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.
Dear CEO,
Games that don’t respect my time are not worth more to me.
CEO wants more money, more news at 11.
Joking aside, length of a game is a terrible metric for price. I always consider how much time I spend playing a game compared to the price for the ROI. But a lot of games just add filler content that is copy and paste missions.
It definitely should not. Gamers use it because there are a range of genres of game. JRPG’s ala Monster Hunter and Disgaea are pretty much a 300 hour minimum. There is no way GTA ever produces something worth 300 hours of gameplay, the closest they’ve gotten is their Online versions which frankly, would be horrible if they were priced per hour.
Racing games would have very little merit in price per hour. Sports games probably in between.
Then there’s the whole fact that pacing can be implemented at the whims of the creators. It takes 4 hours to get energy so you can continue? Well, that 4 hours of paid playtime baybee, payyup!
How about games with little to no story? Should the new CoD only be $25 because it’s campaign sucks? It’s short after all. Or will they try and include multiplayer time, you know, something independent and timeless. Will they become arcades and start charging you per round?
Horrible, horrible idea. No matter hour you look at it, hours per game are only good for gamers with specific intentions, be it their limited time, their desire to 100%, or to see if it simply respects their time in the first place.
Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It’s very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.
It’s yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don’t need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.
And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It’s very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.
It’s layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can’t tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.
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The interest in or aptitude of is irrelevant for the position of CEO. The CEO’s skill lies in increasing shareholder value, period, end of discussion. I don’t get why people still buy into the idea that CEOs give a good god damn about consumer’s opinions of quality - they never have.
Because it’s deeply dysfunctional how much of our society is driven by this shortsighted approach. A lot people are not surprised by it at this point, but just explaining and accepting that shareholder value is the only thing that matters to them doesn’t really fix the issues. And there’s a lot more issues caused by this than just how fun some games are.
We are beyond asking how it works or why, we should be asking what should be done about it.
While I’m not entirely inclined to disagree, I doubt his idea of how much an hour of gaming should cost your average player aligns very well with mine.
What he is doing sounds reasonable on the surface but it’s a rhetorical trick.
This is about getting players in forever live services to keep paying forever even if the game is not adding anything more to make it worth it. There is a hint of merit of paying for a game that you enjoy a lot but don’t forget how today games are endlessly padded out with grind and daily missions to keep players coming back out of habit, delaying access to what they really want to get, rather than because they are enjoying it. Nevermind that these tactics are also what gets people impatient and buying Shark Cards, for instance. It’s why the freemium model became so commonly used. He wants to profit in the mean time too.
1 dollar, 1 hour, that’s what I always say. /s
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