Will there be a demo on XBL?

Was in the beta and no way I'd pay $60 for the 360 version. It has some neat ideas as far as FPS's go, but I wanted SHADOWRUN - not Counterstrike with trolls & tech & magic. I'd recommend renting it before you buy it.

-Ray!!

Any difference in what's on each release to justify pricing the 360 version $10 more?

Which works better? The 360 or the PC do you guys think? Im a PC FPS guy... I liked GOW on the 360 but the controls were still hard for me to be really accurate on.

PAR

Well the PC is Vista only, not sure of how well it runs, heard some horror stories though. Beta for me was on the 360, looked good, not GoW good though. Still it ran well and was exceptable for a MP game.

This would make sense. By the way it is described it does not sound like you are getting $60 worth of content. They will not attract much of the Halo user base by charging the same amount of money for a lot less (no single player game or split screen support). What ever happened to the $50 price tag for games coming out of Microsoft's studios.

What's that stinging I feel?

It's Edwin rubbing salt into my wound.

I'll still play with you, 1dgaf, if it makes you feel better. I still have reasonably high hopes for the game, I'm just sad that Microsoft has screwed up the marketing and pricing for the game. This price has limited the audience severely.

Theres a fine line with a title like this.. if you marketed it and PR it like a AAA Flagship Cross Platform/Games for Windows revolutionary title you cant then really tag it with a budget title price.

It confuses the masses and you may end up losing more sales simply because people would go pfft? $30? must be crap.

I was in the Beta on the 360, and the $60 price tag is the death blow to this title, FASA and possibly the whole "cross platform" gaming vibe.

I'll go into some detail on why I think this:

Guru is correct in that you cannot try to call this a 1st party AAA title and not price it $50 minimum. So, MS is saddled with playing it up as a great new title, which it isn't. $60 will probably turn off a lot of console people, so sales on that side won't be that great. I'm betting that you'll see NPD numbers around 60K for the 1st full month of release, and they'll drop very quickly afterwards. Strike One

I keep seeing things about how PC gamers would play it, but they don't want to play against console folks. Sean Elliot from GFW has basically made that very statement. The controls on the PC side are being reported as "consolish" and sluggish. No PC gamer is really going to want to play this when they are used to a more responsive control scheme. There will be some curious individuals who purchase it, but sales will be lower on the PC than the console. Strike Two

FASA spend too much time and money developing too little. Yes, there's depth to the gameplay, but when you see it on the shelf or reviews, you're going to hear about 9 maps in what is basically a multiplayer only title. That's not enough maps, period. I'm hearing rumors and I agree that MS is going close FASA and reallocate the resources to other development houses. Strike Three

I'm also not quite certain that people actually want to play twitch based games against people on different platforms. In order to satisfy the expectations of the PC crowd, the controls have to very responsive, which makes it almost unplayable with a gamepad. You then have PC dominance over the console on the playing field. Flip that, and you've got disgruntled PC users because of the lack of responsiveness. You'd probably have a more balanced outcome, but fewer PC people would play it. Let's also take into consideration the fact that a successful PC title sells way fewer copies than a similarly labeled "successful" console title (except for the Sims ). There will always be more console people owning a cross-platform title. If you were to have a 2-3 million seller on the 360, you'd probably be lucky to get 500K on the PC. So, only 1/6 of your playerbase is going to be playing on 50% of the platforms supported, but the amount of work that goes into making it playable on both probably exceeds what such a small playing percentage warrants. I think less reflex-based games have a much greater potential as console-PC gaming ambassadors.

It's an idea that has a lot of potential, but it's been poorly managed, badly executed and burdened with expectations that should never have been placed on it. Throw in the general malaise about moving to Vista, which FASA can't control, and you've got the proverbial elephant in the room.

I was in the beta, and nothing about the game interested me in playing it for very long. So, there is no way I would purchase this title.

How many maps did Gears launch with?

Oh, I agree with that on a PC game. I was thinking about a situation where I want to play a console game with someone without having to buy the console. That's probably a much smaller market than Microsoft cares about, however.

8 hours is infinitely more singleplayer time than you'll enjoy in Shadowrun, unless training rounds count in your book.