Mmm, merchandise!January 8th, 2008 by Suzie
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Ever fancied a replica keyblade? Or even some replica materia? Really? WHY?!
Video games have always been used to sell us crap we don’t need. Just like movies. Seems like you can’t turn around from a good game without finding a flood of shoddy plastic action figures or lame photoshopped posters screaming Buy! Buy! Buy! I’m now going to name and shame some of the ones that personally piss me off. Do you disagree? Can you not live without your daily supply of sonic-flavored cola? Let me know in the comments!
1. The afore mentioned replica materia
Materia, of course, is the chunks of magic rock you pick up in Final Fantasy 7 that let you cast spells. The spells are cool - who wouldn’t want to be able to summon a giant flame breathing dragon to deal with whatever enemy crosses their path? Unfortunately, this materia doesn’t do that. No, this materia is a some sort of giant marble on a stand. Whoopie.
In its favor, it was created by a genuine fan as opposed to some official merchandising line. It’s quite pretty. It’s just completely useless.
2. Gamer Fuel
Erm, what?
Okay, so I don’t drink Mountain Dew - the stuff scares the living crap out of me. Even if I did, really, what the fuck? A caffeinated, sugary foul tasting beverage makes you cool, calm and collected? Um, yeah, okay. For those of you that may have missed the memo, focus is good. Hyperactivity and twitchy muscles are bad.
You can also get Sonic Cola, or used to be able to. Mmm, hedgehog. Who knew that video games and drinks had so much in common?
3. Being Aerith
Alright, I’ve always secretly wanted to cosplay. However, some outfits are kind of cool. Leather trench coats? Awesome sharp-edged suits? Sign me up. But - a pink, button up dress with a red jacket? Giant boots? Ribbons? You’re just asking for someone to come along with a replica masamune.
4. Lara Croft Lifesize Stands
You know those huge cardboard models they stick in game stores to advertise new releases? You can buy those. And, I don’t know, turn your house into a game store?
5. World of Warcraft calender.
Strategy guides? Yes. Novels? Sure, why not. Posters? Just about. Calenders? Cash-in.
6. ‘Collectors Edition’ or Box Sets
Buy a game you already have. So you get some extra crap that will probably be on ebay in about four minutes. Nice one.
7. The WWE Smack Down Cruiserweight Championship Belt
It’s big and gold. What else can you say?
8. Plushies
Whether it’s Link or Sonic you too can now have a small, badly stitched fuzzball of your very own.
9. Movie spin-offs
They are never good. Never. Seen Doom? Horrible. Seen Resident Evil? Worse. Seen Advent Children? What a mess of a movie. Guess what? There’s a WoW movie coming out. Afraid? Yeah, me too.
10. Virtual Gold
Finally, the biggest rip-off of them all. Buying in-game currency with real money. Now you can exchange your real money - money that could be donated to charity, or used to buy something useful - for fake money. Fake money that can be picked up anywhere. Just by playing the game. Don’t want to play the game? Don’t buy the money! The game doesn’t get any better after you’ve bought your epic mount, okay?
And there it is - my trawl through the assorted crappy merchandise that tries to lure us in and spend spend spend. So the question now is, what was the stupidest thing you ever bought? For me, I signed up to a subscription to Sonic magazine, solely for the Knuckles poster that came with it. Was it worth it? Sadly, no.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Overdone Aerith cosplay is so 2003. Now it’s all about the overdone Yuna cosplay.
I don’t think these things are intrinsically kitschy or derivative, though. Well, except gamer fuel. It’s noteworthy that most of these goods are usually bought and sold within tight fan communities by fans… it’s hard to really place them into some “evil capitalist teenage girl who likes making plushies” paradigm.
I don’t have any merchandise really, but I remember I have an ex who did and some of it was kinda cool. She even made me a Tonberry plushie and it was pretty adorable. Beats a mix tape or whatever.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Actually, I rather like the WoW collector’s editions. I am rather fancying a WolK collector’s edition. The art book is really appealing and the “nifty” value is pretty high.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
You missed my favourite type of gaming merchandise and that is original soudtracks. Most of the OSTs I have bought for games I have been satisfied with.
January 9th, 2008 at 8:22 am
And after all that, I still can’t get a cuddly Big Daddy…
I’m not a big fan of the fact that half of most games stores are now taken up with merchandise and tshirts rather than games themselves. As Peter said however, a lot of the games releated merchandise are cute and crafty things made by fans. A lot of those are unique and well made, and funding individual craft games fans rather than corporations - I don’t disagree with that at all. I guess it’s only a matter of time before the law suits start flying though…
January 9th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
@Peter Tweig - Well, obsessive fandom about any game borders on the insane. Aside from the Materia, which I included mainly because it boggles my mind, most of these are sold by the corporations. If you make your own plushies, more kudos to you. But consider the amount of stuffed Pokemon, or whatever. There is plenty of official capitalist crap pushed by the corporations. And the people that are selling the display stands are rarely fans… but shady in-betweeners looking to make a buck from the fans. In the UK, at least, the stores will give those stand-ups away for free - so someone is taking them and then selling them on for a profit. Sounds capitalist to me
@vlion - I like art books (and soundtracks). But I would much much rather buy the artbook separately. Throwing it in with the game etc. is just an excuse to charge you more for something you already have. The only excuse would be if you don’t own WoW yet, or you downloaded it or something. And ‘exclusives’ are a crock, if they can sell it as a package they should sell it separate.
@Daniel Primed - I love OSTs. So I didn’t include them :3 I own a lot, and I agree, they rock.
@Hazel - ah! A cuddly Big Daddy. Now there’s an opportunity
I don’t have a problem with fanmade stuff as gifts or portfolio pieces or whatever… love doujinshi, fanart etc. But the replica swords aren’t made by fans, they’re made by sword-makers/corporations. Licensed plushies are the same, and probably sewn together in China etc. And yeah, gamestores should sell games, rather than being a kind of ‘geek-toy’ store.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
You mean you aren’t looking forward to the new Street Fighter movie?
/sarcasm
January 9th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
This is an awesome entry!
I’ve definitely fallen prey to video game merchandising before. The collector in me can’t resist action figures. I try to avoid the shoddy plastic ones, though. Most of mine are pretty well-made and come from reputable companies such as NECA.
I thought Gamer Fuel was disgusting. My roommate bought a pack of it along with Halo 3 on the day it came out. I took one sip of the stuff and that was it for me. Yuck!
January 10th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Don’t quite agree with 6… it depends on the package really. If a game comes out that seems really cool and has a decent collector’s edition, I tend to buy those (instead of the normal edition, not along with the normal edition, that’s just wasting money). Them CEs for Guild Wars, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 were particularly good.
Unfortunately it seems these kinds of Collector’s Editions are the odd ones out nowadays and more and more CEs like Call of Duty 2’s appear in stores. I mean… a slightly different design of the same standard DVD casing and a bonus DVD with maybe 2 hours worth of material? No, that’s not a Collector’s Edition… that’s a rip-off!
January 11th, 2008 at 8:23 am
@Tim - Whaddya mean? It’s going to be the greatest movie ever made!
@Alyssa - Action figures are something a lot of my friends buy. I admit it - I don’t understand the appeal. They just seem to be a waste of space! But to each their own… and I suppose you can always sell them for a fortune later
@Droniac - Agreed. 9 times out of 10 the CE is just the same product with slightly different packaging. I can understand buying the CE of something you didn’t own - buying the Warcraft Battlechest if you didn’t own any of the Warcraft games, for example. But mostly it just seems to be rabid fans with too much money snapping up these extra copies for those self same ‘exclusive’ artworks… that will be on the web and on ebay so fast!
January 14th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I got the WoW collector’s edition when it first came out and regret nothing - yay sleepy panda cub and adorable mini-diablo! Oh, and I’ve gotten a couple fan-made Portal items which I adore.
Any Mountain Dew spinoff is bound to be awful, though. Even my die-hard Dew-drinking husband couldn’t finish even one bottle of the Halo-branded stuff. Although we were kind of expecting it, having experienced horrid gut rot from Mountain Dew Code Black (which I think was supposed to be grape, but tasted more like Evil Incarnate) served at a Warcraft III LAN party a couple years previous.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Sure the stuff is silly but its fun. We got my friends fiance that keyblade for her birthday and she loved it! Plus it made for many great pictures =P .
As far as collectors editions, I still regret to this day not buying the first collector edition when WoW came out. I had one in my hands but was tight on money at the time so I bought the regular edition. Now I will never have my beloved Zergling. I did buy the burning crusade collectors edition and am very happy with the purchase.
I’ve rarely ever bought virtual gold, but I did pay two months of rent from selling gold in Ultima Online several years ago! People were crazy in that game about collecting rare items to display on their characters and in their house. When they opened up server transfers I found out that on the Asian servers they had a special cloak given to all the characters there that for them wasn’t rare. On the American servers though this cloak doesn’t exist. Lets just say after paying around $40 to tranfer a character to an Asian server and then back to an American server, I turned 500k gold into 30 million gold. Back then 1 million gold sold for around $20. Fun time making money in a day.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Oh and so far all movie spin-offs have been horrible. I was at Blizzcon when they announced the WoW movie idea. I just hope they actually put the money into it that it needs to become a good movie. “fingures crossed that it wont suck”
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Actually, I collect video game plushies, even though I don’t need them (Got Mario, Luigi, Wario, Goomba, Knuckles, a crapload of Pokemon, and Yoshi)(Got a Starman, which I actually made myself). You can thank China for the cuddly critters being badly stitched.