Harmonix's Rob Kay Comments by Ellie Gibson

Les showing his fanboy-colors. Good stuff. Busy day for the ignore button today, lalala~

I'll just repeat my tuppence in an attempt to get the comment number on here as high as possible -

What a load of tosh blah blah I'm outraged etc.


By the way, with pricing, guys, GH2/3 solus are still 50 pounds in the shops - so I don't grudge them that.

I just grudge the audacity of not selling the two together. It's borderline offensive.

So, it is agreed we don't like the price. So don't buy it.

If nobody buys it, they have to drop the price. Simple.

Do you need to buy it on day 1?

Nope..

Wait, and ye shall be rewarded...

I wonder how much it's going to cost in Australia? We get raped the most when it comes to game prices. Doesn't matter though, I won't be buying it.

I guess Australians will have to wait for a release date first and foremost. With a bit of luck there will be the usual delays and maybe, just maybe, there was already a price cut when it finally arrives in Australia. Not much consolation though.

what a load of crap, the UK "exclusive" tracks are being released in the US, so they aren't a "unique" experience as he comments.

The cost is just outrageous, and no "look at VAT its 17.5% dont you know?" will wash that isn't £100 pound more.

And then we have the issue of it being a TIMED release, so not only has the vast majority of the buying public waited nearly a year longer than everyone else, unless they go buy an XBOX 360, which is roughly the same price as Rock band incidentally, they have to wait another HALF A YEAR to play, and if its a PS3 you own its bound to cost more as usual.

Dont even get me started on the further delays on top of this for Australia (its not included in the Europe release date).

DONT BUY THIS GAME, they are taking the piss and it has to stop.

EA finally caved in on the Bad Company DLC issue after extreme pressure, the same applies here, vote with your wallets and dont buy this.

I don't see why everyone's making such a fuss about this. Hardly anyone is going to buy Rock Band at its current price in Europe. it'll be the next Steel Battalion.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a pricecut for the game/instruments or they introduce the US bundle in Europe within a couple of months of release. Then maybe I'll consider buying it.

_We also wanted to make sure the hardware gave people choices. Something we weren't able to do for the US launch was let people choose how they buy and experience the game._

Finally, the price of choice is releaved. It's a 100% markup.

It is possible, at play.com, to get this for £127 in the UK - we should be careful to include this in any debate about the price. As yet no-one is having to pay £180 to actually buy it - although Game has put prices for everything but the intruments up and they are RRP.

i read somewhere that rock band may not get an australian release at all...

something to do with shops just not willing to take in a game at that price because they know it wont sell...

... just goes to show then that the extra £100 may not be due to retail, as Rob Kay suggested...

There's no way the extra £100 is due to retail anyway. Why would Game want to sell Rock Band at £180, when they could sell a Wii/360 at the same price and get future game sales too? Retailers aren't stupid enough to think that this'll sell at this price, and as a result I wouldn't be surprised to see it not available in stores, for all the space it'll take up just sitting there with no interest.

Of course, when that happens EA/MTV will just assume that it's because no one's interested in the genre and not bother releasing this kind of game here ever again.

All pressing buttons when the telly tells you to games are for wankers.

@ "Les showing his fanboy-colors."

&

"i agree w/Les. teh 360 is NOTHING cumpared to teh ps3 and teh cel. les, will you b my frend? 2getha we can spred the word of sony!!!!!1"

Jumping to (the wrong) conclusions is usually reserved to fanboys and idiots. If you two had actually read the thread, you’d know that my ‘lol’ at “super-powerful” regards both 360 and PS3. But that will then probably make me a Wii fanboy in the ignorant eyes of the likes of you…

What he actually means is:

"I actually feel like it's well worth their investment. I'm going to sit here and say thanks for all the money."

Disappointing interview, basically it was all about dodging the subject and stating that whoever doesn't understand how lucky you are cause you're only paying 240 Eur for it it's just a sad guy that is never contented with anything.

F**k Harmonix.

I imported it 2 months ago. Its guitar hero with an MB Games Simon strapped to it and sub standard singstar.
1 day of playthrough and its not been touched since. The whole thing feels really cheap and plasticy.

I imagine its like drugs - you'll never get the high of GH back, your habit gets more expensive and less satisfying, until you are just buying it because its there.

Just my opinion but I was really excited about it and well - its crap. I wanted to sell it, but I was made to bring it into the office where everyone got really excited for an hour and then it was left in the corner to be replaced by COD4. The drums make a low quality novelty hat stand, so its not all bad.

There is a moment about 2 hours in when you just go

'What the fuck am I doing - I'm a grown man surrounded by hundreds of pounds wourth of cheap tacky plastic, singing along to some crap song surrounded by other losers banging on a plastic pot like an autistic chimp and a dick with something the size of a childs ukelele 'thrashing' five brightly coloured buttons'

My daughter is 1 and she does the same thing at nursery with pans. I can tell you now, this is not how I imagined my life panning out when I was a bright eyed 16 year old.

I am a fucking dick and I deserve to be bummed by EA for desiring this white elephant enough to piss my daughter inheritance up the wall on this shit.

I am a fuckwit. No two ways about it.

YEAH!!!

fuck that shit!!

Blacklodge, maybe you could garner some entertainment from it by smashing your instruments up during an all out freestyle BIG ROCK ending?! Raaawr!!

Yeah, stick it to the man and Fisher Price!

Blacklodge - Excellent and very funny food for thought there, thanks.

No offence to the guy because he’s been given the impossible task of trying to put a brave face on yet another video game related disaster, but as always with these things, most of the answers involve sidestepping the questions. To say that at that price you will get an experience which can’t be found anywhere else is simply not true, because I found that exact same experience two weeks ago in Times Square and it cost me £85.

The US sales tax was around £7.
For anyone mentioning how VAT is already included in UK prices and to keep that in mind when comparing, this is how much extra you’ll pay on Rock Band in an American shop. The exact figure at the counter was $215, and I bought Rock Band ($170) and Professor Layton ($30), so not that it was, but even if the entire $15 tax was due to Rock Band, that’s only £7.50 extra added onto the price. That’s still miles off the UK price for Rock Band, which is a ridiculous amount of money for the exact same thing the Americans got months ago. The game is the same, the songs are the same, the peripherals are the same, the ‘experience’ is the same; nothing’s changed, therefore it should be marginally more expensive and no more. There is absolutely zero justification for whacking an extra £95 onto the price. Besides, £85 is what it obviously costs to sell the item and still make a profit on it, so charging £180 for it is daylight robbery.

And to mention how they’re offering consumers a choice is again not the issue. The Americans are getting a choice too; you can buy the game for $60 (£30), the drum kit for $80 (£40), and the entire thing, game and all, for $170 (£85). So to say that Europeans have the choice to buy just the game, or just the drum kit, is something US customers have already been able to do this whole time, except that it cost them a whole lot less.

“Or, if they want the full-on Rock Band experience, they can buy the instrument bundle. The combined price, if you add all that up and decide you want that full experience, is quite high. It's not something that is normal in videogames. But Rock Band isn't normal in videogames. This is an entirely new thing. What other game comes with three peripherals that are all different?”

…em, the American version of Rock Band does. It comes with three peripherals that are all different. And it costs half the price!

'weve been insulted and lied to, now we just want to know where exactly the remaining £80 or so'

why does everyone get so mardy about this? its just business. I really want this game, but as its expensive i'll just wait till it eventually gets cheaper, or not buy it, or save up. no point ranting about it like we're all hugely influential marketing execs, because none of us know bugger all about why its so expensive.

One more EA email address: lmarchant@ea.com is apparently in charge of Rock Band PR. My email to that address:

I saw your address listed as PR contact for Rock Band - if you're not the right person to be contacting regarding this, then please accept my apologies, and I would appreciate it if you could forward the mail to the appropriate person or let me know their contact details.

I'm writing concerning the recently released pricing scheme for the UK and European release of Rock Band. I'm sure you're already aware of the general public response to this - the price, at £180 for the game and full set of instruments, is seen as unacceptably high when compared against the US price of $170 for the same goods.

First let me say this: nobody is expecting a direct dollar-to-pound conversion. The majority of European gamers are fairly well educated on these matters and accept that there will always be a markup over the US price to reflect VAT, higher import duties and general higher retail costs on this side of the Atlantic. These points were, I understand, raised by Rob Kay of Harmonix at a recent press event.

However, it's very hard for us to accept the *level* of the price increase on Rock Band. A quick comparison of RRPs of console gaming hardware and software shows that the vast majority costs between 20% and 50% more in the UK than the US. This represents the 'myriad of small differences' that Mr Kay referred to, along with the fact that a variable level of VAT is part of the RRP in Europe and not in the US. This represents the sort of price that European gamers are willing to pay (or at the very least accustomed to paying). There are some outliers - normally on the low side, with the XBox 360 being only 12% more expensive in the UK than the US, for example - but the median seems to be around 40%. Rock Band, however, is marked up over the US price by almost 110%.

While I understand that there are additional expenses incurred selling in Europe, the fact of the matter is that your RRP for Rock Band represents a mark up that is more than double the percentage mark up on equivalent goods from other companies - and given the higher price of the product, it's an even larger increase in terms of the actual amount. I'm sure you can see that without an explanation of why Rock Band in particular should incur over double the extra costs when compared to other gaming products it's very difficult for a European gamer to accept this. If your pricing were in line with the more expensive end of other games, the UK RRP would be closer to £130.

Without a compelling explanation of why Rock Band is different to other products in this respect, there are two conclusions that it is easy to jump to.

1) This is just a money-grab by EA - upping the price for Europe solely based on a belief that people will be willing to pay it, not on any increased value provided.

2) This is an attempt to use the European market to pay for the costs incurred by warranty replacements in the US market.

Neither of these is acceptable to consumers.

I've been looking forward to playing Rock Band for a long time now. I considered importing it, but decided against it partly because I wanted to support the European release. But although I can comfortably afford to buy it, I will not be doing so. To accept the pricing structure you've set out would be to implicitly accept that EA have good cause to charge European gamers so much more than the rest of the world, and to encourage such unreasonable pricing in the future, and I can not with good conscience do so. Until the pricing issue is addressed, either by a substantial price cut to fall in line with other products or by a convincing explanation of why Rock Band is unique among gaming products in requiring such a high markup then I will not be buying the game. I will also be encouraging others not to buy, and attempting to spread the word through gaming publications and message boards and consumer affairs publications and programmes.

Make no mistake, this is a PR disaster. Nobody will be happy with the pricing, and it will cause much dissatisfaction with EA, particularly given your reluctance to date to make any official statement regarding the pricing. With the delays that we frequently see on game releases and the generally higher pricing there is already a feeling among European gamers that we are treated as second rate citizens by the industry. This extreme example of both (particularly for PS3 and Wii gamers) will only reinforce that impression about EA in particular. I hope that you will be able to do the right thing and avoid that.

Regards,

iapetus

A little birdie tell sme Woolies are expecting to shift RB for around £130

great letter iapetus, i know it wont do any good, but its great that someone can make a convincing and intelligent argument and politely eloquently put in words how we all feel...

i really hope your e-mail reaches the right person, and they at least read it...

->iapetus: Very well written letter. I hope you get some sort of non-stock response, because you sure as hell deserve it. I might also suggests posting it on the rock band/EA forums or something, just to increase the visibility. In any case if you do get a decent response, make sure to forward it on to destructoid/kotaku/joystiq etc.

I've already posted the letter in a couple of places, and my current plan is to send one a day until I receive a satisfactory response or run out of EA addresses. :P This one's the second, so I've got a few addresses to go yet...

nice one iapetus, keep us posted

Yeah, very well written and I agree with you on every single point. Keep it up dude.

Is this the right version? Play have it for 100 quid.

http://www.play.com/Games/Xbox360/4-/539...

OK. nice guy tries to talk things pretty... but STILL NO SALE!!!

A friend of mine (who's gonna buy the game no matter what the price...) already joked about "people have to pay admission" to play Rock Band in my house...

I'M SO ANGRY!!!!!!!

Rob Kay, and everyone at Harmonix , EA, and MTV can suck my balls before I'll buy this game at that price.

Buy it or don't buy it. Who cares. It will come down in price anyway.

It least nobody here is rioting for food.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo...

No, you can complain. But lots of people here are easily overstepping the line with their abuse. Calling somebody a cunt? That's not really complaining is it? As they would say on Monty Python, "Stop it, its getting silly". And overblown out of all proportion.

500 sensible, well constructed comments will have more weight than 250 comments with several containing heavy personal abuse.

I have nothing more to add, but to +1 the postcount.

Fuck this shit.

Play have the game solus for 40 quid. I have two GH guitars already and apparently I can use my XBL headset for vocals - this means all I'm missing out on is the drumkit, which I may buy later if I feel it's worth it.

In one way they've answered my prayers: I never thought that I'd have the option of buying the game without having to buy yet another guitar controller. On the other hand the price of the hardware is way too much.

Maybe at some point we'll see third parties offering the peripherals (Such as the drumkit) at a reasonable price?

Greg over at Harmonix has commented on the pricing.

While I don't think he's fully addressed the issue it's nice to see someone trying in an official capacity. Might be nicer if that were someone from EA, but I guess they're still hiding behind the developer.

Could we be realistic here for a moment and stop comparing post VAT UK RRP with pre sales tax discounted US prices? Rock Band is £130 ish on Play, and about £75 equivalent on amazon.com. Im not entirely sure how much the tax is in the states, but lets say it bumps it up to about £85. So we are realistically paying £45 more than the US. Now go and google UK/US salary comparisons and notice how much more you earn in US dollars than your American counterpart in the same job (assuming you actually work, and are not relying on parents to pay for this stuff). In my case I earn about $13,000 more than if I were working in the states, same job. The UK is expensive, but factor in the global economy, cost of living, salaries etc, and we are not paying double, allright?

If you choose to buy anything at UK RRP you are a complete moron.

Entwistle: I keep seeing that kind of argument, but it still doesn't address the fact that Rock Band is so much more expensive in the UK than the US when compared to other gaming products, or when compared to the typical markup associated with gaming products.

Nobody's asking for it to be sold at £85. That's just silly talk. However, by just about every sane comparison, the RRP should be around £130.

Iapetus,

I see what you are saying mate, and I think you are right, the RRP should be lower.

Given the US RRP is 2.4x the usual RRP of a game, yet over here it is 3.6x, it does seem unbalanced.

I just think that once all factors are taken into account, we arent paying much more than our American counterparts. No-one should settle to pay for RRP, ever. It just winds me up when people fly of the handle and blame all and sundry for what they deem a rip-off, without actually considering all the factors involved.

Cheers

Edit: If the RRP was £130, thus we could buy it for £100, it would soften the inevitable blow of buying DLC! Shame it will never happen....

We're not paying that much more than the US, agreed. While they're pretty arguments to throw around to make a point, the fact that we pay twice as much for Rock Band in the UK as the US or that the UK price for Rock Band could get you a full Rock Band bundle and the console to play it on in the US are misleading.

But again, by every measure I try to apply the same thing comes through - to be comparable relative to the rest of the market to the US price, the Rock Band game should be included in the price of the instrument pack in the UK. That one simple move changes it from way beyond the pricing of other titles to merely at the high end of the scale. I'm not asking for an £85 Special Edition bundle. Well, okay, I am, if EA is listening, but I have no expectation of getting one. :P A £130 bundle, though, seems reasonable. And sure, we'd probably see smaller discounts on it from retailers, and that's fine.

I suppose it comes down to the usual thing, talk of boycotts is all well and good, but I for one, want to have some fun outside of work, and games are awesome escapism. I will look at my payslip, curse and swear over how much dissapears in tax/NI etc, then precede to spunk the remainder on video games and beer. No matter the cost :).

So yes, my flatmates and I will wile away hours playing plastic guitars and drums, ignoring the £10k of real musicial instruments we own!!

Iapetus, I assume you are gonna pick it up, so I hope you enjoy it, maybe see (hear) you on live!

Never mind the price, how big is the fucking box it comes in?

You'll hear me on Live if the price drops substantially. I can't buy it before then - not because I can't afford it, but because buying it sends a message to EA that it's acceptable for them to rip us off in this way without any valid explanation.

Meanwhile I'll also stick to the far-too-many real guitars, basses and microphones lying around my house. (Don't have the drum kit - no space for it and the neighbours might complain given how terrible I am on the drums...)

Sorry if this has already been said a hundred times, 250ish posts are a lost.

"Rob Kay: I can't talk to the explicit pricing - how it gets split down between retailers and distributors and the whole chain - because I don't actually know that much about it."

OK, fair enough no-one really expects him to know that, but then can they get someone who actually does know to explain it? Surely that's possible.

Definitely not buying and I will talk all my friends not to buy this game until it's around 40-50% cheaper.