800lb industry gorilla Activision decided to continue their ongoing experiment to gauge just how gullible their customers are this week when it was announced that the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 “Stimulus Pack” would be retailing for 1200 Microsoft points ($15 in non-space buck currency). For those of you playing along at home who don’t do many online shooters (or who just don’t pay much attention), this is generally about $5 more than the average map pack’s pricepoint.

Announced by IW’s community manager Robert Bowling on Major Nelson’s weekly podcast, the March 30th DLC release (which enjoys a window of exclusivity on Xbox 360; the PSN version will be coming in late April) will feature 5 additional multiplayer maps. 3 of them (Bailout, Storm and Salvage) are brand new, while 2 (Crash and Overgrown) are “slightly reworked” versions of fan favorites from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Activision previously pushed CoD fans’ buttons by jacking the PC SKU’s price up, putting it on par with that of the console versions (something pretty much unheard of in the PC market), while simultaneously removing expected features like dedicated server support. Now it seems they’re planning to extend this grand experiment of consumer tolerance/stupidity into the realm of downloadable content as well, testing the threshold at which point fans throw up their hands and refuse to pay.

The saddest thing (in my eyes, at least) is that a fair number of fans, eager for more content and unwilling to be part of the “have-nots” will simply eat it up without realizing that they’re paying $5 more than what they paid for CoD4‘s Variety Map Pack while only getting one extra map. Come on, guys – at least throw in some new Spec-Op missions or something!

Oh, wait – why would Acti do that when they can simply charge more for a separate pack of those? Silly me! What was I thinking? Go back to rolling around in your piles of unpaid royalty cash, Bobby. Sorry to disturb you.

[Via: Major Nelson]