Submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to games@lemmy.world
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
They should pay me for testing their beta software
They should pay me for testing their beta software
By your own admission you buy the games anyway. You could just not. Companies only listen when it hurts their bottom line.
I refund poor quality software on Steam. So no, I do my best to not support.
I agree, as should salaries of employees. Every hour you produce something measurable you get paid. See how far that idea goes.
I don’t actually disagree with moving from the 60/70 USD standard, but instead I think big budget blockbuster studios should die off, and focus on making optimized, shorter, and more creative games.
Honestly, if I get a 30 minutes to an hour of quality play time per dollar, it’s worth the cost to me.
That seems fair. People pay way more per hour for movies in the theater and other entertainment all the time.
Unpopular opinion - I completely agree. In terms of cost per entertainment-hour, video games are by far the best value compared to similar media.
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.
Yet they continue to rake in cash at the current pricing models. They don’t need to raise it.
I remember having no money as a teenager and talking with a friend about how a 50 dollar game could be our sole entertainment for 2-8 weeks
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!
Ima sell my watered down soup in dollars per deciliter.
I hate dollars per hour to determine how something is good value. I could sit and watch a 3-4 hour movie but if it’s a genre I dislike then I’ll probably not feel I got value out of it. Likewise if I buy a 70 quid game but it’s 15-20 hours and it’s got a great story, impressive visuals and solid mechanics then I’ll have got my money’s worth but if something is 70 quid and it’s filled with things that feel like a checklist to do then I’ll end up regretting the price that I paid.
It all said means that companies that would release a tight and cohesive 15-hour game will instead release a jumbled sloppy episodic 150-hour mess to pad their pockets.
It would mean worse games coming out that cost more money
The subscription meta in full swing.
I found my next game to not buy.
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
Then that would mean all those games that only had 40 hour campaigns that sold for $60 were $20 too expensive.
Sounds like pure greed to me
... or perhaps pennies per second.
Even a penny a second works out to $36 an hour.
Hour of original content would be fine with me. So all those GTA V should be free…
I enjoy low priced games as much as the next person but I’m inclined to agree. At least a little.
In terms of currency per hour some games are outright bargains when you compare to a cinema trip and yet the triple A’s cost more to produce than your average film.
He’s certainly correct, at the purely analytical, quantitative level. But if humans were purely analytical and quantitative, then laissez-faire capitalism would function perfectly.
The problem arises from games having more costs than just monetary though. The cost of a film, asides the ticket price, is a couple hours of sitting on your ass. The cost of a video game, willingly paid by every gamer, is actually hours of practice with hand eye coordination, various video game systems and conventions, time spent learning that specific game, etc etc. You can see, objectively, this is a lot of “investment” required. Which is one of the big reasons not everyone is much of a gamer.
The executives should be factoring this cost in too though, because your subconscious does when it decides how much “fun” you’re having at whatever you’re doing right now.
Well you have to take the price of the system you run the game on into account. If you spent hundreds of dollars to buy a game and a console (pc gaming is even worse), you need a lot of content to reach parity with something like a cinema ticket or a Netflix subscription.
This hobby is expensive, particularly because it’s main demographics is children or cash strapped young adults. Maybe it’s good value if you spend hundreds of hours on a few games, maybe take-two is feeling that it doesn’t get its fair share from these hundreds of dollars, but they should not be deluded into thinking it’s cheap for the customer.
This is 80s company greed all over again that almost destroyed the video games industry.
We never learn.
WindyRebel@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.