Because they offer thousands of hours of play time? Like seriously, all the things you could say against this idea and you choose to go go with “But GTA, one of the games with the most lively open worlds, where you can do so much exploring and random stuff, doesnt have much play time”
I don’t think he said that… I think he meant playtime is overpriced which considering the amount of people worldwide that play gta and the profit ratios it definitely is
Sure thing! GTA 5 average game time was 52h (main+extras), so its price is then about $1 per hour at launch. Looking at my Steam library, I’d probably have saved hundreds if not thousands over the last 20 years if all the games were billed like this…
Have fun implementing the payment system that reliably measures and bills this with zero downtime, internationally! And even more fun when nobody mysteriously chooses to subscribe to this shit.
Yeah, but dollars per hour is stupid. I care more about enjoyment per hour. Just maximizing play time is what has cause open world games to be boring as hell. I’d rather spend less time with a game that’s more enjoyable over a shorter period than more time doing the same few activities over and over and getting nothing out of it.
To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you’d stop playing.
Well, there are a lot of psychological tricks that can be used to make us keep doing things we aren’t enjoying. We’re just big dumb apes who are easy to manipulate.
This only works if you spin this with a product leadership strategy:
Shovelware games that don’t offer a solid chunk of hours or any kind of replayability should be priced lower, and proper games should be priced normally.
The thing is, this is not at all how pricing works if you’re building a business model. Prices are always heavily influenced by what the consumer is willing to pay, or in this case what they’ve been used to for years. For as long as I can remember “full price” has always been $50 or $60.
Special editions with marginal bonus content, $10 price increases on the base game and shitty DLC (horse armor comes to mind) are all examples of corporate shit tests, designed to see how far they can take it.
History has proven though, that changing consumer expectations is among the more difficult things to do in a market where alternatives are rampant. Though the whole franchise loyalty thing kinda ruins that, but I’ll be damned if I have to pay $200 for a game. That will promt me to just play something else instead.
No. This is absolutely wrong. If a game is short but does something unique and engaging it’s worth more than the next open world game that wastes your time. The amount of time a game takes to complete has next to nothing to do with the value a consumer gets from the game.
A “proper game” isn’t one that takes 60+ hours to complete. A proper game is one that takes an idea and does something interesting with it, or at least tries to create the most enjoyable experience for a player as possible.
I don’t want to trudge through an open world collecting bullshit they put in just to make me spend more time. I want an interesting experience that maximizes my enjoyment per hour. If it’s low enjoyment per hour there’s a million other things I could be doing instead.
Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states “product leadership”.
I agree, we don’t need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.
The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I’m still having fun I’d be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant “collect all these flags” middle finger for 100% completion.
Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.
You can’t just peg things to an expensive thing people do rarely and say something people do commonly should be just as expensive while ignoring the cost of the device that runs the game.
Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.
Apple releases “iTetris” for $3000. Their fans claim it’s way better than the original. It’s the same game with only 8 levels, but you can pay extra for more.
forbes.com
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