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The march of technology is supposed to make things better for consumers, but these days it seems videogame makers strive to find new ways to take more of our money and give us less in return.

We are not communists here at Game|Life. We want publishers to make financially prudent decisions so they can continue to deliver games that fuel our addictions. But some bone-headed business moves benefit everyone except us.

Here are the 10 worst offenders:

Originally from Wired.com

10. Xbox 360’s Expensive Memory

xboxmemWant a bigger PlayStation 3 hard drive? Buy an off-the-shelf laptop drive and slap that baby in. Need more room for all the WiiWare games you’ve downloaded? Hot-swap a generic SD card. Running out of space on your Xbox 360 hard drive? Bend over. The biggest hard disk you can buy for Xbox 360 is the 120-GB model, and it costs a whopping $140. For purposes of comparison, that’s the MSRP of Western Digital’s terabyte drive. Need 512 MB of portable memory for your Xbox? Only $40, which would buy an 8-GB SD card.

9. DRM and Piracy

Digital rights management schemes, which limit the ways we can play legitimate copies of games, are annoying. But piracy is worse. If you think it’s a victimless crime, consider the case of publisher Stardock. It releases its games without DRM, as a sign of courtesy and respect to its customers. But the ambitious online mode of its recent PC game Demigod has been plagued with problems, partly because even though only 18,000 people bought the game, 120,000 people have been logging in and playing. Stardock has spent a lot of extra time and money supporting these freeloaders, and that sucks. But what really sucks is that the pirates are mucking up the performance for those who bought the game legitimately. Dear 100,000 people who pirated Demigod: You are jackasses.

8. GameStop-Exclusive Powers

gigawattbladesIn Sony’s inFamous, Cole McGrath learns electric superpowers by frying enemies. Except for the Gigawatt Blades power, which he learns by you paying money to GameStop.

Giving out plastic tchotchkes in return for putting down a reservation fee on an upcoming game is a nice touch, but working out a sweetheart deal with a retailer to hold back in-game abilities unless a player hands over five bucks ahead of time is downright sketchy. Not to mention the fact that if you miss the preorder deal, it’s impossible to unlock the content at any time thereafter. GameStop gets more preorders, Sony gets advertising sponsorship and the rest of us get a gimped game.

7. Old Game, New Price

We can argue all day about whether paying $8 for a Super Nintendo game download is worth it, but at least that’s the highest any game publisher charges for 16-bit relics anymore. Except for Square Enix, which took the 1995 game Chrono Trigger, slapped it onto a Nintendo DS cartridge with only the barest of extra features, then charged $40 for it — 10 bucks more than a standard DS game. Icing on the cake: Complaining about the game’s sales, as if it’s consumers’ fault for having the audacity to spot a raw deal.

6. PSP Go

pspgo_handAren’t game machines supposed to get cheaper over time? Sony’s new PSP is microsized in every way except the price: $250, an $80 premium over the current model. The only advantage is the smaller form factor, and we doubt that the smaller screen counts as a gameplay plus. Otherwise, the Go’s features are downgraded over the original PSP’s — no disc drive, no swappable battery pack (and no upgrade to the expected battery life to counteract either of those).

So why is the price the same as when the unit launched in 2005? Sony says it’s because retailers are taking a bigger cut off the top, since they won’t be making money on sales of game discs. No matter who is to blame, consumers lose with PSP Go’s price. With any luck, the accompanying shift to downloadable sales will make the PSP’s software catalog cheaper than retail, but we’re not holding our breaths on that, considering …

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