Dance Central DLC to cost more than Rock Band's, Harmonix explains why

* "We figure if your willing to buy Kinect at its entry price, your stupid enough to pay more for DLC. Besides you know how many geeks drop dead testing this? Funeral arrangements for the families are costly."

* Not an actual quote from a harmonix employee

I'm okay with this.

This sounds reasonable enough. Especially since the work involved is obviously a little more complicated than simply filling out gem charts.

lmao @ Shagittarius...more true than you probably know

The only victim here will be the poor chap that masters this game & hits the club only to embarrass himself in-front of the ladies.

I smell $5 songs...

dancing makes me feel inadequate

I want Rick Astley's hit song, "Never Gonna Give you up."

This is one of those situations where I think a price increase on DLC is justified. They do have to come up with a new routine ... even though I think it's kind of a silly game I don't have a problem with the price of per track dlc going up.

Will also cost the player a chunk of his/her dignity..

The price increase is justified for sure, but whether it is appealing is another question

WAIT WAIT WAIT! Something isn't right here...

As a choreographer myself, i understand and appreciate paying them to create the routine and mo-cap the moves. HOWEVER, I played this game at E3 and all the game is doing is linking (and repeating) canned moves, usually in one or two counts of 8, that can be (and was) used across nearly all the songs.

I can see the INITIAL expense of choreographing the moves and mo-capping them. But once they've amassed a library of dance moves, it'll be very easy to just link them together in different orders without paying a choreographer. Honestly, there's only so many dance moves you can do standing up in a confined living room space. They can also use pre-recorded voice overs from previous songs that said "Break it Down" or whatever. Heck they did all this way back with "Yourself Fitness!" game.

Other than that, "find the song, license the song...,integrate the animation, build the filter system, the flash cards..." should take the same effort as charting a song in Rock Band with all the different instruments, separating out the tracks, animating the band according to the song, etc.

So personally I don't think the price hike is justified FOR THE REASONS THEY STATE. I think they are just trying to insure similar profits for a game that won't have as much demand as Rock Band. If they said that, I wouldn't blame them and would totally understand that. But not for the weak excuse they made in this statement.

It's a really fun game though and I'm looking forward to owning it!

$150 for Kinect, $60 for Dance Central, and more than $2 a song for DLC? Hell, I think $2 for songs is too expensive for music games as it is, especially given that I buy these music games for $20-$30 a while after they come out and for the 80 songs I get we're looking at far less than $2 a song.

I'd be okay with $2 a song for Dance Central, but this pretty much seals the deal on me never buying DLC for this game. Harmonix, MTV, and EA make WAY too much money off Rock Band DLC as it is. They're not getting any more of my money for overpriced Dance Central DLC. I don't care how you justify it. If you sell enough copies, you more than make up for the production costs. That's common sense.

Not a good idea. To the end consumer, a song is a song. The music is what they're paying for, not the choreography (even though both are the case).

I say they are just testing the waters for the pricing of the Rock Band 3 DLC. Expect them to say "RB3 DLC will cost more than the usual $2, because it's soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo--------> much more work to chart all the tracks for Pro Mode".

Soooo, my bet is that we'll be seeing $4 per song, since it's not only the standard five difficulty settings, but the five pro sets as well. Who's in with me?

game looks fun cant wait and if i like a song ill buy it dont really care about the price