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.
So practically he wants to create a SaaS model to eternally milk their user base. As much as I like the game devs working for rockstar, their management is an utterly horrendous bunch of scums and in a way I wish that GTA6 is one giant flop.
That’s why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions. The studio needs to have a constant revenue stream to maintain the development and the infrastructure cost.
Game companies make profits unrivaled by any other industry and all we hear is “it’s not economic to sell a game for 60 bucks.” Now there are microtransactions and those profits skyrocketet. Now even that is still not enough. It’s just Ridiculous.
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.
forbes.com
Najnowsze