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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Executives are assholes and should not be listened to, ever.

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.

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 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...

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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.

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

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.

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

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

Calling it now, they're about to introduce a monthly sub for the solo mode.

Unrelated question, does anyone know any good pirate sites?

Of course it's a Forbes article.

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

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.

LMAO yeah right, eat shit take two

Good luck with that.

grabs pirate hat

MW3s campaign for $4. Cool.

By that logic, imagine how much a soccer ball will cost!

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?

Shit like this is why I pirate.

So he's suggesting AAA games be about $5-$10 right?

Any company that attacks modders can die in a fire. I for one won't be buying this crap.

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

Oh God, Factorio will cost me my life savings

High quantity, low quality?

Maybe video games should be priced at value per hour

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

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.

€200 for Vampire Survivors?

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

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

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

Please insert Shark Card to continue.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

Take two dollars for every hour you play

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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

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."

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.

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

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!"

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.

One Dollar One Hour? Did Take Two hire Spoole?

Take Two, are you fuckig high?

The same thought pattern gamers have had for years.

Factorio would cost me $370

My logical brain: He’s not wrong. The rest of my brain: Yeah, good luck with that, asshole.

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.

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

Spoole has finally been vindicated

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.

Alright so then pay us for the time spent in loading screens lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2irMfxaRZRM

They should pay me for testing their beta software

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.

Then that would mean all those games that only had 40 hour campaigns that sold for $60 were $20 too expensive.

I found my next game to not buy.

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!

The subscription meta in full swing.

Sounds like pure greed to me

I agree, as should salaries of employees. Every hour you produce something measurable you get paid. See how far that idea goes.

... or perhaps pennies per second.

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.

How much should Tetris cost, given it can be played endlessly and forever?

We already price games by dollars per hour: cost of game over game length.

Games like WoW that literally price per hour like they’re AOL or a parking meter aren’t very popular.

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.

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.