If it was a dollar an hour, then GTAV would be $1208…
But of course, TV AFKing took up a solid chunk of this time… because of forced waiting periods. Sooooo combine a pay-to-play per hour model and forced waiting periods then you’ve got MTX “Shark cards” with extra annoying steps.
I’ve put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let’s use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I’ve played each of them for about 2,000 hours…that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let’s be generous! Let’s count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that’s at 10% off. I’ve bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let’s try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That’s about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I’ll take it!
Granted, since most games don’t hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren’t going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I’m willing to occasionally pay these days.
I’m all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!
You want us to subsidize all of the microtransactions and equivalent online bullshit to turn on your money machine. Strip all that horseshit away, give us good single player ONLY and you’ll be doing just fine.
“CROSSING GUARD, WEARING SOLID GOLD HEAD-TO-TOE ARMOR, SAYS CROSSING GUARDS AGENT BEING PAID ENOUGH TO DO THEIR CRITICAL WORK!”
“Zelnick is admitting that even though maybe this should be the case, that because of the nature of the market, there simply cannot be a pricing model like that, and the move to $70 recently is sort of the maximum they can hope for.”
There absolutely can be a market like that. We’re in a digital utopia where we don’t actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn’t charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just “own” it.
But I suspect most of his stats show that there’s a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn’t even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn’t want to say goodbye to that money.
I don’t want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?
Goes further back than that. In the late 90s early 2000s basically all 3 of the MMOs on the market were subscription models (Ultima, Everquest, and Warcraft are the ones that spring to my mind). Essentially a pay per time scheme where if you were playing the game you paid for it monthly.
This guy is just so far down the modern game industry rabbit hole he forgot that it wasn’t as profitable as the soul sucking microtransaction/whaling hellscape that’s become the norm.
This is Lemmy, nobody reads the article. They just react to the headline they know is cherry picked and find a way to work it into whatever circlejerk suits their fancy.
I’m still not going to buy games at $70. I don’t care enough about their BS to pay that much.
Plenty of great games in the $20 to $30 market all day long. I’ve put a few hundred hours into a handful of games that were that cheap over the last few months and have bought zero $50+ games. [EDIT: I did buy Zelda TOTK for $50, correction]
For example, I would like to buy Armored Core 6 but I’m not going to pay the “discounted” price of $53 that it’s available at now. I can wait until it’s further discounted, while I play lots of other games that I already have.
I bought the new Zelda game for $70, and while fun, didn’t feel worth $70. I won’t be paying $70 anymore. Most games just can’t put out the value required unless they actually build the game from the ground up with a phenomenal story, good replayability and (optional) co-op.
You guys are competing against Deep Rock Galactic, Baldur’s Gate 3, Subnautica, Battlefield 1, Risk Of Rain 2 / Risk of Rain Returns, and many other total gems. If you aren’t beating those high standards, you can’t charge $70.
I actually did buy the new Zelda but I waited until I found it on sale for $50 a few weeks after launch. It was a temporary deal but I knew it would likely be the best price on TOTK for a long time given the trend of high prices staying high for Switch games. My kid and I are still playing it so it was worth the high price considering the market status quo.
but of course you know the mindless hordes of ignorant little goblins out there will not only buy it, they will preorder the mega super luxury ultra elite edition at that, making the game have a launch day sales record twice that of what GTA5 was in its entire first week.
Thus proving to TakeTwo, Rockstar, and every other company that it doesnt matter how shitty, or how exploitative that they are… because gamers are fucking morons and will dumptruck money to their doorstep, and not even major fuckups like cyberpunk and starfield can prevent it.
I liked Starfield and I still logged a shit ton of hours on it.
But it’s story, dialogue, and character interactions feel that bad combination of rushed and PG13 in a setting that should be R. The fact that they will likely never rewrite and re-record these quests kinda blows. And the looting took a step backwards with the lack of clothing pieces and non-unique clothing stats.
I’m excited for what the modding community does to the game, which is the major reason I bought it. I’ve got over 3000 hours on skyrim, less than 200 of that is vanilla gameplay ¯_(ツ)_/¯
forbes.com
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