Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically play… if I’m buying a AAA action game, it’s something something like Sekiro, and I’ll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, I’m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesn’t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - I’ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. I’m also not against short games… I often prefer short games, but I also won’t pay $60 for them; I’ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. I’m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
There’ve definitely been games that I didn’t get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have played… Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and it’s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. That’s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); it’s a “waste” from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes that’s okay, and I’m willing to splurge. I’ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
Hours per dollar isn’t a great metric for all sorts of reasons
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much I’ll spend on a game. If I’m only going to spend 20 hours on it, I’ll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (‘Finished’ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), I’d feel pretty bad about that purchase.
I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games I’ve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really don’t want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, I’ll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, I’ll probably just ignore it, as much as I’ll hate doing so.
I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I haven’t bought anything at $70, and don’t intend to start.)
If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and don’t include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their ‘Video games haven’t changed price since the 90s! The price isn’t keeping up with inflation!’ argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. There’d maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.
There is a fairly nice base location near the center of the map that has ~6 coal and ~6 ore nodes, and is on a plateau making it functionally immune to NPC raids. I found it completely accidentally; there’s the 3 wildlife sanctuaries around the outside of the map and they all face inward at different angles, so I was trying to triangulate where they were “pointing” to see if it was leading somewhere. Turns out it was leading to a sweet base location.
This is noteworthy because there’s 4 resources (ore, coal, sulfur and quartz), so you need a base with access to 2 of them if you want to have all 4 generating passively.
For what it’s worth, if you customize the difficulty of your game (which you can do at any point, including after reaching the 40s), you can change most things, including resource drop rates and how much effort it takes to mine them, xp rates, Pal encounter rates, capture rates, etc.
I had a similar experience as you; by the time I hit 42 or so, I had the capture power maxed out, and most eggs were not giving me anything interesting, and I had the whole map revealed, so exploring had lost its luster and I was not enjoying the thought of grinding out another 6-8 levels to start being able to tackle some of the harder challenges in the game; I set the XP rate to x4, and doubled the resource rates, and it pretty much solved the problem for me.
Obviously if you’re playing on a server this isn’t an option, but if it’s just your own single player game, consider trying it; you might find some settings that smooth it out for you.
In my opinion, the fact that so many of these competing devices run windows just ruins them out of the gate. The fact that you can cleanly suspend and resume games on the Deck is its best feature by a mile, and I’ve yet to see any windows-based device manage to even come close to doing that reliably.
I prefer playing characters as little like me as possible. If there’s a non-human option, I will always take it. The further from human available. Weird alien race? That’s my jam.
If I have to be a human, I’ll often play a female character because it’s the furthest from ‘me’ I can get within those constraints. I’ll also usually play a character of a race I am not, for this same reason.
I think this is largely dependent on build and weapon. I’ve been playing a stealth / throwing character and throwing knives kill almost anyone with a single headshot, as do revolvers. If I try to use an assault rifle, though, I can empty a clip into someone’s face and they’re still standing.
Just to echo what Marc said, we are so sorry for our earlier actions.
We are so sorry you took our earlier actions so poorly.
Genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet.
Genuinely disappointed that our removal of the TOS was noticed and publicized across the internet.
This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. And Marc’s response is true, you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity you are using as long as you keep using that version.
This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity, whereafter we will do everything we can to invalidate prior versions of Unity, and force upgrades on users.
We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer some Q’s live
We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer whichever Qs live we find convenient to our narrative, and ignore any that are not.
Please forget about our attempted greed, so we can try again in a stealthier manner in the near future, at our earliest convenience.
The worst isn’t even people currently developing things - it’s developers who already have released products. Imagine if you released something like, over the summer, for example. You’ve been paying the current revenue share, and will continue to do so until Jan. 1, then you’ll start paying the per-install fee. So you’re paying twice for the same customers’ purchases.
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.