What you’re asking about here is value, which is a purely subjective thing.
Here’s the thing: we all play games for our own reasons. Some play for an interesting story, some play for challenging mechanics, some play to be scared, some play just for something to pass the time. How much you enjoy a game will depend on how well it meets your goals and that’s often hard to quantify.
If your sole purpose of playing is to pass the time, then sure $/hour is a great metric for how good a value it is.
And let’s not forget that people all have different amounts of disposable income. For someone with a lot of money to spare, it takes a lot less to make $60 “worth it” than for someone without reliable income.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own idea of value and it will change over time.
I guess I take for granted that extended time spent in the game contributes more to the subjective value. Otherwise, why play? Of course there are a plethora of reasons to keep playing. But if we disregard that for now.
There are edge cases. E.g. a lovely small title that isn’t replayable and barely three hours long. That one could bring the average up a bit, depending on the price. But I’m not asking for a universal rule, rather where the ratio starts to hurt subjectively for people.
Or well, I guess what I really wanted to know is how people compare the price of games to other recreational joys. Especially considering the timespan of the compared activities. Though maybe a bit poorly phrased. :)
For me personally, I tend to compare it to movies. I have no problem going out and paying $15-20 to go be entertained for 2-3 hours. By that metric, a $60 game needs to keep me entertained for maybe 10 hours for me to feel like it wasn’t a complete waste of money.
As I alluded to before, I tend to also value how entertained I am during that time. A good movie or a good game doesn’t have to be long to be worth the price of admission. And conversely, there are games that I have more time into that I feel like were not worth the price (coughDiablo4cough) but I kept playing because of a combination of sunk cost fallacy and trying to find what all those other people thought was so good.
I was younger, too young to work, so one summer break I joined up with a European guild to raid with. Lots of fun, learned a but about British (primarily) culture. Lots of fun, even when I joined another guild I raided with them from time to time.
The other was a family guild. It eventually fell apart as the adults got busier with their careers and kids and shit. But the inner circle, so to speak, were invited to a bulletin board and we all talked for years after that. Eventually lost contact with them as I grew up and got busy with life.
Lots of fond memories, and a couple not so fond (RNG hates me, in every way). But they were along when RNG screwed me time and again, and were always willing to try again. Lots of love for those folks.
On days like this I ask myself if the reason games are released that broken is because there are no real software engineers in the game industry. Like a carmack with doom. Someone who understands the technical site of things.
Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).
Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.
But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.
Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.
I really hope its good. From the YT videos I’ve seen of people who got it early, it looks great.
But I still have a little bit of hesitation about how the roads continue to work. They’re still mostly “plop a road of X type”, and upgrades you just either connect in, or plop on top of an existing road. Finessing lane changes, i.e. merges or adding a new lane, still looks to be mostly an issue of getting the game to do what you want. If you sat me down and asked me to do a fun game based way of drawing road and other networks, I’d probably go with something loosely similar to how OpenStreetMap represents roads, but with more graphical flair. Roads are just collections of points, in whats called a “way.” You can set attributes on a way, which are things such as lanes, speed, lighting, material, etc. For a game, you could basically draw a line of where you want the road, and then set how many lanes it is, and see that footprint, before you apply it. Also lets you do things like take a 5 lane road and split it up into a big mess, so you can make abominations like the hi-5 in Texas, or even things as simple as diverging diamond or SPUI. Not sure if thats possible in CS2, I haven’t seen any youtubers do it. Getting them working in CS1 was possible, but required a ton of mods.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, and maybe the CS2 approach is better. I’ll have to get my hands on it to try it.
As for zoning, its okay, but I wish we’d really start to see some divorce from what SimCity invented back in 1989, and allow for more granular mixed-use zoning. I want apartment buildings that have light commercial at the ground floor, like you see in basically every major city
Also really hoping that it has proper M+KB on xbox. Starfield doesn’t, and it leaves whole sections of the game essentially broking (i.e. crafting 99 items requires you to press RB a shitload)
The Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts series have my absolute favourite soundtracks
Others that stay rent free in my head are Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in World of Illusion, halo 3, odst and reach, theme hospital, sonic 1, 2, Ape Escape and Gain Ground
I think you are in luck, most competitive shooters have it these days, I can’t really think of a big one that doesn’t, some are better than others though. Counterstrike, overwatch, warzone, fortnite, valorant, rainbow six all have them.
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