Standing in EB games waiting to pick up my pre-order of PREY, I was watching a couple of guys bouncing back and forth between the PC wall and the XBox 360 wall of games. Like me, they were looking at new titles, and trying to decide what platform to buy a game on. Already planning to review PREY on the 360, my choice to purchase the 360 version was made, but for these two, there was a whole lot of debate going on. It seemed, from what I could overhear, that the PC they had access to was not quite as powerful as they would have liked, but still had enough juice to make the game look fairly good. The 360 version would look a bit better though. Of course, the PC mod community would likely put out some cool additions that the console crowd would not have access to. But…if you are into gamer points then the 360 version is the only place to collect those. Oh decisions, decisions, decisions.

In the end, they decided to go with the PC version. The item that tipped the scale in its favour as purely financial - that $10 difference between console titles and their identical PC counterparts. I have to confess, I am totally stumped on this issue, and can not for the life of my understand why there is this gap between the two. It is not as though it costs so much more to write to a DVD disc than it does to a couple of CDs, or that the plastic cases used in console boxes are somehow rare and therefore costly items. So what’s the deal here? Is the point that console gamers are simply willing to pay more money and so publishers are happy to milk us all for an extra $10?

When it comes right down to it, perhaps us 360 owners are getting a little extra for that $10, at least in the way Microsoft figures it. Maybe the math works something like this: The ability to collect gamer points and brag is worth an extra $3 at least. The gamepad’s great rumble feature is worth $2. The ability to play in front of your TV is certainly worth another $2, and the chair you can sit in saves your back even though it costs you another $1 for the game. The remaining $2 is easily justified by the fact that 360 owners benefit from LIVE’s instant online connectivity and the ability to voice chat with friends during matches hassle-free. Hell of a deal really… when you do math the Microsoft way.

So are we getting shafted, or are we still getting a good value for our dollar?

- Martin VanWoudenberg