall upgrade RB2 was. For all we know music tracks are no longer even in the same format. Round peg, square hole.

The question is, will Harmonix go back and re-work any of the old DLC to take advantage of the new features? I have tons of songs that would be a blast on keyboards or with multiple vocalists, and I’m sure the ScoreHero crowd is just salivating to see who can be first to score 100% at Green Grass on Pro Expert Guitar.

But this Boston pack, now. I already bought that. Money spent, content received. I don’t think I should have to buy it again.

I mean, I understand that, if they ever do re-work it, I will probably have to. Indeed, there’s simply no way they’re going to sink the required time and energy into it without some kind of compensation. The influx of new players who didn’t get the pack the first time around may or may not cover it. I don’t know. Even if it does, it would just be irresponsible business not to leap at the chance to double-dip.

The conflict here is the real vs. perceived value of a Rock Band song. A single song is usually 160 Microsoft Funbux, which is $2 in real people money. Now, one way to look at this transaction is, when you buy a $2 song for Rock Band, you are buying the following:

• the audio of the song itself,
• the ability to download it as many times as you want in the future,
• the visuals and animation associated with the song,
• eight guitar tracks (four difficulties each for lead and bass),
• four drum tracks, and
• four vocal threshholds.

This sounds like a good value on the surface, but most players won’t ever see all of these features. I only play one difficulty on each instrument, for example, and very rarely at all on drums. In essence, I paid for a bunch of charts that I never actually use. What a rip-off!

It’s not really a rip-off. I mean, I don’t look at it like that. When I pay $2 for a Rock Band song, I look at it as though I am buying this:

• the ability to play the song in Rock Band.

When viewed from that angle, $2 is a totally fair price even if you never play anything but medium guitar.

And that’s the heart of the dilemma. If the second viewpoint is right, I shouldn’t have to pay for track upgrades because I’ve already paid for them. I wanted The Song, I gave them $2, they gave me The Song. The Song is still going to work in RB3 with or without the new features, so holding those new features hostage from me when they’re readily available seems like a form of extortion.

But if the former viewpoint is correct, and each individual chart, note and minute of programming is worth a fraction of your $2… then Harmonix owes me money, because I’ve never used up the full $2 worth of any track I’ve ever bought from them. How about I sit down with one of their accountants, and let’s figure it all out. I use four of the sixteen available charts from each Boston song, so they already owe me a $x.xx refund… which I will happily apply to the expected balance of the four or five new charts I’ll use in the future on keyboards and what-have-you. Hell, I’ll even throw in a tip.

So the issue is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface. Maybe the best solution is to just leave the old tracks alone and focus on getting us new material. Yeah, it kinda sucks that we’ll never be able to do that entire Queen track pack with three vocalists, but it’s not like there aren’t another thousand songs out there waiting to be sung.