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.

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…

@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.

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!

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!

@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!

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.