2h of playtime within 2 weeks for a no questions asked refund. A 6 year old game with 0 hours may get a refund once, but Steam will start refusing refunds after that.
Playing devil’s advocate, I can understand the point because I already think in terms of value per hour.
That’s why I can justify buying a less critically acclaimed game with more replayability than I can justify one that you realistically can only play once (starfield vs latest COD). And why I generally don’t play mmo’s because I can get a new game each month for $10, or play a $60 for a year straight. The total number of hours I have in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 or GTA 5 is crazy compared to how many hours I had in the last battlefield.
But it’s not just about total hours. My first playthrough of Outer Wilds, Subnautica, and BioShock, were each more “valuable” than the time I spent in GTA, even though I’ve spent 10-100x the time in GTA. Then you’ve got games like Prey and Minecraft that have high replayability that is consistently high “value” time.
Games currently have an insane value/cost ratio. When compared to a theatre movie that costs ~$10/h, you’d have to have a phenomenal time. Especially compared with the cost per hour of a game like Skyrim or Baldur’s Gate where you have to spend like a thousand hours just to get the whole story of the game.
This is a bit off topic, but there are some first-playthrough experiences that are truly magical, and you’ve named several of the games that did that for me. Subnautica, Outer Wilds, RDR2, Stardew Valley, Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m sure there are more (and older ones too like KOTOR and Paper Mario). Replayability is great, but I love those first playthroughs.
Depending on how exactly this is meant, this might not be controversial.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the “long plays” higher than the “short plays”.
Games that are played for many hours are already rewarded by being more popular, meaning more people buy them, meaning more revenue. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book. I must have read LOTR a hundred times by now, and the Tolkien estate has benefitted not only from me buying the books multiple times (softcover, hardcover, kindle, audiobook) and giving them as gifts, but also from every other person on the planet doing the same.
Make a better product, and people will use it more, and more people will buy it. This is just drink verification can bullshit.
Honestly, I sorta hope they try it, just so they can blow millions of dollars on something that was absolutely doomed and I would hope it craters the company, or at least some careers.
It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book.
No, it’s like paying more for a thicker book.
Also, you just admitted to paying more for the same thing by buying it multiple times. So you’re obviously already willing to continue paying for the same entertainment.
No, it like being charged hourly to read a book, and the book has a bunch of copied and pasted paragraphs saying “protagonist killed 10 chickens.” And the ending to the book costs extra.
And you still have to buy the whole book before doing any of that.
Imagine for me a world where executives want to maximize extraction of funds out of consumers. Now imagine "filler" in video games. Finally, imagine games psychology and how to keep the player running after that carrot on a stick.
You don’t pay more for a thicker book. That’s an absolutely ridiculous notion and it’s not how the industry works. At all. The value of a book is the quality of the writing, not its length.
Second, I could have read each of those individual books as many times as I wanted. I was buying different products each time. I’mnot paying for the same entertainment at all. It’s more like buying the same e game on Xbox and on switch, if that makes it easier for you.
It’s a stupid fucking idea, and it’s exactly what got Unity rightfully smacked down just a week or so ago.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the “long plays” higher than the “short plays”.
So how would live-service games fit into that dynamic? Couldn’t Activision argue that CoD is a live-service game, and therefore, should be priced differently somehow?
Not ragging on you or anything, this is an actual question for discussion.
All that pricing model would do is incentivize even more useless filler than a lot of games already have. If a game can say it offers 100 hours of playtime, but 70 of those hours are fetch quests, how many hours do you think they’d try to charge for?
How many people would buy it, if it were that boring?
Every pricing model can be gamed. Look at the aforementioned sport games. They are often not super expensive, but get new releases with hardly any changes almost every year.
I loved GTA 5, but I got really sick of driving across town. At a certain point, it felt like I had to go to work and wondered what the point was. I bet they’re planning a lot of that.
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I’ll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that’s fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What mental image do you have of the average game buyer? A mindless idiot who just has to buy everything he’s being advertised?
Of course you can make such a game. But nobody will buy it. It’s that simple. BTW your construction is called straw man. You know damn well, that some games have been designed for longer playtimes, you just chose to ignore that knowledge.
I uh.... I don't know if @De_Narmset out to do this, but they just described the main gameplay of Cookie Clicker, a $5 game about manually clicking a picture of a cookie. It was released on steam two years ago and has made over $3 million in revenue.
It made more money than Hades, which has won several awards. There are leaderboards for the cookie. It is you whose opinion of what the typical gamer will put up with is actually high.
That’s definitely a strawman or just a straight up misrepresentation of what cookie clicker is. You only actually “manually click a picture of a cookie” for about one to five minutes, then you basically never click it again. It’s described as an idle game where you play by not playing, and the core mechanic is “number get bigger faster”. The game described in this thread is mindlessly clicking a button, no depth, no automation or acceleration. Just click a billion times to win.
Why would it be a straw man? It’s exaggerated for sure, but the point being: If you pay per theoretical hour of gameplay, games will include a lot more low quality padding.
Not everyone uses every product for the same amount of time. That’s the first problem with this way of thinking. But let’s pretend that isn’t the case and apply this thinking to other forms of entertainment.
If I enjoy playing basketball should I have to pay by the hour to own a basketball?
Chess is one of the oldest games and it has way more hours played than all GTA games combined. Should we have to pay by the hour for a chess set?
Why stop at entertainment? I use my bed more than any game I’ve ever played. Does that mean I should pay by the hour to own a bed?
Seems pretty clear what motivated this CEO to say this… greed
Honestly tho. If I a game has 300 hours of content, multiplayer, mod support, and is overall good I’ll pay more for that game. Not $300 but maybe like $80-$90. That game doesn’t and will never exist, at least not from a triple A studio
Joke's on anyone who actually thinks GTA 5 isn't already predatory as fuck, and to those excited for anything Rockstar Games has to offer going forward.
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