I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.
My value for gaming is less of a simple equation, but my examples of games that are “undoubtedly worth the price” are going to consist a lot more of shorter games that are absolutely spectacular for their shorter playtime with a £30ish price tag.
Think:
Outer Wilds
Tunic
Hollow Knight
Journey
The Witness
Portal (1&2)
Celeste
Undertale
To The Moon
Ori and the Blind Forest/Will o the Wisps
The Witcher 3
I have no strict criteria for this, but I can say I’ve had far, far more than my money’s worth from those games in terms of the value they brought to my life.
If you do want to look purely at the number of hours you’ll get out of a game vs its price, look no further than Guild Wars 2. You can get all the content for under £100 I beoieve, and I’ve spent 6000+ wonderful hours playing it. It’s not the same kind of enjoyment though.
I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.
So true and well said.
I love playing a 70 hour From Software game or a 50 hour JRPG as much as the next guy. But some of my favorite games of all time are old classics like Super Mario World or Zelda: OoT, which can probably be completed in a single session or two if you know what you're doing. And there have been some truly great, but short, indie games over the years.
Then there are also sim games and arcade/fighting games that had great reliability and you can get many hours out of if you like them.
In the end, as long as the game is fun and satisfying, I don't care how long it lasts.
I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.
If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.
The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.
That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.
The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.
I've been playing some Mario Wonder too (both co-op and single player). I'm not the biggest 2D platformer fan, but I think it does a pretty good job. I'm surprised at how difficult some of the levels have gotten so far (4 and 5 star difficulty levels ain't no joke). I'm not sure if I'll finish it, but there's fun to be had for sure.
I'm also closing in on finishing Chrono Trigger for the first time. I'm enjoying it, though I think the PS1 and PS2 era JRPGs are more up my alley. This game definitely oozes charm though, and I can see why many consider it a classic. After I beat it I'll probably try Chrono Cross again, though last time I tried playing it the game froze twice early on just talking to people...
I think so, though there are some optional levels they may struggle with. If they play as Yoshi they won't take any damage, which might help. Alternatively, someone more experienced could play as Yoshi and the kid could ride the Yoshi through some of the more challenging spots.
I bought Kerbal Space Program 1 for $14 when it was in version 0.16 I think, before it was in early access on Steam. I’ve received all updates and DLC for free since then because I got in before a certain date, logged definitely thousands possibly near 10k hours in it, and it is by far the biggest bang for my buck I’ve ever gotten from a video game ever. Thank you HarvesteR and original dev team!
Diablo 4's Season 2 started this week, and I'm having a lot more fun playing with my rogue this round than I did with my druid in Season 1. They made it a lot easier to level up, which is nice. I could have done without the story though. It was super short and the new character Erys was not likeable at all.
Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive all had to be paid for. Only the original mod (1.5 and under) and Global Offensive/CS2 have been available freely (and in GO’s case, it came later just like TF2 and RL).
I was livid about 1.6 going retail back in the day. I had been playing the same game for free, as a mod, for at least 2 years prior to that.
Even if you take my spending (which was in the hundreds) on Warframe into account, it was still worth the thousands of hours I put into the game. It’s really just a matter of whether you enjoy the game enough to justify the spending.
When I got my PSX in 1997, the games sure felt like a good deal at $50 after paying $70+ for cartridges for years. I only got one new game per year at full price for my SNES. I also generally felt happier buying on PC because new games were also less than consoles for a while.
Now with the indie scene, there is a lot more variance, even though I also occasionally grab top-shelf releases. I still think FTL might have been the best $10 I’ve ever spent on a game. At the same time, I paid $60 for Persona 5 Royal right at launch even though I had played the original game, and I still thought it was incredible value.
R&D as an analogy, if the game does something new, creates a new experience then it’s worth extra because you can’t get it anywhere else until poor copies appear in a few years
Replayability and Flow. Length doesn’t matter look at AC games. But I could re run RE games or Respec new build in Elden Ring and feel the rush of making decisions on the fly and anticipating the dodge when an enemy could almost touch me
Beauty, same as movies I guess when you get to experience people’s creativity, not in overproduced generic stuff like Amazon or Apple TV shows or Asscreed, but when there is a good art direction. Good design beats out fidelity any time
I almost never buy metroidvanias before they go on sale pretty heavily because there are just so many good choices, but I played the absolute hell out of that first flash bike game that you controlled balance front and back. This is that, but with a big map to explore and combat I'm really enjoying. You block bullets with your bike, reload ammo with a backflip and a bullet parry with a front flip, and aiming your gun is bullet time, but because you're aiming in the air a lot, you still have to pay attention to your rotation, so there's a nice tension to it. I'm two bosses in, and both are decent takes on the unique flavor of their mechanics. I'm hooked hard.
Steam has a demo so you don't have to buy it without knowing if it clicks for you.
Minecraft hands down. I’ve put more time into that game than any other in my life. I constantly go back to it, and almost everyone I meet online plays it or has played it. There is so much enjoyability from a game as limitless as that
Ive been obsessed with The Witness for a few weeks now. Some puzzles are so damn tricky but figuring them out is so pleasurable. This is one of the few puzzle games im actually trying to solve on my own instead of relying on walkthroughs so the experience is very fulfilling
After you finish the witness, you should try The Looker. It's a free parody of the witness that's also pretty good as a puzzle game in its own right. Though, like the witness, I didn't finish it either.
I played through Far: Lone Sails and really enjoyed the light puzzle and management of the machine. It was super atmospheric and I really loved the game overall. It was a perfect casual game that really absorbed me into it. Going to play the sequel as well soon.
My Ghost Recon team in my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 got past level 8, and they may as well have ascended to godhood then and there. There are several achievements for killing some boss or another before they get to do some kind of attack, but this team just bursts them down before they get the chance to take a second turn. I'm in Act 3 now and just checking out a few remaining plot threads that I missed in my first playthrough.
I'm also trying to finish a run of 30XX. It's good, and the level generation is slightly less repetitive than its predecessor, but it's mostly just more of the same. New bosses and such, and the game is still good, but I was hoping for more of an iterative improvement over the first game.
I pay $20 to watch a mediocre rehashed superhero movie for 2 hours. I can absolutely pay $60 or $70 for something that gives me 10 hours of entertainment. And most games I pickup give me way more than 10 hours. So I find gaming to be worth it pretty much all the time.
Completely agree. They demand more than most communities, while enjoying one of the few products that has dodged inflation in a huge way. I remember paying $60 for games in 2000. 20+ years later, and I’m supposed to be livid that most are still $60. The amount of whining is so crazy it’s embarrassing.
Welll…it depends. If you count DLC, there are games that have greatly outpaced inflation.
The Sims 4 costs nothing for the “base game”, but with all DLC – and that is still coming out – it’s presently about $1,100.
Another factor is that in many cases, the market has expanded. Like, in 1983, it wasn’t that common to see adults in the US playing video games. I am pretty sure that in a lot of countries, basically nobody was playing video games in 1983. in 2023, 40 years later, the situation is very different. The costs of making a video game are almost entirely fixed costs, separate from how many copies you sell.
So…if there is a game out that that many, many other people want to play, it’s going to sell a lot more copies.
I don’t really see the point in getting upset about a price, though – I agree with you on that. I mean, unless the game was misrepresented to you…it’s a competitive market out there. Either it’s worth it to you or it’s not, and if it’s not, then play something else. If someone is determinedly charging some very high price for a game in a genre, and a lot of people want to play that genre and it can be made profitably at a lower price, some other developer is probably going to show up sooner or later and add a competitor to the mix.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne