Games

High quantity, low quality?

Maybe video games should be priced at value per hour

Wellllll I think it should be priced by how much I enjoy it. Make a great game, get paid bookoo bucks! Make a shitty game, you get what you deserve.

He didn't say it but he wants you to RENT software not OWN it. Make no mistake, this would be BAD for consumers.

Can I counteract that with "then maybe you should release finished products at the initial public release date"?

€200 for Vampire Survivors?

If that cost goes above $1/hr I’ll probably just not buy. That’s my base cost I’ll accept for paying for a game. If I’ve gotten $1/hr I find that I’ve gotten my moneys worth

Sure thing! GTA 5 average game time was 52h (main+extras), so its price is then about $1 per hour at launch. Looking at my Steam library, I'd probably have saved hundreds if not thousands over the last 20 years if all the games were billed like this...

Have fun implementing the payment system that reliably measures and bills this with zero downtime, internationally! And even more fun when nobody mysteriously chooses to subscribe to this shit.

Dollars per hour divided by total copies sold. Eventually, it's free.

That's a terrible idea. You'd pay more than an entire paycheck just to play a typical JRPG which typically have 40+ hours of gameplay. I'm not paying $600 to play one game.

This is developers incrementally conditioning you to accept an even worse state of things for games. And if they follow through, I'll pirate their shit and never give them a dime of my money again.

Please insert Shark Card to continue.

Did John 'charge for ammo' Riccitello end up at take two this quickly!?

So we are renting the game instead of buying it. Great /s

I've put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let's use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I've played each of them for about 2,000 hours...that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let's be generous! Let's count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that's at 10% off. I've bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let's try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That's about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I'll take it!

Granted, since most games don't hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren't going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I'm willing to occasionally pay these days.

I'm all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!

Take two dollars for every hour you play

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.

There's a concept that should be familiar to a business owner called value based pricing where you charge based upon a (usually service) product's perceived value rather than the cost of producing it. Make a game worth giving time and money to then you'll have success. Fill it with pointless content to pad out the hours and it is neither worth the time nor the money

Coming from a franchise who rakes in mountains of cash from GTA Online… The problem with pricing per hour is that there’s no measure of quality. You can create a junk game that took 200 million to develop and has hundreds of hours of gameplay. I also thought the point about movies was a good one. An excellent movie with big actors and a gigantic budget is usually priced the same

Man, did any of you read the article?

"Zelnick is admitting that even though maybe this should be the case, that because of the nature of the market, there simply cannot be a pricing model like that, and the move to $70 recently is sort of the maximum they can hope for."

Interesting. I wonder how they’d feel if the hardware and software they all used to make these games were charged the same way? Or how about the cars/public transit and roads they take to get to work?

Good idea Strauss.

You want us to subsidize all of the microtransactions and equivalent online bullshit to turn on your money machine. Strip all that horseshit away, give us good single player ONLY and you'll be doing just fine.

"CROSSING GUARD, WEARING SOLID GOLD HEAD-TO-TOE ARMOR, SAYS CROSSING GUARDS AGENT BEING PAID ENOUGH TO DO THEIR CRITICAL WORK!"