With the recent re-release of The Witcher as an enhanced pack, I’m left wondering what’s next on the horizon for publishing executives. While on one hand I love the idea that a developer is so willing to improve on the work they’ve done that they will retool and in some cases, reconstruct entirely, sections of their game in order to let it truly shine. But on the more cynical hand, I see this as a somewhat blatant attempt at an underhanded grab for cash – milking fans for more money (most aren’t going to settle for a free download) and picking up new pundits at a full release price (as they’re not going to be generally savvy enough to realise you can purchase the old and busted and get the upgrade for free).

Cynicism aside, what’s truly scary is what this could mean for the future of PC gaming. We’re already paying out the nose for everything from physical copies through to digital downloads (which is a nightmare for anyone living in a country that pays by the byte – like Australia *insert face-palm macro here*), not to mention the maintenance of our little beasties to appease the mighty Shader-gods… that the idea of paying for an improvement to a game we’ve already purchased sounds like, well, a console.

Publishers have already been caught out exploiting their “forced” pay for content on the XBox marketplace, so what’s to stop them from doing the same on the PC? Oblivion was bad enough and was only saved by a vast community ready to provide third-party addons derived using the tools shipped with the game. If a publisher wasn’t quite as willing to part with development tools, it’d be a different story. Give a game enough time, you can ship it out again with some modifications and charge full price again, damned be the second-hand market.

This is all “the sky is crashing down” conspiracy theory, but it does keep me up at night because there’s one thing that has always held true of the video game market: If they’re willing to buy it once, then there’s no reason not to charge them the same or more next time.