Now that streaming services have invented cable again, games reinvent arcades.
To the top for you!
Well, I believe that game publishers should be forced to work in vats filled to shoulder height with whale semen. Probably best for everyone if neither of us get our way.
Jokes on him. I have a steam library of games I've never played. Let's make this retro active and I'll take all my money back, please.
Yup, I have over 1k unplayed games in my library, which is enough to last me the rest of my life.
The only reason I still buy games is for my wife.
Piracy is there for that reason
Aren't most games on steam refundable?
This headline is clickbait. The actual article was posted in another thread and while I don't have it available to me right now, the gist was basically that the CEO was just explaining how they had calculated the price of their games based on operational/production costs and average expected entertainment-hours.
Thank you
Congrats you just reinvented the subscription.
And I think we should pay in punches to the face to this CEO, but hey, opinions, opinions
Why? Because he said a $60-70 game should have nearly that amount of content?
Well, I guess that's the end of video games for me. We had a good run there for a while
That’s the end of new AAA games. There’s still loads of older and indie games out there.
Yup, the golden era of AAA games has been over since after the 360/PS3 days arguably.
Now it’s all corporatized and basically trying to nickel-and-dime users - which apparently a large amount of users are perfectly okay with (more or less) due to devs still pushing out battle/season passes, $20+ MTX skins, and lootboxes.
I don't think all AAA games would go that route. A bunch of them definitely would but some of the publishers that have a passion for games and not just cranking out the same shit year after year would definitely not go that route.
I'm sure that's not going to increase grinds
Microsoft will send the bills for Solitaire and Minesweeper next week.
Uh oh Age of Empires is going to be painful
Factorio devs just became trillionaires
Might as well just release it in an arcade and charge quarters.
Speedrunners be like, "oh a discount!"
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Without further research, i have to imagine he means charged per hour of gameplay, so a 40 hour game, a 10 hour game, and a 120 hour game should all be priced differently.
Considering replay value I'm not sure how you actually accomplish that pricing method in a reasonable way, but i don't fault him for thinking in that way (assuming it is not actually streaming)
Edit:
I'm not saying i agree with the quote. I don't think it's fair to be angry at an assumption, so be mad at what he actually meant. Also, the actual quote at least has some level of merit, even if i think it's a bad idea (certainly not as awful as a subscription model).
Here's the full quote with source:
"Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick isn't concerned with upsetting fandoms, as reinforced by his latest comments that video games should be priced on their “per hour value”, aka based on the hours of gameplay you get."
"Length" of a game is useless out of context. Games like the later assasins creed are bloated garbage with overinflated playtime. On the other hand you have games with procedural generation, optional endgames, post launch content and the simple fact that a small, but still significant amount of players will play through a short game multiple times, because they enjoyed it so much/wanna get better. (In my case, thats Furi)
What I am trying to say is, you can't really get a proper amount of hours of playtime for any game, unless its like 99% cutscenes.
Yeah, they're going to lose a ton of money if they try this.
Yarr harr fiddle de Dee,being a pirate is alright to be
Playing devil's advocate, I can understand the point because I already think in terms of value per hour.
That's why I can justify buying a less critically acclaimed game with more replayability than I can justify one that you realistically can only play once (starfield vs latest COD). And why I generally don't play mmo's because I can get a new game each month for $10, or play a $60 for a year straight. The total number of hours I have in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 or GTA 5 is crazy compared to how many hours I had in the last battlefield.
But it's not just about total hours. My first playthrough of Outer Wilds, Subnautica, and BioShock, were each more "valuable" than the time I spent in GTA, even though I've spent 10-100x the time in GTA. Then you've got games like Prey and Minecraft that have high replayability that is consistently high "value" time.
Games currently have an insane value/cost ratio. When compared to a theatre movie that costs ~$10/h, you'd have to have a phenomenal time. Especially compared with the cost per hour of a game like Skyrim or Baldur's Gate where you have to spend like a thousand hours just to get the whole story of the game.
This is a bit off topic, but there are some first-playthrough experiences that are truly magical, and you've named several of the games that did that for me. Subnautica, Outer Wilds, RDR2, Stardew Valley, Horizon Zero Dawn. I'm sure there are more (and older ones too like KOTOR and Paper Mario). Replayability is great, but I love those first playthroughs.
I mean some games do have monthly subscriptions. That's basically paying for so many hours at a time.
Filler quests. Filler quests everywhere.
Mandatory filler quests on opposite sides of the map with limited to no fast travel.
Or lots of escort missions.
Constant mandatory skill checks for skills you would never use that can only be leveled via proceedurally generated minigames designed by a hallucinating AI trained on 90s TV show or movie board games. "Why do I need a mastery of macrame to progress the storyline of this FPS?"
Joke's on anyone who actually thinks GTA 5 isn't already predatory as fuck, and to those excited for anything Rockstar Games has to offer going forward.
Does that mean the developers will be paid more or the C level executives?
You know the answer in your heart.
Honestly tho. If I a game has 300 hours of content, multiplayer, mod support, and is overall good I'll pay more for that game. Not $300 but maybe like $80-$90. That game doesn't and will never exist, at least not from a triple A studio
Oh no then we have to make all those transport regions... Instant transport for available parties (notifications from global, access behind a paywall)
This guy’s gonna hate speedrunners.
Does he know about the DLC concept? I feel like he doesn’t
See that requires effort on his part, and CEOs and Execs are very, very much interested in yacht time, not work time.
The genie's out of that lamp, indie devs can make great games now so i can safely ignore what the rich assholes want from me.
I feel like this headline may have been taken out of context. It's such a weird thing to say off cuff.
Yeah but now someone’s gonna try that
Charge what you want, I’m still just gonna pirate it 🤷🏼♀️
And we believe new games should be released every 10 year.
Not interested..
Who is that charming fellow? I feel he has lots of good ideas
He's so environmentalist he lives in the woods
That's how they used to be in the early days of the Internet. The earliest online multiplayer games like Cyberstrike charged by the hour. Cyberstrike cost six dollars an hour! Games in the BBS days were by the minute.
... Not that I feel there is any reason to bring that back. I am ok with live service games charging a monthly subscription though.
But the idea itself isn't as unheard of as everyone here acts like it is.
This is absolutely not what he is saying, and no one is pretending this is new
Depending on how exactly this is meant, this might not be controversial.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the "long plays" higher than the "short plays".
No. Seriously, just fucking no.
Games that are played for many hours are already rewarded by being more popular, meaning more people buy them, meaning more revenue. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book. I must have read LOTR a hundred times by now, and the Tolkien estate has benefitted not only from me buying the books multiple times (softcover, hardcover, kindle, audiobook) and giving them as gifts, but also from every other person on the planet doing the same.
Make a better product, and people will use it more, and more people will buy it. This is just drink verification can bullshit.
Honestly, I sorta hope they try it, just so they can blow millions of dollars on something that was absolutely doomed and I would hope it craters the company, or at least some careers.
All that pricing model would do is incentivize even more useless filler than a lot of games already have. If a game can say it offers 100 hours of playtime, but 70 of those hours are fetch quests, how many hours do you think they'd try to charge for?
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How many people would buy it, if it were that boring?
Every pricing model can be gamed. Look at the aforementioned sport games. They are often not super expensive, but get new releases with hardly any changes almost every year.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the “long plays” higher than the “short plays”.
So how would live-service games fit into that dynamic? Couldn’t Activision argue that CoD is a live-service game, and therefore, should be priced differently somehow?
Not ragging on you or anything, this is an actual question for discussion.
De facto that already happened - see WoW, it has been running that model for years.
At the end of the day, publishers can charge however they want, and there have been many different attempts already.
Not everyone uses every product for the same amount of time. That’s the first problem with this way of thinking. But let’s pretend that isn’t the case and apply this thinking to other forms of entertainment.
If I enjoy playing basketball should I have to pay by the hour to own a basketball?
Chess is one of the oldest games and it has way more hours played than all GTA games combined. Should we have to pay by the hour for a chess set?
Why stop at entertainment? I use my bed more than any game I’ve ever played. Does that mean I should pay by the hour to own a bed?
Seems pretty clear what motivated this CEO to say this.. greed
OSRS about to go for thousands of dollars.
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I'll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that's fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What mental image do you have of the average game buyer? A mindless idiot who just has to buy everything he's being advertised?
Of course you can make such a game. But nobody will buy it. It's that simple. BTW your construction is called straw man. You know damn well, that some games have been designed for longer playtimes, you just chose to ignore that knowledge.
I get what you mean and it makes sense. I just still hope it doesn't happen cause we all know the devs won't get paid more
