Physical goods are a pain. They take too much time and money (and oil / carbon emissions) to move around, they require high-street retailers to stock them who skim ridiculously fat margins off the top (or rather from the middle upwards), meaning the creators don’t get anywhere near as much as they should for their product, and worst of all, you have to wait for them to arrive instead of being able to get them right now.
Yeah, I’m petulant because Rock Band hasn’t arrived yet (and yes, I know since it needs instruments the rant against physical goods is tangental, but I don’t care). It was dispatched a couple of days ago, but it’s most likely sitting in some warehouse right now waiting for someone to get off their arse and move it somewhere else. It’s a bank holiday on Monday too, so I won’t get it now until at least Tuesday, if I’m lucky. Sucks. I haven’t looked forward to a game this much in quite a while, so I just want it to arrive already so the fun can begin. I’m not quite desperate enough to go down to the high street and pick it up at the outrageous price HMV are asking for it though. Ok, more outrageous.
I see GAME reported problems fulfilling preorders so I guess I should just be glad I have a copy heading my way. I also saw a number of people responding to that story with disappointment - they wanted Rock Band to fail in Europe to send a message about inflated pricing. To be honest, I knew that was never going to happen - if you want Rock Band, you want it; you’re not going to sit around moping about the price while other people have a ton of fun. It was always going to be pricey, and with the Play discounted price (now almost matched by Amazon I see), it’s really not any more expensive than was originally envisaged. Sure, it’s still damn expensive, but we always get ripped off here in Europe, just look at how a $60 game in the USA becomes a £50 game in the UK when exchange rates are almost $2:£1. In that context Rock Band being $150 at Amazon.com and £140 at Amazon.co.uk (I got it a little cheaper from Play on discount) doesn’t seem quite so unusual, even if it does stretch the already tenuous argument. But Harmonix are right about one thing - you can’t get anything like this anywhere else right now (and personally I don’t think you will for a good while, unless GHWT really surprises me), and that’s why they can get away with it. Personally, if I have to be a little poorer to have a whale of a time with my friends & family then I’m happy to do it - I love social gaming. If that means I’m caving to corporate greed, so be it - I’d rather be happy than right 
May 24th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I hate to rub it in, but I’ve had Rock Band for a while. I can say for sure that you will be happy with it. There are so many horrible design choices they made (our drum pedal has broken 3 times, until now it is a mass of aluminum) that irk my friends and I constantly, but at the end of the day we still have a great time playing.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Hi,
Sorry to hear that it didn’t arrive today.
I was half tempted this afetrnoon to give you a ring to see if it had arrived so that I could pop around and have a quick sneak go befoe I go away. I’m sure it should be with you in a matter of days.
I noticed that they had them in HMV today - boy is the box big!
May 25th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Sorry to hear it hasn’t arrived mate.
To tide you over, here’s a website that tracks *all* the download content and includes youtube links to the expert note charts for all the instruments for every dlc song available. You can thus look them all over and see if you like the note chart for your particular instrument before you buy it. Enjoy and happy rocking out!
http://www.rockbandcontent.com/rbc/db/songs.php?rw=0&p=1
May 25th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
@Eric: great site, thanks! As expected the note charts all look lots of fun, compared to the ‘make it hard and thrashy for the sake of it’ charts of GH3. Unfortunately I’ve now mentally spent a whole bunch of extra money
Ah well, you can’t put a price on fun, right? 
May 26th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Yeah couldn’t agree more. I like the Rock Band guitar charts orders of magnitude more than the GH3 ones (GH3 hasn’t seen my 360’s drive in months, yet Rock Band is an almost permanent fixture there).
As to *having* to spend more money, you really have no choice. There are way too many fantastic download songs with great charts available for Rock Band. I’ve download a bunch already and religiously check every friday for the announcement of that week’s DLC and Tuesday for the videos of the actual note charts. Be thankful for one thing though, that Rock Band allows you to buy songs a la carte instead of the bullshit forced bundling that GH3 does. I haven’t bought a single GH3 song pack on principle thanks to the bundling, yet I’ve bought around 30 tracks in Rock Band and intend to continue buying new songs that I like as they continue to be released.
GH3 can fade into obscurity for all I care. I just don’t really find it that fun to be honest, especially compared to Rock Band or even GH1 & GH2.
May 26th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
It’s not just a European thing (maybe the Rock Band pricing is). In Canada we constantly get ripped off by our neighbours south of the border. For example, a 12 month Xbox Live gold subscription costs $44.99 in the US, but it costs $59.99 here in Canada. Our dollar is pretty much even with their dollar, so where does that $15 price hike come from? On a side note, I have Rock Band and can’t begin to explain how much fun it is at parties and with my kids. Happy rocking!
May 26th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Jon, I saw MS dude reply to this on XNA forums - he simply said they just don’t want to track/update prices on daily basis so you end up with 1 to 1.