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!
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.
While I’m not entirely inclined to disagree, I doubt his idea of how much an hour of gaming should cost your average player aligns very well with mine.
What he is doing sounds reasonable on the surface but it's a rhetorical trick.
This is about getting players in forever live services to keep paying forever even if the game is not adding anything more to make it worth it. There is a hint of merit of paying for a game that you enjoy a lot but don't forget how today games are endlessly padded out with grind and daily missions to keep players coming back out of habit, delaying access to what they really want to get, rather than because they are enjoying it. Nevermind that these tactics are also what gets people impatient and buying Shark Cards, for instance. It's why the freemium model became so commonly used. He wants to profit in the mean time too.
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.
That was before they started diarrhea shitting themselves since the founders left. GTA Trilogy, GTA+, and removing cars people paid for in Online is just a taste of things to come.
Yeah, they left and the change was IMMEDIATE. Holy moly the shit show that was RDO. If you were playing that game back then, you could see the crumbling of the company happening in real time, it was wild. RDO being left to rot is my Roman empire, and I wonder if the founders feel regret at all with how their creation was treated by the company they left. Or if they just dry their tears with hundos these days?
Heck, I don’t even feel like RDR2 lived up to it’s full potential before they left, what with post-game being the most buggy and unfinished-feeling part of the whole game. It felt like it was just waiting for DLC content to be added, since it was a huge patch of map with hardly anything going on. Sigh, who knows.
It’s Rockstar Games, they love microtransactions and Sharkcards and will more than likely implement more greed tactics into their next big game (GTA 6). I’m still pissed off over the bilking they did with the bunker series in GTA 5. They’re a ruthless, greedy company. And don’t forget those times they went after those fanboys/talented game designers who were revamping their old games like GTA 4. Those kids were super talented and Rockstar busted their asses like the mobsters they are. Fuck Rockstar and their next GTA greed fest.
I’ve often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it’s very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.
This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous ‘story’
I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don’t want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn’t always the case.
It is debatable, but would you pay 70$ for a 2-hours game and another 10x70$ for DLCs and expansions that would extend the original content?
But this also doesn’t mean that you should feel your game with generic content in order to make it longer either. It is a fine line but I know that I would have a real problem justifying 70€ for 2 hours of game content without replayability, even if the game is amazing.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price
This is exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It’s half the length of The Last of Us 2
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 ;)
If that cost goes above $1/hr I’ll probably just not buy. That’s my base cost I’ll accept for paying for a game. If I’ve gotten $1/hr I find that I’ve gotten my moneys worth
Nobody is saying that you should be paying minimum $1/hr, I’m saying that if I’m getting less playtime than equates to $1/hr I haven’t gotten my moneys worth and I don’t find that the game would be worth buying.
forbes.com
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