Money can be exchanged for goods and services

Attention game industry, we already have a standard for which we can purchase items: money.  Let’s use it, shall we?

Obviously, we all know about Xbox Live Points, which inexplicably have a conversion rate of 80 points to every $1.  There’s just no reason to have such a stupid conversion rate except to slightly obscure the true price of downloadable items.

Nintendo/Wii Points are slightly better, but only because they have a sensible conversion rate of 100 points to every $1.  At least when you buy something there’s not a weird conversion that you have to pull off in your head to figure out how much it is.  Now we learn, however, that instead of just using the same pool of Nintendo points for DSi downloads, you will have to keep completely separate accounts for both.

Come on, Nintendo.  So now instead of just having a spare 200 or so points stranded in one account, we can now have two separate Nintendo accounts with stranded points.  Want to buy that NES virtual console game and have 200-300 points left in your Wii account and another 200-300 points in your DSi account?  Sorry, you’ll have to buy another 1000 points on your Wii account.

There’s a simple solution to this: use actual money.  Don’t make people convert their money into some stupid point system first.  Let us pay for the things we want as they come.  Amazingly, this is one of the few things that Sony got absolutely right from the start with their PSN store.  Downloads have real prices on them rather than prices in points, and you can purchase just the downloads you want rather than adding a pre-determined amount of credit to your account first.  Yeah, there is some weirdness around adding money to your PSN “wallet” or something along those lines, but at least you can just add the exact amount of your purchase to it if you want.

Is it really too much to ask to just let people see the actual prices of things, and pay the actual prices of things?  Why do we have to convert our real money into funny money in order to buy the items we want?  No brick and mortar store forces me to buy a gift card from them before I’m allowed to buy something, and online stores should be no different.