just like many a modern parent in this modern age i, look you see, have children what like all them Space Invaders type computer game things. these are, to be sure, all quite different from my era of such things, or if you like "when i were a lad".
back in the days when i played away on such superb machines as the Commodore 64 or the Sega one went to the shops, bought the tape or disc or cartridge of the game, and got on with with. yes, for clarification, my brother was all about the ZX Spectrum and Nintendo, so i have had exposure to them.
not so. these days one either gets a game "for free" (Fortnite) or pays a substantial, well north of £70 (FIFA 19) amount of cash for the game, gets a download rather than a nice disc or shiny box, and then is encouraged to throw even more and more money at the game for "download content" and what have you.
in a sense this is quite a clever (genius, maybe) way of selling you the same thing again and again. and again. just as the music and film industry like to resell you the same items again, promising "newly remastered" versions of things you have, sometimes paired with extras you have no need for, the games industry has clocked that you can easily get players (or the parents of) to fork out cash for stuff on a game what they have already bought.
but, as you can see in the above, they have got a bit cheeky. actually you may have to click on the image to make it bigger to see in the above. and yes, if you can see that all as it should be, between Amazon and Microsoft they are indeed - presumably with a smirk hidden behind a straight face - attempting to charge me £13.80 to procure £12 of whatever it is the boys spend on this Fortnite or FIFA business.
yes, indeed, i went off and did some research. i thought it would be interesting to see if this somewhere in the vicinity of 15% extra charge applied across the board. with respect to the £15 voucher, no it did not. fancy that.
what exactly do the boys spend this money on? i have tried to pay attention to it all as i have a genuine interest in both what they do and where my hard earned (well sort of hard earned) coins go, but a lot of it tends to fly over my head. from what i can work out, money spent on Fortnite lets you buy some costumes for your little computer fella on the game, and also lets you purchase dance moves. on that FIFA thing the money lets you buy a kind of "virtual card" that lets your players play better, or gives you players, or some other such thing of that nature.
now then, there's the peculiar part. like me you may have thought that you only get the face value of what you pay for higher amounts, but no. above it shows that if you give Amazon and Microsoft £10 you get a £10 credit or whatever it is called. so, for some reason it is only the value of £12 that Amazon and / or Microsoft have an issue or quarrel with, shoving some 15% on to the price to deal with it.
the abiding, overriding instinct is, of course, to tell someone or other to f*** right off with this approach to pricing. indeed, this would be because i only needed £12 to secure or otherwise procure whatever it was the boys wanted, but to get correct value i either had to spend £15 or 2 lots of £10 and then have extra. a problem is that i have no idea if this peculiar pricing on the £12 is down to Microsoft or Amazon, or both of them. as i would not wish to swear at the innocent party (if there is one) by accident, i suppose i shall have to refrain from such a course and simply write all about it here.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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