I should have seen it coming. Lumines Live! has evidently been posted to the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1200 Microsoft Points (the purchasing kind).

The economists and pricing experts within Microsoft have gotten together to post one of the highest prices for an Xbox Live Arcade game. This pricing comes in opposition to the free games of Poker and TotemBall. Rich, Jeff, and the HotSpot crew bandied about speculation as to what the pricing gurus were up to with free offerings, but this is some other twisted experiment. The only problem is this isn't an experiment.

I would like to look down my nose at a $15 Lumines price, but I have already paid a significantly higher price for that tempting game. Last year I bought a PSP and Lumines solely for the Lumines experience. That means I paid $300.00 just to play Lumines. Granted, I was hoping to amortize the hardware experience over time and across multiple titles, but time has told me I bought it solely for Lumines.

Economists (whether they work for Microsoft or not) call the most money you are willing to spend for a good or service a reservation price. My reservation price for Lumines was definitely more than $15 for the first psychadelic experience. The question being asked now is whether I value Lumines with points and pop music extensibility for more than $14.99. The short answer is no. My marketplace valuations have been significantly more conservative than my retail purchases.

If Q Entertainment, Microsoft, or even Ubisoft were to publish Lumines Live! on a disk, I would happily pay $15. However, a tenuous download stored upon my 360 HDD is not worth the current asking price. What is it about packaging Lumines as a stand-alone game that makes the cost so much more tolerable? Since I don't read instruction manuals and I have too many cases in the house as it is, the packaging is not enticing. The added value comes in the form of the disc. I want to free up the scarce real estate on the HDD and have it on a disc from which to run the game. Microsoft has bundled XBLA titles before. Doing so with Lumines Live! just might be a tantalizing option in the future.

As of this writing Xbox Live is still not up, so I can't test whether the reservation price is below or above the $15 threshhold. If my current measure of temptation is any indicator, I believe my price is well below Microsoft's price. So, what is that price?

Proabably somewhere around $7.50.