If they release this for free on the PC then Bethesda will have some 'splaining to do.

BethSoft won't be giving away their mods for free for the PC. Of course, if THEY can do it, so can the gaming community...

$2.50 for what I would barely take the time to download for free on the PC seems a little on the pricey side.

I'm not really debating anything, merely voicing my displeasure in the way Microsoft and Bethseda are using the Marketplace. If all I would stand to benefit from the purchase of this download is a horse that looks better, I'm not interested. I'll hold off for more enticing Oblivion downloads. I doubt Microsoft will care. They've garnered the benefit of my many retail and XBL Arcade purchases since November of last year, and will continue to do so in the future. Though I tend to be fairly free with my Microsoft Points, I'm trying to speak with what purchasing power I have and state that I won't spend $2.50 on a meaningless (to me) download.

Sigh. I was hoping that someone else would bring this up, but two weeks after the game's launch is months after the content in the game had to be finalized. Everyone (that is, not just people here) is screaming the same thing: why wasn't it already in the game? Well, because you have to stop adding content to the shipping disc some time, or else it will never ship. Yeah, they were clearly working on this content before the game shipped, but most likely it was because the art teams had very little work to do while the programmers and testers worked on performance optimization and bug squashing.

As for the price point, well, it does seem a a bit high. $2.50 for a cosmetic change?

Well, maybe. People did have to put their time into making it, after all, and they are trying to run a business. Maybe 100 funny money points would have been more appropriate, but I'm guessing they are just trying to figure out what an appropriate price point for this sort of thing will be. I'm thinking that we will probably be seeing something like the following as a pricing schedule for Oblivion content:

200 points ($2.50) for fun little cosmetic additions like this and potentially future armor and weapon additions.

400 points ($5.00) for minor quest additions making use of existing art properties.

800 points ($10.00) for major quest additions that bring significant art additions with them (such as a chunk of Elswyr, Valenwood, Morrowind, Skyrim, or Hammerfell)

Really, though, it's $2.50. Yeah, you can get similar additions free from the community for the PC version, but I can't, and neither can a lot of other poeple. The fact that they are devoting development time to adding such fun things at what is really not an unreasonable price and making it available to their console users strikes me as kind of cool, and I want to see more of it in the future.

They won't; it will be paid content for the PC.

...and I'm sure they will, now that Bethesda is putting the framework in place for such a thing. There is something to be said for getting art assets that are designed by the same team as the main product, though, since it promotes continuity and consistency in the design.

And then there is this. As much as it pains me to say, though, I think that this will be the exception rather than the rule going forward. Why?

1. The system for purchasing content on the 360 is worlds more robust than what was on the original Xbox. Honestly, this is probably a large part of why such things were given away free to begin with. If the system for payment is confusing and not standardized, your content adoption rate is going to be painfully low, so you might as well just give it away. On the other hand, make it simple, easy, consistent, and familiar as Microsoft has done on the 360 and people aren't even going to bat an eye at droping 100 or 200 funny money points for that minor cosmetic change, map, or character model that they hardly would have picked of for free before.

2. As I said before, content production is a business. Sure, they are using the crack dealer's business model (first hit is free, then once people like the idea start charging for it) but the simple fact is that developers want to find ways to make money off these endeavors. When first trying to peak interest, they use the concept of downloadable content as a way of marketing the original product. Now that we the consumers are more familiar with it, they will start using the original product to market the downloads, and make oodles of money in the process.

They said in many interviews before launch that the first available download would be horse armor, so it was never intended to be in the shipped game. That said, I don't particularly find horse armor all that useful since there's no combat on horseback! But with that said, it would be cool to see the armor on the horses, but I can't see myself paying for it. Once modders see how they did it, it won't be long before someone releases their own custom horse armor textures.

Quite often for you, it seems.

Seems like every time Im riding across the countryside and I run into a creature or bandit, its my horse they want to kill. I couldnt say why. The horse doesnt have a sweet knife just itching to dig into spinal cord, the horse doesnt have brutal spells to unleash, the horse wouldnt drag the bandit's corpse into a degrading position on the road for all to see... but still it wants to kill the horse. As I've leveled up, thats become a lot more dangerous and I have to go looking for where the horse ran off to, but nothing has managed to kill it yet.

*edit* I am a retard and missed a few relevant posts

I somehow managed to completely skip that second paragraph. It would appear I'm a filthy skimmer.

That said, I'm still not spending 200 points on it. I don't even ride my horse anymore. Kick me once, shame on you. Kick me twice, shame on me.

Kick me three times and I capture your soul with my glass dagger.

Who would spend 2 bucks for something that they would undoubtedly be able to find online for free? And here I'm referring to the release of the horse armor for the PC version.

Saying this, I realize that I spent 10 bucks to get a collectors edition of the game simply for a pocketbook guide that has content that I can easily find online for free.

But the shiny coin!!!

Ah, who am I kidding? I'm a consumer whore.

I agree that $2.50 is simply too much for simply a new armor skin. I mean, an entire expansion might cost around $30, and I would expect hours of content and new features, skins and weapons included. $2.50 for just a horse skin is too much.

Honestly, yes $2.50 is not much, one can just skip a meal at McD's or something. What I am most concerned about is that they are now setting a precedent. If for something this trivial it cost this much, how much are the bigger mods going to be? How much will they charge us if/when they release the 3dstudio Max importer/exporter for the game?
I really don't like this trend at all. I hope that Beth Soft will do the right thing, not the greedy thing

Looking into the future, if and when fallout 3 gets released, are they going to start charging us for every quest that we do? Or to unlock more area to continue in the story line you must pay to get the content? Oh gosh I really hope that I am just being a pessimistic jerk right now, and that I am just taking a way too negative view on things.

Vote with your money. This is definitely an experiment for them.

Remember that for now this isn't coming out for PC modders to release. Bethesda hasn't released the 3D modeling plugin needed for the SDK.