Do you agree with this?
hes not wrong, but hes not right either.
$60 for a 2hr game no matter how good will ALWAYS feel bad, the price/hr value really starts to fall off around the 10hrs of gameplay mark though.
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You're saying there's no right or wrong answer? I imagine if Path of Exile started charging $5 an hour you'd be saying that's very VERY wrong 😎
That's why most publishers don't charge $60 for a 2 hour game. Because they know it's a bad value and consumers will get upset. That doesn't mean games that are highly replayable should be turned into a rental service.
You're either on the side of the consumer or you're not. No neutral bs.
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no way not going to start paying like £200+ for one game - i think the more they charge the less people will buy them - i do of course want them to get some profit but what about games that don't really have an ending?
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The best for the publisher.
Endless pricing, pay per hour, and installing the game would cost extra on top :-D
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Sounds like a terrible model. They used to do that a lot in the PSX days as I recall, stretch out a game to get that coveted 40+ hours of gameplay (RPGs especially) but many of them would've been much better games if they were shorter.
Dragon Quest 7 is the first one that comes to mind. I enjoyed that game quite a bit (as a kid, when I had time!) but it's a solid 100+ hour game if you do just about anything off the beaten path.
That said, it doesn't seem right that EA can crap out another Madden game with updated rosters for $60 every year while something like GTA 6 takes years of development and is expected to sell for the same.
At the end of the day though, a game is worth what people will buy it for.
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up to the gamer/customer to decide if they want to pay what they are charging
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That said, it doesn't seem right that EA can crap out another Madden game with updated rosters for $60 every year while something like GTA 6 takes years of development and is expected to sell for the same.
Interesting point.
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Doesn't seem right? GTA V is still making Rockstar and TakeTwo millions. It's a game from 2013, mind you. And it's all due to their online microtransaction crap. They tried to do the same with RDR2, but failed. It just didn't offer, I guess, enough of a fun factor for players to make them spend money on the in-game items, given how crazy the stuff in GTA is compared to the stuff you can buy in RDR2. Can't really do flying horses and shit in RDR2, while all the crazy stuff in GTA kinda fits the vibe. So, there's nothing right or wrong here. These companies will look for the best way to make millions. Rockstar did it by focusing all their efforts on the MP side of GTA V and abandoning everything else. They really wanted RDR2 to be the next GTA Online, or at least earn them close to what GTA Online is. However, it failed, and as soon as they saw it was failing, they literally abandoned the whole thing. The MP story quest is still unfinished and will stay unfinished given that it just isn't worth it to them to spend more money developing something that doesn't earn them millions. So, EA has a new sport each year, while Rockstar sits on their ass and collects millions each year from a game released in 2013, releasing a new game every 5 or so years, with an odd "Next-gen GTA V update". They could have easily skipped RDR2. That's how much money GTA V MP is making them each year. I bet they will milk GTA VI the same way as they did with GTA V. That is, if the cows playing the online component let Rockstar milk them.
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I get your point, and maybe they wouldn't feel the need to do all the 'microtransaction crap' if they'd thought they could get away with selling it for more from the get-go. Still, that was just an example. Take any low-effort regurgitated yearly release vs. any other game with several years of development if you prefer, my main point was that $60 being 'the price' regardless of the time/effort being put in doesn't necessarily make sense.
Certainly not advocating for higher prices and as I said, a game is ultimately worth whatever people will spend on it (including microtransactions), I just find it wild that we've collectively decided that $60 is 'the price.'
To your point, since the microtransactions have made them so much money I would be highly surprised if GTA VI didn't have something similar.
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Oh, GTA VI will have some sort of MTX for its online mode, I'm 100% sure about it. No way TakeTwo let's Rockstar not make them billions. This is sadly the trend with online multiplayer games. MTX make more than the game's units sold. It's sad, but a reality, and we can see how every aspect of a game is slowly being monitized in some way. We used to have unlockable costumes, cheats and such. Now some games just give them to you for a one-time fee. RE4 Remake had MTX, but Capcom was sneaky and only added them after all the good press they got.
Also, I don't consider FIFA (only sports game I played until recently) or Assassin's Creed as low-effort games just because of how long they were developed. I can easily point to some games that took 3-5 years to develop, yet are barley different from their predecessors. Why is that fine, but for these yearly releases we need to justify buying them. If I would go content to price ratio, FIFA would be king. I can easily put in 1000 of hours into just that. I wouldn't have the time to play other stuff, but the amount of hours I can get out of this game for 70$ (new price) is just insane value if you look at it like that. The same goes for Assassin's Creed games. While they scaled back Mirage, the previous three offered soo much content that it was insane and people even complained about Valhalla having too much stuff (don't share this oppinion tho, played 90-smt hours, enjoyed every minute of it). Even the pre-RPG era ones were all quality games despite being yearly releases. I do dislike how both Ubisoft and EA are using crappy MTX shit in their games, but I won't lie and say that their games are shit just because they take less time to develop.
So, I don't think there will ever be a "fair" way to price a game, as there are too many variables in play, but the most important one is customers perception of what is and isn't worth their money and how they decide. Some AAA games I would pay full price for, some I wouldn't and it's all based on my likes and dislikes. I also think bundles warped our perception of what game is and isn't worth X amount of $. I just saw a thread where a person went to a dev on Steam forums to essentially complain about the game being 10$ for "only" 2-3 hours of content. I think this mindset only hurts gaming, and we will get what this GTA suit dude is saying: publishers/devs pricing their games based on the hours of content in the game since that seems to be what many focus on when looking at a game's "value". We will see even more bloat because more content (hours) means more money to pay. I really want devs to focus on quality over quantaty, be they small or AAA. But with gamers constantly yapping, "uh, X game is not worth Y price because it's only Z hours long" I don't know if that will be true across the board in gaming.
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Don't know anything about FIFA (other than it's popular) and I certainly don't include Assassin's Creed in the 'yearly minor update' category, but there have definitely been years where the only meaningful changes to some games (Madden, at least) were roster updates. Working in a game shop 'back in the day' I was amazed by how well those games sold. Different strokes, I guess.
Certainly nothing against shorter games either, that was actually one of my original points; I'll take a solid 10 over a sloppy 40+ any day, especially now that I'm getting older. When I was younger it was a different story, if I was done with a game within a couple days (and it wasn't rented) it felt bad because I didn't have 1000+ games waiting to be played. Now I'm happy to play for a bit, experience the story and move on to the next thing.
That said, I still think there's something to be said for the price matching the value. If a game only offers a couple hours of gameplay they're probably going to have a hard time selling it for $60 (though to your example, $10 seems totally fair to me, anyone who doesn't like it can wait for a sale). Some people will always complain no matter what the price is, though. I've seen plenty of "$3 game at best, lolol" posts myself, likely thanks to the bundle effect you mentioned.
But, as I said before, a game is worth what people will pay for it, so if they actually tried to release GTA VI for, say, $80-$100 and it didn't sell well they'd eventually lower the price. Still, for GTA I'm certain some would buy it anyway.
Anyway, nice chatting. Always nice to have a civil discussion with someone online, heh.
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I heard a lot of people complain about RE3 Remake's price due to how short it is. It took me about 6-7 hours to finish my first run on Standard. I didn't buy the game, traded some bundle stuff I didn't need for it. If I did buy it, the price I bought it at wouldn't be guided by valuing the runtime. I can say with 100% confidence that the 50 hours I spent playing the game and 100% it was super fun. So, any price I paid for it would have been worth it to me. Just like RE4 Remake was worth buying day 1 (even if I was a bit salty I had to wait a month to use RT and actually play it, cuz I want shiny puddles and stuiff, ha). Doesn't matter that it provided me with 80+ hours of content (I think I replayed it once or twice). The game was just fun, and since my financial situation allowed me to, I bought it day 1. I just think value being tied to runtime will hurt indie devs the most, not really AAA games that often have tons of mtx stuff and expansions and such.
Also, sports games are easy to get into and they have an insanely large crowd. One look at the revenue each year these companies and clubs make is enough to tell you why EA is one of the largest companies in the world. They struck gold with the two biggest sports franchises in the world, Football and American Football. Basketball is big, but the NFL is bigger, and Football is the World's Game as they say. The only area NBA is bigger than NFL is internationally. But domestically, NFL crushes it.
And here's an article comparing the EPL and NFL in 2021
https://theblizzard.co.uk/battle-of-the-football-leagues-which-is-bigger-the-epl-or-nfl/news/
And here's an article about the growth of the EPL (English Premier League)
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/sports-business-group/articles/annual-review-of-football-finance-premier-league-clubs.html
So, couple the size of the audience for each of these sports worldwide, and add the fantasy manager element of the Ultimate Team modes, and you'll have them hooked. I mean, FIFA 22 and 23 accounted for almost 70% of my playtime last year. I didn't spend a single dime on the game's mtx (even managed to get a review copy on Steam for 23, which was wild, and EA paid me in a way since I got those FIFA Points from the Ultimate Edition they gave me). But it has FOMO, it has an addicting gameplay loop, and did I mention it has FOMO. That's probably the biggest reason I kept playing. Each week some new shit comes out. And this year, in Feb or smt, I decided to quit the franchise for good. Did this once before, ended up selling my acc and getting RE2Remake in return. And I can't describe how much pressure off my shoulders I felt just dissapear. I was now able to play other games. Same thing happened this year. I felt free.
I think FOMO in MP games is a blight on the gaming community and it turns something that's supposed to be fun into almost your daily job. I can tell you with certainty that if EA made the SBCs in their Ultimate Team mode never expire, same for objectives and season rewards and such, the game would be much more chill and casual friendly. But that won't bring them billions sadly. They have to make players come back each week. They have to make them think they need to spend money on these digital cards that are useless after a year.
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As if they weren't already insanely greedy already.
Pricing isn't cost based. It's "I want to make "x" amount of extra profitz based."
I would buy exactly zero games priced like that. In fact, I already buy exactly zero games priced at $70 and almost zero games priced at $60 (BG3 being the sole exception).
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The quote in the source rather explains that they already consider the expected playtime within the pricing decision.
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Technically speaking that pricing model already exists, both freemium games with aggressive monetization and old arcade games charging you per life do this to some extent, the thing is that it isn't really compatible with a single-player game meant to be played at one's own pace like GTA. They could try this and they'll surely make a nice amount of cash from it thanks to brand recognition but many would either skip GTA 6 altogether or opt for piracy, they're kinda playing with fire on this one since after such a long wait they're just one misstep away from getting bodied by a backlash, this could turn into a debacle like with other games with years worth of expectation to live up to.
BTW I have never played any GTA much so I'm not on the loop, have they actually confirmed that they're talking about GTA 6 and this isn't just some spin-off title like they used to make back in the day?
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have they actually confirmed that they're talking about GTA 6 and this isn't just some spin-off title like they used to make back in the day?
I've read the source and checked the quotes in it and as far as I can tell this was about the gaming industry in general, not a specific title.
Here's the direct quote from Zelnick, the CEO in question:
“By that standard our prices are still very, very low, because we offer many hours of engagement, the value of the engagement is very high. So I think the industry as a whole offers a terrific price to value opportunity for consumers."
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Oh, no, I wasn't talking about pricing with that last question. I should have probably been a bit clearer with that break.
I was actually asking if it's confirmed that the new GTA game is gonna be GTA 6, since from the news I had seen previously about the announcement it just said that a trailer for a GTA game was dropping soon, and the wording seemed suspiciously vague. It reminds me of some years ago when Blizzard did a whole deal of announcing a new Diablo game and people were expecting it to be Diablo 4 but it ended up being some mobile spin-off and there was a bit of a debacle live during the presentation with fans booing at them.
Like, it just reminds me of that with how non-committal the wording seemed.
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Well, I'm out of the loop as well when it comes to GTA 6's development.
The Development section in its Wikipedia page points to 6 being the game in question, especially with the leak that happened a while back. Still, who knows.
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To this day I still remember the booing that occurred on stage. The idea of having Diablo on mobile was great, but the hype and the announcement were poorly executed. However, I don't think that Rockstar Games will do a similar thing. My deduction is based on all the leaks that occurred over the past years, the confirmation that they are working on GTA 6, and analyzing the official statement from Rockstar Games "We are very excited to let you know that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. ".
I think the trailer will drop during the Game Award which is scheduled on December 7, 2023, or maybe on December 10, 2023 (25th anniversary of Rockstar Games).
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The "Is this an out of season April fools joke?" comment, is still legendary in my opinion
Devs be like: Don't you guys have phones?
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Person wants more money
Shocking. I also want more money for the same work, soo....
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That's like saying a Toyota needs to cost more than a Ferrari, because you're driving it much more than someone who owns a Ferrari drives his car.
It's not the quantity, but the quality that matters.
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Well, many players will look at the runtime of the game to base their decision on how much to pay for it. Not everyone values quality over quantity for the money they spend. It's like buying a bundle that has 3 games for 10$ instead of one game for 10$. Doesn't matter that the one game you buy for 10$ could be better in many areas than every game in that bundle, 3 games is more than 1, thus the bundle is better value when compared to buying just one game for 10$ to many players out there. While I would love if what you say was true across the board as I think that is how games should be evaluated primarily (quality > quantity), it just isn't how things work atm
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Don't evaluate on quantity or quality. The only thing that matters is revenue. Even looking at popular bundle services(like Humble Bundle) and picking through offers for the last few years, you'll be hard pressed to find sales figures anywhere close to what most AAA titles reach in their launch week window. I'm not sure what the current numbers are but even back in 2019 Humble Monthly only had around 400,000 active subscribers and that was the flagship bundle product. Meanwhile games like Call of Duty are pulling in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, all thanks to unit sales and more importantly, microtransactions.
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Units sold pale in comparison to what microtransactions make these companies. I really wonder how much CoD Warzone alone made Activision from their mtx crap. It's a sad truth, but it is what it is. No way companies will stop doing this unless players push back, which won't really happen. It would take like goverment intervention or smt to make these publishers/devs stop trying to exploit ther customers. Also, on PC, we litterally have sales 24/7, just bombarding the player which further drives players to buy stuff they don't really need.
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Activision made somewhere along the lines of 5+ billion from mtx in 2022 but I can't remember where I read that. For CoD Warzone II, in the first 10 days alone the revenue crossed the 1 billion mark according to Activision.
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I agree with you that some people will value quantity over quality in some cases.
But I'm not sure it's true unconditionally.
Meaning: If the game is very-super-extra long, but is completely NOT interesting/fun to play, I don't think that there is anyone that will prefer it over a shorter game, that IS interesting/fun to play.
I do agree, that some people play some game for thousands of hours.
And even if that game is not the best game in their library, they might still appreciate it more than the "better" games, due to the sheer number of hours of fun they got for it.
But still - the prequisite for them would be that it's a game they enjoy.
So it's not completely straightforward.
There are nuances...
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Awesome news! I´m gonna write their support that I´ve spent my Megalodon CashCard in GTA Online within MINUTES and would now like my money back 😀
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And then Starbucks will price per sip and we're all screwed :P
Seriously though, that's a nifty soundbite and I don't necessarily agree with it but however painful it seems to dish out 70 bucks for a game, you have to recognize that we all have paid far more per minute of entertainment/enjoyment. We've all paid 10-15 bucks for 2 hour long movies. We have all paid unreasonable prices for a coffee it takes us 10 mn to drink.
And I guess that's what he means.
But then look at Ubisoft trying to make people pay 15 buck a month subs for a game they already sold twice with barely any improvement and less content. I'd say we're not done with crazy pricing yet.
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not me i don't like coffee but your point is well taken
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imagine if skyrim had a subscription fee where every 60 minutes you play it takes $1 from your bank account. they would have made BILLIONS lol
and if you cant pay for the next hour, the game just saves and exits to desktop lol
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So back to 90s? Actually a games charging per minute/turn were not that rare.
But we got away with that as they became cheaper to run...
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This is just another way to say "games as a service" which doesn't have any beneficial aspects for customers.
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Hey, Rockstar, I expect new games from you every week, how about that? Deal?
Just kidding, I'll never pay a single dime on your games in the future.
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I mean I kinda get that 70 or even 100 bucks for a game is technically relatively cheap. Even on the low end (as an example I bought Sniper Elite 5 for 15 bucks and played it for 15 hours, which equals to 1 buck per hour) it's cheap. And I don't even wanna start about other games like RDR2 (which I bought for roughly 20 bucks and played for a bit over 400 hours so I paid 5 cents per hour of entertainment) or Rocket League (7 bucks, 2500 hours => 0.28 cents per hour. Yes, that's roughly 4 hours per cent.) and I got tons of other examples. So technically it would kinda make sense to make videogames more expensive. If you go watch a movie at the cinema that might be 15 bucks for 2 hours of entertainment. Even if a game would cost 100 bucks you'd only need to play for 13 hours to get even. And then there are people who spend 1000 hours in that game. So from a business standpoint it would make sense to make games more expensive. But then most people wouldn't buy your games anymore. So... let's just keep the current model.
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Can I counter charge the gaming company also the cost of electricity and wear and tear of all the equipment involved? table, chair, pc, my house etc. Because that is also included into the cinema costs (not counting cost for employees and insurances etc yet)
I get your point but if you look at it from the point with what I mention its not a really fair comparison to be honest.
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I don’t necessarily disagree. I’d be perfectly fine with short AAA-level games costing less. The hard part would be the balance and cost of production. A two hour realistic game is going to cost more to make than a 2D platformer of the same length and I don’t think those games should cost the same. On the other hand, game length can be very subjective or can change depending on difficulty setting. Should a game like GTA or Fallout cost $200 because you can plausible get hundreds of hours of play? Should it cost something different for someone who doesn’t care about side content? Where is the line for aaS games who arguably can provide infinite playtime for as long as the servers are online?
It’s a nice thought, at least in the direction of “shorter games should be cheaper” but there’s way more that goes into a game than playtime, and even that isn’t an easily quantifiable metric.
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All very good points. Realistically, these companies charge what people will pay. Whether folks argue it's increased cost of development or shareholder bonuses driving prices, it really doesn't matter. So long as consumers are actively spending $70-100 per title that's where the market will fall. While prices trending down sounds good on paper, games compared to other media have avoided price hikes for a very long time so it was bound to happen.
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ITs quite clear that they are only caring about their own asses and more profit, not the benefit to industry. This makes sense pretty much only for publishers like rockstar who aim to milk one game for decades. So obviously they would be much more better off with some type of subscription based payment which bring in money over time, not as one time payments.
And I love how these "industry changing" ideas usually come from already established publishers who are pretty much already swimming in cash.
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That's basically the free-to-play or subscription model.
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From what I understood from the article, the publisher seems to believe that games should be priced per hour. His main argument revolves around the fact that games such as Alan Wake 2 (which is a great game) have 12 hours whereas Assassin's Creed Valhalla offers more than 150 hours, but they're priced the same. Also, some games such as GTA 6 and Baldur's Gate take much more time to develop than annual released games such as a franchise like Call of Duty. The article also mentions:
"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 $70 recently is sort of the maximum they can hope for."
The article pursues by explaining how some games have opted for micro-transaction to keep a steady revenue. The example given is about GTA Online which reportedly made billions of dollars.
Personally, I don't have a problem with micro-transaction. As long as it doesn't have a true impact on the game then I think it's totally fine. If we take the widely popular game World of Warcraft, they do have an in-game shop that sells mounts, cosmetics, pets, and other things. However, they have no impact on terms of gameplay nor do they give any advantage over someone who hasn't bought an item from the in-game shop.
Another example would be League of Legends (LoL) which has grossed more money than World of Warcraft and is also a free-to-play game. Everything in LoL is technically free and can be obtained without buying in-game currency. Also, everything the shop has to offer is purely cosmetic and doesn't give you an advantage over other players. In fact, by simply playing the game you can obtain pretty much everything you can buy with real money. In my case, I have never spent a dollar in the game, but I do have all the champions unlocked and a bunch of skins which I acquired just by playing the game. Sure some skins are pretty nice and are missing in my collection, but eventually, by playing the game I'll get them.
In summary, I think that keeping the 70$ for a game is reasonable due to the cost of life, the time, and the effort it takes to make a single game. However, should a game want more revenue, the option for micro-transaction that offers no advantage would always be a viable option.
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hes right
i want to play 0 hours, and will be paying 0$
the older games filled with mods are the best
once they removed mods from new game, if only for a short time because the backlash. lost all trust in them
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prices set expectations ... and i am sure i wont shove them more money in their ass after the microtransactionfest of gta online ..
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I suppose rockstar is going a little crazy seeing how long gta5 online is alive. So such ideas come into mind. But there are not so many games that can be played for so long. The idea itself is not wrong. And there will always be piracy
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If publishers EVER do this, my backlog would finally meet its maker. Ha!
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/11/11/gta-6s-publisher-says-video-games-should-theoretically-be-priced-at-dollars-per-hour/?sh=3c66267373f7
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