GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Games@lemmy.world – 416 points – GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour
forbes.com

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.

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Thank fuck for indie devs making the best games right now at an affordable price.

I have over a thousand games in my steam library and my most played is dominated by indie games.

I am curious which indie titles you would recommend.

Edit: Some of these are not necessarily indies (solo or small team devs), it's more like indie/niche games I consider good.

Non Steam (yet):

Not in any specific order, my steam library is about 80% either Indie or non-AAA.

In addition to that:

  • Atom RPG;
  • Dead Cells;
  • Into the breach;
  • Shadowrun series;
  • This war of mine;
  • Dust - An Elysian Tail;
  • Broforce;
  • Bastion;

Many more of course.

Would you say bastion is the best supergiant title pre-Hades? I've been eyeing both that and transistor for a while

I would. But I didn't play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There's an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.

CrossCode! Why is this freaking game still such an underdog?
Zero Sievert is also well worth mentioning.

CrossCode isn't my type of a game but I saved Zero Sievert, looks good!

Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn't hear about it until recently. I'm so glad I didn't completely miss out on it. It's like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.

I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.

Literally my idea of the perfect game.

Welcome to the CC simps, because you're certainly not the only one who does that. It's generally a no brainer considering that they also still offer a demo to just try it out. Of course that doesn't tell you much about the great story and characters, but I think the fluidity of the movement and combat system definitely can convince people over already.

I recently played Outer Wilds for the first time last week. Games like this, I always worry they're overhyped, but it was great.

There's a lot of good games on this list, plus ones I've never played before, I should probably check some of them out.

Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it's safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.

This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven't given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It's by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.

Heard about it, haven't played it yet but I did have heard great stuff about it, it's definitely on my future radar

Can confirm these are absolute bangers

Can confirm your confirmation, some of these are incredible experiences

I agree with you man, thanks for agreeing with me

That feeling when you have played (and loved!) Like 90% of this list lmao

..do I play too many games?

..nah

I'd like to add Ardor to the list. It's a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It's pretty polished for an actual free to play game.

What's your genre?

Can you recommend any dungeon crawlers or survival games?

Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is my all-time favorite mobile game. It's a Rogue-like with hundreds/thousands of ways to win; but be prepared to be humbled.

Literally just made it to the shop keeper after defeating the slime boss. It's a hell of a game. Maybe one of the best.

See I normally like this type of game but struggle to get into this one in particular. I'm also confused about most items in it.

Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.

Ape Escape is very quick to pick up and a blast to play. It's more of the old school side scrolling style, but definitely in the survival theme.

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Tower defense and strategy in general.

Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I've player the most on mobile by some distance. It's £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.

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I was going to reply, but most of the games I would recommend are already listed out.

Some gems are missing, but I'd need to be at my PC to figure out which ones.

However, I did not see Unexplored 1 mentioned by anyone off the top of my head.

A few of those games form my core of things I'll go back to every so often, though my list isn't all Indies. I'd probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it's in a relatively decent state at the moment and it's somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.

Disco elysium

Yea, I wouldn't give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I'd sail the seas for it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It'll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.

In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.

Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.

Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.

Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.

Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.

Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.

Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it... a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.

Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.

Death's Door, top down dungeon crawler/RPG.

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The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.

Do people get refund if the game have a bug or a glitch that slow them down?

An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.

As a Morrowind player, I feel attacked

Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying 'dollars per hour' while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)

Stupid metric by some rich asshole who is solely focused on making more money.

I read something like this and my immediate thought is “torches, pitchforks, guillotines.”

Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games

Seriously I'm tired of all these gaming CEOs that don't play games therefore are so out of touch. Guy is just another Kotick clone.

Theoretically he can go fuck himself. All that is going to do is make games drag out mindless crap with no actual value entertainment-wise.

The most successful games are already like that, and I hate it. Give me a good story in a compact experience (luckily, still many examples for that).

First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.

Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you'd spend 3 times as long trying to finish the same game, and now they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.

Sounds like someone wants me to not buy their overpriced game.

Yup. For every idiot like this, there's an indie game or even a Larian Studios offering MUCH better bang for your bucks.

Rockstar's games are the rare few I'd say are worth a full $60

That was before they started diarrhea shitting themselves since the founders left. GTA Trilogy, GTA+, and removing cars people paid for in Online is just a taste of things to come.

I specifically mean their in-house single player games, so only GTA V and RDR2 for the last decade.

That's what I mean, Rockstar was a brand you could trust until after RDR2. Founders left right after and you can see how things changed right after.

Yeah, they left and the change was IMMEDIATE. Holy moly the shit show that was RDO. If you were playing that game back then, you could see the crumbling of the company happening in real time, it was wild. RDO being left to rot is my Roman empire, and I wonder if the founders feel regret at all with how their creation was treated by the company they left. Or if they just dry their tears with hundos these days?

Heck, I don't even feel like RDR2 lived up to it's full potential before they left, what with post-game being the most buggy and unfinished-feeling part of the whole game. It felt like it was just waiting for DLC content to be added, since it was a huge patch of map with hardly anything going on. Sigh, who knows.

Too bad it will be at a minimum $70, and i bet with the hype, even $80, while also being chockful of microtransactions.

It's Rockstar Games, they love microtransactions and Sharkcards and will more than likely implement more greed tactics into their next big game (GTA 6). I'm still pissed off over the bilking they did with the bunker series in GTA 5. They're a ruthless, greedy company. And don't forget those times they went after those fanboys/talented game designers who were revamping their old games like GTA 4. Those kids were super talented and Rockstar busted their asses like the mobsters they are. Fuck Rockstar and their next GTA greed fest.

Don't call them mobsters, they probably think that sounds cool. More like corporate sell outs.

Sure, great idea, why wouldn't I want more low quality padding content in my games? It's not like they already have too much of it.

That's a subscription. He should try it and see how that goes.

GTA+ is already a thing..

Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their "+" more attractive.

The less someone actually plays games, the more this idea will make sense to them.

Gamers, especially older gamers, will know this is a BS metric.

"We were going to charge $60 but then we added 40 hours of tailing side quests so now we're charging $120" - Ubisoft.

Hours of gameplay is a god awful metric and only a corporate dipshit could utter such a stupid fucking sentence.

4k+ hours on path of exile. I played D2 probably more hours than my kids have been alive.

Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that's all people do. Here's the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.

he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:

"In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that's perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to."

So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics

He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I'm sure will continue with 6. I'll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I'm still a fan, but I'm not giving them another cent.

"I will pirate because you didnt give me sp dlc" is one of the craziest reasons ahaha. GTA 5 was good value all things considered, was a great game.

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree. It had plenty of content to make up for its price tag.

I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is "i'm going to pirate your next game" then you're probably just pushing them further into a direction you don't want them to go.

They were not going to shift course on game design based on a single sale turned pirate

If you think that giant companies don't look at social media responses to their games in order to make future decisions, I have a bridge to sell you.

If you think that companies look at social media more than their own sales metrics, then Ive probably already sold you a bridge and have a loyalty program for you to sign up for, to get 15% off your next purchase

If you think that giant companies don’t look at social media responses to their games in order to make future decisions, I have a bridge to sell you.

I've been part of Community Management at a major studio, and I was told to stop 'wasting their time' with customer feedback, so which bridge is it?

Odds that you can name the studio?

I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it's more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti... mizion, Sledge..wammer Ztudios, 434... endustries, Pioware.. Grames?

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That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it's no better value than any other story driven single player game.

gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it's been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.

we can complain about a lot, I'll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst "very very competitive".

Ah but see, that may only be due to GTA V actually having the development time and releasing as a single player game because Online wasn't near being ready when the game launched. Now that Online is out and that's where their focus has been, we will most likely see the base single player game quality suffer dramatically. Look at games like Call of Duty. They used to have phenomenal single player experiences, and now you're lucky if you get something worth playing at all.

So I would point at rdr2. That came out long after gta v online made mountains of money. Large single-player experience. Online existed, didn't detract.

That may be true for many, but I'm willing to bet most of those "hours" they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn't included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.

If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don't try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they'll ignore after release, and don't be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.

Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!

the makers of the software they use also have their own algorithms for determining pricing yes.

Yeah, and I bet they’re affordable. What Strauss is proposing is a massive increase in initial purchase price for those that aren’t paying subscriptions. $70 is borderline affordable for a lot of people as is and that will now be a higher entry price. I’m not in that boat, personally, but I can see how it would be detrimental to the gaming industry as a whole.

Then again, there is the flip side where people are now forced to choose the games they can afford that year even more carefully (1-2 vs 6-7 or more as an example) and if a game fails expectations and someone misses out on something else, then maybe it’ll start putting some shitty developers out of business.

They aren't proposing increasing the price. Did you read the article or my initial comment about how people just read the bad headline and argue against it at all?

Of course I read the article. It specifically says, “… value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that's perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to…”

I’m beginning to wonder if you read the article. They want to charge off of one value and add it to an initial base value. If you think this idea has nothing to do with increasing profits then I have a bridge in the Sahara to sell you.

Nothing in that is about raising the price, the whole thing is about him showing off what great value the series is by their metrics.

Here's where you say "of course it is! I've imagined that this leads to the next thing which is raised prices". Cool, go make these comments on the thread about them raising prices, or proposing raising prices. That isn't what is happening here.

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Can't wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.

One correction:

Apple releases "iTetris" for $3000. Their fans claim it's way better than the original. It's the same game with only 8 levels, but you can pay extra for more.

We're living in a dystopia so boring that the future is easily predictable.

I've often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it's very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.

This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous 'story'

I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don't want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.

And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn't always the case.

I don't know if shorter games should command a lower price. It depends on the value you get out of it.

It is debatable, but would you pay 70$ for a 2-hours game and another 10x70$ for DLCs and expansions that would extend the original content?

But this also doesn't mean that you should feel your game with generic content in order to make it longer either. It is a fine line but I know that I would have a real problem justifying 70€ for 2 hours of game content without replayability, even if the game is amazing.

And shorter games should naturally command a lower price

This is exactly the thing that doesn't make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It's half the length of The Last of Us 2

I agree, that's why i think Take Two owe me $23 because i finished GTAV in 37 hours.

Though i hope Wube, Bethesda, and Fromsoft won't bill me for my playtime...

"breaking news: a czech man known only as kovarex has rocketed to the top of the most wealthy men in the world list. Legislation is currently being drafted to regulate the use of the drug 'factorio' with several legislators describing as 'extremely addictive. Like, so addictive. Really guys.' "

I played 3 GTAs, and I only enjoyed gta 2. They owe me money

Ok so somebody should ask this CEO how he expects gamers to pay potentially $200 per game.

What an idiot, games are priced at what the market will bear and they've pretty much reached that limit now.

When you get paid in 6-7 digits annually, ideas start to form that the peasants aren't paying you enough of their 2 digits.

He's out of touch and thinking about profit, like the blizz ceo pushing games-as-a-service

I always prefer a good 5 hour experience over a bland 60 hour experience.

It does sound like the next step here would be adding as much low quality filler content as possible to spread out play time.

Just add a bunch of GOW-style "slowly crawl through the narrow space" parts to pad the play time!

Well, fuck them, at this point indie games are often better than AAA titles anyway.

If video games were priced by hours of dev time, I could kind of agree (with the theory, in practice it doesn't really make sense). But let's be honest here - that's not what he means at all.

Not only is it not what he means but this same asshole would probably force devs to add padded objectives just so he could claim it takes more hours to finish. The new GTA will have 1000 missions where you have to walk across the whole map to retrieve some object that needs to be walked back to the other side if this dick gets his way. It’ll be the first game in history where it takes 2 years to 100% it and costs $200 so it’s a steal - only $100 per year of gameplay!

For some reason I can't see your answer on the post: despite us being both from lemmy.world and me being able to otherwise access your profile and see your posts and comments, the only way I can see it is in my notifications, not as an answer to my post. Anyway.

That's why the original argument is inherently flawed: for the same price, I'd rather have 20 hours of carefully crafted content than 500 hours of AI generated fetch quests in a basic, procedurally generated open world from the latest version of the Ubisoft game framework. As a customer, I'm not buying playtime, I'm also buying the quality of that playtime.

This is also why we don't pay for a movie, an album, or even a show or an exhibition by their duration.

Man, imagine if movies or books charged you by the hour. Lord of the Rings would make bank!

Thing about a book (and a movie) is, that once it's out, it's done (99.99% done).

For a game like GTA Online (be it V or VI), there are ongoing server costs, massive content updates, support, all that jazz.

I'm not saying I support it, just that I understand

your understanding is misplaced; their ongoing costs are MASSIVELY offset by their in-app purchases already. to claim they need more is just greed.

Game companies make profits unrivaled by any other industry and all we hear is "it's not economic to sell a game for 60 bucks." Now there are microtransactions and those profits skyrocketet. Now even that is still not enough. It's just Ridiculous.

When did I say I support microtransactions? It doesn't have to be both at once.

That's why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions. The studio needs to have a constant revenue stream to maintain the development and the infrastructure cost.

That's why live services game needs to end

That’s why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions.

Not really. Subscriptions are a thing, or used to be, at least. But they're nowhere as profitable as mtx.

That’s why live services game needs to end

MMORPGs would like a word with you

Then why are not GTA games priced at $20-30?

Because they offer thousands of hours of play time? Like seriously, all the things you could say against this idea and you choose to go go with "But GTA, one of the games with the most lively open worlds, where you can do so much exploring and random stuff, doesnt have much play time"

I don't think he said that.. I think he meant playtime is overpriced which considering the amount of people worldwide that play gta and the profit ratios it definitely is

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So practically he wants to create a SaaS model to eternally milk their user base. As much as I like the game devs working for rockstar, their management is an utterly horrendous bunch of scums and in a way I wish that GTA6 is one giant flop.

They're gonna price it at 100$, i can feel it in ny bones

I hear something in the distance... Like waves crashing upon a shore...and... And I hear...

Yar har fiddly dee...

Go for it, i ain't interested in GTA 6, legal or otherwise.

Of course it's a Forbes article.

Forbes says companies should make more money. Wow hot take Forbes thanks

Good luck with that.

grabs pirate hat

Awesome proposal. Some indie games would suck me dry and I'd be paying 1/4 of the price for AAA releases! Is this the redistribution of wealth Marx has been talking about?

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.

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

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.

well yup and thats what they want the games to be. a service. multiplayer diablo2 was much like an mmo but no servers needed. You could run the server and play with your friends or even open it up but everyone needed to have a copy of the game. so it has been done and they want to do it more and more.

While I'm super into self hosting instances, that usually defeats the point of MMOs. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that the publishers of MMOs often defeat the point of their game after long enough anyhow.

All that has generally pushed me towards round based games where the only advantages are my own personal skill.

Check out my new game: Paint Drying Simulator! With real time paint drying action! 6000 hours of play time! Only $129.99!

Wow, that's like less than $0.03 per hour of playtime? Sign me up.

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!

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

So I should have paid about $5000 to Tencent because I played League of Legends?

Absolute dogshit. Nobody owns rights to the output of my attention span. Nobody gets to tap my wallet like it's a tree.

Just because someone has some criteria that they use to judge value for money doesn't mean that you have to follow it...

Way to completely miss the point.

Nobody is saying that you should be paying minimum $1/hr, I’m saying that if I’m getting less playtime than equates to $1/hr I haven’t gotten my moneys worth and I don’t find that the game would be worth buying.

Oh heck. How did I miss that this wasn't another subscription thing like Unity? I'm hearing old adages during a weird time.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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. [EDIT: I did buy Zelda TOTK for $50, correction]

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.

I actually did buy the new Zelda but I waited until I found it on sale for $50 a few weeks after launch. It was a temporary deal but I knew it would likely be the best price on TOTK for a long time given the trend of high prices staying high for Switch games. My kid and I are still playing it so it was worth the high price considering the market status quo.

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.

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!"

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

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.

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

Factorio would cost me $370

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.

I bought it for my friends because I felt bad having only payed 20$ to the devs for thousands of hours of content.

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.

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 also 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

Oh yeah, make me hate this rotten company even more dude. Keep it coming.

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.

Hour of original content would be fine with me. So all those GTA V should be free…

Ima sell my watered down soup in dollars per deciliter.

This is 80s company greed all over again that almost destroyed the video games industry.

We never learn.

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!

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.

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.

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