How Much Are You Paying for Doom 3?

How much are you paying for Doom 3? $200? $300? $500? $1,000? Multi-thousands?

If you’re scratching your head wondering if I’ve lost my mind talking spending hundreds and thousands when the game only cost about fifty dollars, consider this:

If you have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for the purpose of playing one particular game, shouldn’t the true cost of the game include whatever it costs to make it work right?

And if you look at it that way, and ignore the hype and hysterics, doesn’t it put this game in a different light?

A Geek Pass-Rush

From all initial measurements, the hardware requirements to play Doom 3 reasonably well are high. You pretty much need a $300 video card to play with decent FPS headroom and without a lot of compromise. Northwood/Athlon XP systems are going to lag more than a bit.

These facts might encourage many to beef up their systems.

We don’t object to the “what” of the situation so much as to the “when.” Deliberately or not (probably not), the timing of Doom 3’s release will lead a lot of people to upgrade prematurely.

The marketing hype now blanketing this neck of the woods is like a pass rush in American football. The purpose of a pass rush is not so much to sack the quarterback, but to hurry him into throwing the ball before he ought to.

The effective result of Doom 3 marketing is to hurry you into buying before you really ought to.

If looking at Doom 3 makes you want a socket 939 system with the latest generation video card, that’s fine in the long run, but if you buy it four or five months from now, you’ll probably pay about $250 less for the combo than you will today, plus you won’t have compatibility worries about the AGP card you buy today working in future systems.

Effectively, if you buy now rather than buy later, at the least, you are effectively paying an extra $250 to play Doom for four or five months.

You can do a lot of other things with $250. Is renting Doom for four months worth that much?

Paying For Ad-Ware

Some have suggested, and more have thought, “Buy the game now, and make do with the current box.”

That may seem like a good idea on paper, but the best advertising is the advertising you don’t notice, and that’s what doing this effectively does for the hardware industry.

What effectively ends up happening a sizable chunk of the time is that people pay $50 for something that will make them sell themselves on spending a lot more.

For many that will take that approach, once that game gets its foot in the door, it is going to end up nagging them worse than any Girlfriend From Hell into spending more on it, with every missed frame and case of video choppiness.

If the game ends up unplayable on a box, how many people will then run out and spend hundreds of dollars so as not to “waste” the fifty dollars spent on the game?

What is even more amazing is that some will do this just so that will happen. I can understand why one might do so if somebody else is going to pay for the upgrade, but if that’s not the case, all such people are doing is playing head games with themselves for the benefit of some hardware companies.

Such sheep are effectively saying, “Let me pay you to give me supplemental nagging to break my will and wallet.” To me at least, that’s a girly-man move. How devolved.

It’s Not Going To Go Away

I mean, really, it’s not like this game is going to go away anytime soon. Given how long it took for 3 to come out, only a gross optimist would expect a Doom 4 to come out less than five years from now.

For many, it’s really a matter of will, as in, do you have any? In life, sometimes you have to say, “No” even when everyone around you is saying, “Yes,” and sometimes that will hurt a lot more than not playing a game for a few months.

But if you don’t develop the self-discipline to determine what’s in your best interest and stick to it for the little things, you won’t have them for the big things that really matter.

Speaking for myself, eventually I’ll end up with what will be an ideal Doom 3 system, but I decide when the timing is right. Not some corporation stimulating simulated peer pressure.

Think about it. Think a lot about it.

Ed