Doug

A lot of you who keep saying, "Activision will make money regardless of who makes Call Of Duty, blah blah blah ..."

You're forgetting that buzz/word-of-mouth/Metacritic scores are what have made IW's COD games popular ... and what gets the masses you speak for buying a game.

When that positive domino effect starts tipping the other direction, no, you won't see Call Of Duty selling any more than any other lackluster FPS shooter franchise.

The only question is, how many releases will it take for this to happen. 2-3? 1?

The slant the Joystiq blogger gave to this story is so confusing.

Green Day has a presence on the Rock Band Store already. The dedicated game is 45+ songs on top of that. Where is the controversy ... oh, wait. There isn't any!

Why the drama-queen spin on every Joystiq article ... don't get it.

"...to every sucker out there who paid $15 dollars for something that should have costed (sic) $10 dollars."

@The Alex

Learn some grammar, if you want to land a job that pays you enough to even buy $10 DLC maps. The word you were looking for in your piss poor rant was cost.

You're right. The price dropped because game prices drop. And this is a game, even though it has the Beatles in it.

The idea that this game deserves to evaluated differently than another game, because it's the Beatles, is stupid. The fanboys on this site drank a whole lot of kool-aid when this game was released at $60. It's not even worth $30 to me.

And when it gets to $20, I'd still probably buy the Hendrix DLC album instead.

The Beatles just isn't compelling as a rock band game.

@Quan

I would tend to agree with you. Only, they do play MW2 every night--they're WOW religious about it. So, my fault for having dedicated friends. It's the only reason I have the game is to get together with them--I prefer BC2 myself--so it was either sell MW2 last week, or pony up.

I am with the outrage here, but not directed at gamers who find themselves stuck in these veiled MMO-style charges. No one wants to pay $15 for maps.

I wish Joystiq could be less smug about its coverage, but that would be like asking Activision to lower the price.

"We can now confirm that there are at least 2.5 million idiots in the world."

Wrong.

IW put the DLC maps into the general TDM rotation, which means you are forced to have the maps--if you want to stay in a party of friends who have the maps.

My friends bought the maps, for their own reasons. I play MW2 to party up, so I had to buy the maps. It's lame--of course--but blame IW for forcing players' hands, not the players for wanting to keep together with their friends.

If IW kept the maps in a segregated DLC playlist--like they said--then we wouldn't be stuck getting kicked out of maps at the last second--a little trick IW picked up from Treyarch and WaW.

Get your facts straight.

If these 45 songs were such a cut above and the game was so amazing, you have to ask yourself why did the price drop from $60 in the first place?

That was my earlier point. Everyone went on and on about how great this game was, but the market dropped it like a rock pretty quickly. You can get special ed. bundles for half off the $250 asking price. The game is $20 used now. It's probably very nice, but a limited experience, even with the Beatles love it brings.

The early years of 3-chord songs do feel like filler to me. They might be fun to harmonize to, but aren't anything special to play. Just because it's the Beatles doesn't make it unicorns flying out of your fingers for 5 straight hours.

When this game came out there were lots of people on here saying, you have to buy the $60 game, it's so awesome, and also you have to buy all the $20 DLC albums so they'd make more DLC. Now that the new-hype has passed, the 45 song tracklist seems to be half a game, and $30 is getting there for a new purchase.

I keep reading these boring, politically-spoken interviews with the Xbox staff. Game Informer had one recently. Same drill here.

The guy's smug answer that we don't need more space does not convince me. How about those of us still on 20gb drives, who won't pay half the price of a console to get 100 more gb, where to get 40 more gb doesn't even seem worth it for $70.

It's stupid and they know it, but they keep saying, "We're pretty happy with our strategy right now, thank you very much."

Excellent article.

It's nice to see a writer take the time--painstakingly so, in this case--and show why Lexus keeps itself from being taken seriously in the sport class.

Thanks for the great writing, the fine detail and yet it was very fun to read.