The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)
So practically he wants to create a SaaS model to eternally milk their user base. As much as I like the game devs working for rockstar, their management is an utterly horrendous bunch of scums and in a way I wish that GTA6 is one giant flop.
Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their “+” more attractive.
That’s what I do. I take some entertainment - not just video games - and rate it by how much fun it gave me over how many hours and at what price. 8 hours for €40 in an amusement park? Cheap thrill. A €70 AAA game that I throw in the corner after an hour? Not good. A €200 LEGO set that takes a lot of fun hours to build and inspires me to something else? Perfect entertainment!
Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games
It definitely should not. Gamers use it because there are a range of genres of game. JRPG's ala Monster Hunter and Disgaea are pretty much a 300 hour minimum. There is no way GTA ever produces something worth 300 hours of gameplay, the closest they've gotten is their Online versions which frankly, would be horrible if they were priced per hour.
Racing games would have very little merit in price per hour. Sports games probably in between.
Then there's the whole fact that pacing can be implemented at the whims of the creators. It takes 4 hours to get energy so you can continue? Well, that 4 hours of paid playtime baybee, payyup!
How about games with little to no story? Should the new CoD only be $25 because it's campaign sucks? It's short after all. Or will they try and include multiplayer time, you know, something independent and timeless. Will they become arcades and start charging you per round?
Horrible, horrible idea. No matter hour you look at it, hours per game are only good for gamers with specific intentions, be it their limited time, their desire to 100%, or to see if it simply respects their time in the first place.
Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It's very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.
It's yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don't need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.
And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It's very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.
It's layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can't tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.
well yup and thats what they want the games to be. a service. multiplayer diablo2 was much like an mmo but no servers needed. You could run the server and play with your friends or even open it up but everyone needed to have a copy of the game. so it has been done and they want to do it more and more.
While I’m super into self hosting instances, that usually defeats the point of MMOs. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that the publishers of MMOs often defeat the point of their game after long enough anyhow.
All that has generally pushed me towards round based games where the only advantages are my own personal skill.
Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that’s all people do. Here’s the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
“In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.”
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I’m sure will continue with 6. I’ll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I’m still a fan, but I’m not giving them another cent.
I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is “i’m going to pirate your next game” then you’re probably just pushing them further into a direction you don’t want them to go.
If you think that companies look at social media more than their own sales metrics, then Ive probably already sold you a bridge and have a loyalty program for you to sign up for, to get 15% off your next purchase
I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?
That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it’s no better value than any other story driven single player game.
gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it’s been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
we can complain about a lot, I’ll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst “very very competitive”.
Ah but see, that may only be due to GTA V actually having the development time and releasing as a single player game because Online wasn’t near being ready when the game launched. Now that Online is out and that’s where their focus has been, we will most likely see the base single player game quality suffer dramatically. Look at games like Call of Duty. They used to have phenomenal single player experiences, and now you’re lucky if you get something worth playing at all.
So I would point at rdr2. That came out long after gta v online made mountains of money. Large single-player experience. Online existed, didn’t detract.
Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
Yeah, and I bet they’re affordable. What Strauss is proposing is a massive increase in initial purchase price for those that aren’t paying subscriptions. $70 is borderline affordable for a lot of people as is and that will now be a higher entry price. I’m not in that boat, personally, but I can see how it would be detrimental to the gaming industry as a whole.
Then again, there is the flip side where people are now forced to choose the games they can afford that year even more carefully (1-2 vs 6-7 or more as an example) and if a game fails expectations and someone misses out on something else, then maybe it’ll start putting some shitty developers out of business.
They aren’t proposing increasing the price. Did you read the article or my initial comment about how people just read the bad headline and argue against it at all?
Of course I read the article. It specifically says, “… value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to…”
I’m beginning to wonder if you read the article. They want to charge off of one value and add it to an initial base value. If you think this idea has nothing to do with increasing profits then I have a bridge in the Sahara to sell you.
Nothing in that is about raising the price, the whole thing is about him showing off what great value the series is by their metrics.
Here’s where you say “of course it is! I’ve imagined that this leads to the next thing which is raised prices”. Cool, go make these comments on the thread about them raising prices, or proposing raising prices. That isn’t what is happening here.
That may be true for many, but I’m willing to bet most of those “hours” they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn’t included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don’t try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they’ll ignore after release, and don’t be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.
Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you’d spend 3 times as long trying to finish the same game, and now they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.
forbes.com
Aktywne