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.
€200 for Vampire Survivors?
not enough tbh
Any company that attacks modders can die in a fire. I for one won't be buying this crap.
Paradox and Bethesda/Microsoft can be first on that line.
Thanks for killing cities skylines and starfields potential over selfish bullshit… I’m not bitter, you’re bitter!
Can I counteract that with “then maybe you should release finished products at the initial public release date”?
Wellllll I think it should be priced by how much I enjoy it. Make a great game, get paid booko bucks!
Wouldn’t that be covered by the proposal? Make a shitty game and I’ll barely play it.
There are holes in my comment but just trust me.
High quantity, low quality?
Maybe video games should be priced at value per hour
It would encourage me to complete games as fast as possible and stress me the fuck out. Renting games per hour is a dreadful idea
Sure thing! GTA 5 average game time was 52h (main+extras), so its price is then about $1 per hour.
Have fun implementing the payment system that reliably measures and bills this, internationally!
Yeah, but dollars per hour is stupid. I care more about enjoyment per hour. Just maximizing play time is what has cause open world games to be boring as hell. I’d rather spend less time with a game that’s more enjoyable over a shorter period than more time doing the same few activities over and over and getting nothing out of it.
To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you’d stop playing.
The fun in gta starts after the story is done though. Thats when you can spend thousands of more hours in it
He didn't say it but he wants you to RENT software not OWN it. Make no mistake, this would be BAD for consumers.
thats what mmos are. its been done.
That’s not software. That’s a service. If you can’t pay, you can’t expect them to be maintaining servers.
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.
Dollars per hour divided by total copies sold. Eventually, it’s free.
Please insert Shark Card to continue.
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!
So we are renting the game instead of buying it. Great
Take two dollars for every hour you play
Did John ‘charge for ammo’ Riccitello end up at take two this quickly!?
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.
No. This is absolutely wrong. If a game is short but does something unique and engaging it’s worth more than the next open world game that wastes your time. The amount of time a game takes to complete has next to nothing to do with the value a consumer gets from the game.
A “proper game” isn’t one that takes 60+ hours to complete. A proper game is one that takes an idea and does something interesting with it, or at least tries to create the most enjoyable experience for a player as possible.
I don’t want to trudge through an open world collecting bullshit they put in just to make me spend more time. I want an interesting experience that maximizes my enjoyment per hour. If it’s low enjoyment per hour there’s a million other things I could be doing instead.
Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states “product leadership”.
I agree, we don’t need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.
The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I’m still having fun I’d be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant “collect all these flags” middle finger for 100% completion.
Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.
I wish I could get a partial money back if I played 2-3 hours because the game is crap…
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.”
There absolutely can be a market like that. We’re in a digital utopia where we don’t actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn’t charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just “own” it.
But I suspect most of his stats show that there’s a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn’t even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn’t want to say goodbye to that money.
I don’t want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?
there simply cannot be a pricing model like that
Microtransactions? Battle passes? Episodic releases? Is the guy purposefully playing dumb?
Goes further back than that. In the late 90s early 2000s basically all 3 of the MMOs on the market were subscription models (Ultima, Everquest, and Warcraft are the ones that spring to my mind). Essentially a pay per time scheme where if you were playing the game you paid for it monthly.
This guy is just so far down the modern game industry rabbit hole he forgot that it wasn’t as profitable as the soul sucking microtransaction/whaling hellscape that’s become the norm.
This is Lemmy, nobody reads the article. They just react to the headline they know is cherry picked and find a way to work it into whatever circlejerk suits their fancy.
I’m still not going to buy games at $70. I don’t care enough about their BS to pay that much.
Plenty of great games in the $20 to $30 market all day long. I’ve put a few hundred hours into a handful of games that were that cheap over the last few months and have bought zero $50+ games.
For example, I would like to buy Armored Core 6 but I’m not going to pay the “discounted” price of $53 that it’s available at now. I can wait until it’s further discounted, while I play lots of other games that I already have.
I bought the new Zelda game for $70, and while fun, didn’t feel worth $70. I won’t be paying $70 anymore. Most games just can’t put out the value required unless they actually build the game from the ground up with a phenomenal story, good replayability and (optional) co-op.
You guys are competing against Deep Rock Galactic, Baldur’s Gate 3, Subnautica, Battlefield 1, Risk Of Rain 2 / Risk of Rain Returns, and many other total gems. If you aren’t beating those high standards, you can’t charge $70.
Take 2 is playing a dangerous game betting the farm on a single property and then trying to come up with new ways to milk it. When it falls out of favor it is going to sink them.
It’s worked fine for blizzard and wow for the past 10+ years even though is a hollow shell of what it used to be.
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!”
The same thought pattern gamers have had for years.
And it’s always been a bad one, because not all time spent playing a game is equal in value.
Case study: Literally every Ubisoft game in the late '10s and '20s
Factorio would cost me $370
I bought it for my friends because I felt bad having only payed 20$ to the devs for thousands of hours of content.
Don’t talk to Dota 2, counterstrike, valorant or league of legends players.
Inb4 anyone mentions the hundreds of other game I didn’t mention.
Hey, what about the hundreds of other games you didn’t mention?
One Dollar One Hour? Did Take Two hire Spoole?
Thank you for bringing up some happy memories
Take Two, are you fuckig high?
Oh yeah, make me hate this rotten company even more dude. Keep it coming.
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 with the time nor the money
Alright so then pay us for the time spent in loading screens lol
If it was a dollar an hour, then GTAV would be $1208…
But of course, TV AFKing took up a solid chunk of this time… because of forced waiting periods. Sooooo combine a pay-to-play per hour model and forced waiting periods then you’ve got MTX “Shark cards” with extra annoying steps.
Spoole has finally been vindicated
JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Shit like this is why I pirate.