It has become obviously apparent that I, like many other gamers out there, have a ridiculous admiration for Activision’s and Harmonix’s music puzzle titles. Upon hearing that Rock Band was set to be launched in May in Europe and the UK, I jumped for joy in sheer excitement and my anticipation skyrocketed. Needless to say, I was so super-psyched that I wrote an article for CeX as fast as I could to get the information out to my fellow gamers; but at that point I was not aware of the price tag that would be slapped on to the bundle. Sure I took a guess and surprisingly, or should I say, unfortunately, I was correct.

After doing some research in retail shops and online stores, this is what I have found so far: the Rock Band – Band in a Box bundle on Game.co.uk is retailing at £129.99. On Play.com the bundle's price is set at £99.99, but guess what - this Band in a Box comes with EVERYTHING BAR THE ACTUAL GAME! More brilliant news comes from the fact that I’ve not seen a single store / website price with the actual software at anything less than £39.99. So let us do some maths here: an average person who would like to purchase Rock Band in-store would have to fork out £170 for everything. This is so outrageous and caused such a public outcry that the guy who runs product development in Harmonix actually posted a statement on their forum boards which tried to appease and explain the price tag.

Before I go into a little bit of detail with regards to their reasoning and logic, let me also throw another point into the mix. I am by no means a rich man, but I am willing to fork out the money to purchase the bundle. What strikes fear into my heart is two-fold: problem one is the inability to insure the products, which are essentially guaranteed to break. Problem two is after throwing away so much money, you are still forced to pay for downloadable content; and with Harmonix promising 70 songs for available download, that is potentially another £110 to acquire the entire song list.

Moving back on track, their reasoning with the high price comes from their claims that shipment is so expensive that it requires them to set the Europe/UK price tag much higher than in the USA (where, by the way, the entire bundle goes for roughly $170). With regards to not packaging the software with the hardware, their logic is that the instruments are manufactured in China, while the software is made in Europe. Therefore, if both were packaged together, they would have to be opened and manuals for each country would need to be inserted, etc. I cannot actually be bothered to type anymore with regards to this topic because I find it appalling. We’ve seen countless games throw in a manual with more than 1 language already inserted - why can’t they just make a multilingual manual for all of Europe, which is a simple answer to their problem ?

In my opinion, it is illogical and too expensive; and after reading my own article, I am probably going to wait for a rumoured price cut which is in speculation. Perhaps it will happen sometime after launch ?

I.K.
CeX Towers

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