Premium Themes: Are They Worth It?

Last night I realized that I was fed up with my premium Braid theme, and thus decided that it was time for a change. 

Looked through the XBL Marketplace I saw that there was a new premium Grand Theft Auto 4 theme and shelled out the €3 for it because it’s GTA 4 art so it can’t be bad, right? Wrong.

When the theme started downloading I noticed it was only 4mb in size which should have alerted me right then and there that I was in for an unpleasant surprise. Not only did the theme only one background it also only featured three friends backgrounds which were just pen and ink drawings of some of the The Lost and Damned characters. They didn’t even bother giving anything a nice shape, it’s just a bunch of square black and white drawings. I paid €3 for this?

After looking around on the internet I found a few forums where people post pictures of their new themes so other people can see in advance what they’re paying for. I found some pictures of the Crackdown theme and quickly replaced the GTA4 theme with the beautiful (and 10 points cheaper no less) Crackdown theme. This made me wonder: how many people buy these themes only to find out they look as horrible as the GTA4 theme?

What surprises me is that there is no way of seeing a preview of the themes on Xbox Live Marketplace so Microsoft expects all of us to just blindly purchase these themes and the new Premium themes also come at quite a hefty price compared to the pre-NXE themes, which were only 100 points or €1.20. The GTA 4 theme isn’t just more expensive than the robust Crackdown theme it’s also 25mb less. So where does Microsoft come up with the analogy that less content is worth more? Is there more value to be had in the name of such a franchise as GTA that we will overlook the cost? Apparently.

I’m pretty sure most of you have been miffed by a microtransaction like this before and I’m afraid theres not much we can do about it to make companies stop providing us with a product that unfortunately fails to deliver any form of value. What we can do though is spread the word about these practices, post pictures of these so called premium themes and other micro purchases online and tell people not to shell out for such a lame duck.

Also, for those interested the image above is a picture of that €3 piece of fool’s gold. Sorry for the quality I’m afraid I don’t have a capture card at the moment.