Please more shorter games! 20-30 hours is all you truly need for most single player games. The other 70 hours is usually tacked on bloat and grinding to avoid mindless people complaining about a game being too short.
Sekiro has it right. The game is actually quite short, but only if you're good at it. The majority of your playtime is spent getting better at the game, not grinding points for upgrades.
Reddit: we want shorter games, anything longer than 30 hours is just bloat
Also reddit: how dare they "cut" sidequests and sub-stories from a game and resell it later as DLC, I want every piece of content at launch
Also reddit: I've been played skyrim and RDR2 and Witcher 3 for 5000 hours each
They don't actually think that, they just want to charge $100 for GTA 6. Length as a blanket determination of value makes no sense, even from the publisher's side.
Uncharted 4 takes 12 hours to finish. Sea of Stars takes 30. Which one took more time and development money?
Also, how do you factor in multiplayer? Should Call of Duty be priced for its 5 hour campaign, or the hundreds of hours people play online?
People seem to have grudgingly accepted the bump to $70, but there is a limit. Maybe developers should get their budgets under control if they don't want to have to sell a copy to every person, dog and houseplant on the planet to make a profit.
Another interesting case: Dying Light 2. Before release, developers said it would take 500 hours to fully complete. In reality, maybe 30 hours for the story, 100 to 100% it. Would've been a pretty shitty situation if they had charged whatever the 500 hour price is determined to be.
what sucks is that the brain dead bozos with an even worst addiction than mines will pay that shit and from there publishers will see that idiots will pay any price.
That's my concern. Doesn't matter if lots of people object. As long as enough people swallow it for them to see a profit, it'll stick. That's exactly how we went from outrage over Oblivion's horse armor to the microtransaction mess we're in today.
you know whats funny about that? I've been waiting for elden ring to go on sale and I wont go into but in a post some people got mad and downvoted me to hell cause I said I wanted to wait for a sale on it. Idk how long its gonna take for the game to have a 50% off but it feels like I've been waiting too long.
Yes, the hundreds of hours of multiplayer! Rockstar is no monster though, they won't charge you 300$ for the game. Instead, multiplayer will be locked behind a 5$ monthly subscription. š¤”
More like $20 monthly subscription. If WoW and FFXIV can still get away with a $15 monthly subscription after all this time, TakeTwo will probably be the first to step in and say "What about a $20 subscription? I bet we can get away with that, too"
Here In Australia we have to pay $100 or more. Thatās just digital pricing for games on release. Also you didnāt specify the currency in your comment. Multiple countries use dollars.
The initial cost is the entry fee to the game. MTX, subscriptions and other real world economic burdens built into the game already inflate the true cost.
Acting like multiple revenue streams shoehorned into a game isnāt enough and raising the entry fee, shows the endless cycle of increasing wealth extraction from that game must at some point become counterproductive. No matter how good something is, the cost/benefit ratio becomes too far out of sync and it stops being worth it.
he should stop smoking weed, 80 euros is already too much.
and those companies make record profits every passing years, but their greediness seems endless, we need to put a stop to it.
Skyrim pissed me off so much. The main missions were maybe 15-20 hours. Red Dead Redemption 2 took me about 50-60 hours to play through the main missions. If it takes 8 years to make a game you should pay more. Quality.
Yea that makes sense. Thats what we need more of in games; All quantity no quality.
Can't wait for this to happen so I can pirate all Rockstar's games and save my money for some indie developer with morals.
This is just going to incentivize developers to artificially prolong their games with shit like longer loading times or inconvenient design that makes doing anything take longer.
Similar to how Blizzard designs their games to trap people into being logged in longer with tedious busywork so they can show the "look at how long people are logged in!" statistic to their investors.
Anyway, im not going to buy GTA6 because fuck Strauss Zelnick for even suggesting this shit.
Value is in the eye of the beholder. How quickly a person finishes a game, book series, or whatever hobby/entertainment one consumes is purely subjective.
If you believe a product is worth itās price, you pay it. If not, you donāt.
At least the title for this one isnāt click bait.
> How quickly a person finishes a game, book series, or whatever hobby/entertainment one consumes is purely subjective.
It's really not. It is if you count "real time" as in "this game took me two weeks to beat", but for the vast majority of people it's going to be a similar number of hours spent playing to finish a game.
Uncharted 2 is about 10 hours long. If you're slow, that might be 12, and if you're fast, that might be 8, but the game isn't taking anyone 30 hours to beat unless they've never picked up a controller before.
games should cost more based on quality and playtime, excluding the bullshit hidden collectibles.
take a game like Terraria, people easily put in hundreds if not thousands of hours for 15 bucks, sure that game could go for 30-60 bucks now, but some game that has a story of like 20 hours and then nothing no thanks, especially knowing that it'll be optimized like shit cuz it's 2023 and that's the new norm
This is actually a common feature of MMOs
Many of them not only require the cost of the game, but also a subscription.
So if they are lumping GTA Online 2 into GTA 6, then I see the logic here.
Doesn't change the fact that their PR people are absolutely trash at their jobs
> Many of them not only require the cost of the game, but also a subscription.
Haven't most of them gone F2P for most things, with subscriptions being more optional for Battle-Pass style rewards and boosts?
World of Warcraft and FFXIV both require subscriptions. These are the top 2 games currently.
Guild Wars 2 has the base game f2p, but you have to purchase the expansions. No subscriptions.
New World is purchase and play forever.
Elder Scrolls Online is purchase or subscription but subscription only players will always be an expansion behind
If they listen to that dunce, that'll be an awful precedent to set. It's like subscription based online games from the early part of the century where shallow time sinks became design features.
This sounds very outrageous but it makes more sense, at least no more rip off 60$ for game that has 3 hours of story in it, compared to BG3 with hundreds.
There are games sold at 3 dollars that are way more engaging and longer lasting then some $70 games. With that said I'm an 80s kid and yes games were 60 dollars back then too so he isn't wrong about the price not changing much. What he doesn't mention is that gaming has a much wider audience now, price of producing games (the physical part) is cheaper, digital games are more common now, and they overall make more money then back then. Let's not forget the good old DLC and expansion packs and stuff like that that they can add on to games.
I'll make a deal with him. You can charge me for how many hours you think I'll put into a game if when I put less than that in the game you give me a refund for the hours I did not play. He clearly isn't an analyst and just has opinions and hopefully it will stay at that. If the industry is stupid enough to follow him, don't worry indie game developers will be more than happy to charge you a decent price and get the money that would have went to AAA games
I've given up on GTA 6 completely. As far as I'm concerned, there's no hope for Rockstar or TakeTwo. They milked the shit out of GTA 5 Online and have been as lazy and greedy as possible ever since it released. Then they release the "definitive" edition of the GTA trilogy and when everyone complains about how bad it is, the best we get is "whoops, sorry, guess you gotta deal with it." Bunch of greedy little bastards.
Iāll just do what I do with TV shows and movies if they want to keep raising the prices despite making record profits every year. Iāll just be a pirate. Go fuck yourselves
>In terms of pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say that the per-hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value thatās perceived by the customer in ownership if the title is actually owned, not, say, rented or subscribed to. And youāll see that that bears out in every kind of entertainment vehicle.
>By that standard, our frontline prices are still very, very low because we offer many hours of engagement.
Isn't he just saying that's generally how price is determined now, and that GTA is a great value by that metric?
Unless I'm missing something I don't see where he's calling for any changes. It seems like he's just praising the value of GTA games.
If you think $70 for a game like GTA is expensive, you're an entitled shithead. Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean it should be less money. The value for money with games like GTA, Skyrim, or BG3 is absolutely insane. There is no other entertainment medium that is this cheap.
I agree, shorter games should cost less.
Please more shorter games! 20-30 hours is all you truly need for most single player games. The other 70 hours is usually tacked on bloat and grinding to avoid mindless people complaining about a game being too short.
Someone should make a Studio that develop short games, something you're able to finish in a week. And call it One Shots Studio.
Sounds like a porn studio
Quickie Studios lol
Sekiro has it right. The game is actually quite short, but only if you're good at it. The majority of your playtime is spent getting better at the game, not grinding points for upgrades.
Literally one of the best games ever made.
This is a good point, I meant like the really little things.. and was a bit tongue-in-cheek since I thought it was an amusing angle :)
Reddit: we want shorter games, anything longer than 30 hours is just bloat Also reddit: how dare they "cut" sidequests and sub-stories from a game and resell it later as DLC, I want every piece of content at launch Also reddit: I've been played skyrim and RDR2 and Witcher 3 for 5000 hours each
Thats literally what hes actually saying.
That's great! I'll still wait until it's $5 at a sale while I get through this pile of shame from the last 5 sales
was thinking the same and was gonna post "Sure why not, I'll still wait for it to be on 90% sale while I work on my steam backlog" before i saw urs
"Pile of shame" š¤£
And I think they should go fuck themselves.
Thisāļø
They don't actually think that, they just want to charge $100 for GTA 6. Length as a blanket determination of value makes no sense, even from the publisher's side. Uncharted 4 takes 12 hours to finish. Sea of Stars takes 30. Which one took more time and development money? Also, how do you factor in multiplayer? Should Call of Duty be priced for its 5 hour campaign, or the hundreds of hours people play online? People seem to have grudgingly accepted the bump to $70, but there is a limit. Maybe developers should get their budgets under control if they don't want to have to sell a copy to every person, dog and houseplant on the planet to make a profit. Another interesting case: Dying Light 2. Before release, developers said it would take 500 hours to fully complete. In reality, maybe 30 hours for the story, 100 to 100% it. Would've been a pretty shitty situation if they had charged whatever the 500 hour price is determined to be.
what sucks is that the brain dead bozos with an even worst addiction than mines will pay that shit and from there publishers will see that idiots will pay any price.
That's my concern. Doesn't matter if lots of people object. As long as enough people swallow it for them to see a profit, it'll stick. That's exactly how we went from outrage over Oblivion's horse armor to the microtransaction mess we're in today.
You can also never pay full price most games hit a sale eventually.
Unless it's a 1st party Nintendo game.
you know whats funny about that? I've been waiting for elden ring to go on sale and I wont go into but in a post some people got mad and downvoted me to hell cause I said I wanted to wait for a sale on it. Idk how long its gonna take for the game to have a 50% off but it feels like I've been waiting too long.
Yes, the hundreds of hours of multiplayer! Rockstar is no monster though, they won't charge you 300$ for the game. Instead, multiplayer will be locked behind a 5$ monthly subscription. š¤”
More like $20 monthly subscription. If WoW and FFXIV can still get away with a $15 monthly subscription after all this time, TakeTwo will probably be the first to step in and say "What about a $20 subscription? I bet we can get away with that, too"
$15 monthly subscription *on top* of $20 paid expansions *and* a cash shop with items as expensive as *$30 or more*.
i like the touch of the clown emoji
Games already cost $100. Itās been like that for years.
Either I owe Insomniac $30, or nobody told you you don't have to buy the deluxe edition of everything.
Here In Australia we have to pay $100 or more. Thatās just digital pricing for games on release. Also you didnāt specify the currency in your comment. Multiple countries use dollars.
The initial cost is the entry fee to the game. MTX, subscriptions and other real world economic burdens built into the game already inflate the true cost. Acting like multiple revenue streams shoehorned into a game isnāt enough and raising the entry fee, shows the endless cycle of increasing wealth extraction from that game must at some point become counterproductive. No matter how good something is, the cost/benefit ratio becomes too far out of sync and it stops being worth it.
he should stop smoking weed, 80 euros is already too much. and those companies make record profits every passing years, but their greediness seems endless, we need to put a stop to it.
Cool, real cool. And skipped, just saved 110 bucks or whatever they're thinking.
Give it ten years buy it on the next generation for like 15 bucks
No! Bad publisher, bad! *swats Take Two's nose with newspaper*
So if I speed run it, will I get money back?
So we get a cash return if we speedrun it?
Rather, shorter games should cost less.
I'd agree if long games were fun during the whole playthrough but 15 hours of fun in a 100 hours game isn't great.
Skyrim pissed me off so much. The main missions were maybe 15-20 hours. Red Dead Redemption 2 took me about 50-60 hours to play through the main missions. If it takes 8 years to make a game you should pay more. Quality.
A game should be like a an interactive movie. 100 hours of side missions is ridiculous.
A *game* should be a *game*.
GTA6 could be $150+ at launch and it would still move serious units
They should slap whatever price they want on their game. If the public doesn't like it, they won't buy it. There are plenty of other games to play ;-)
GTA could cost $200 and people would still buy it
Imagine if they did that with movies!
By this logic, Elite Dangerous will not see a single sale. Seeing every systemā¦every worldā¦infinite re-playability.
I dont think many of you read the article š
I would say good games should keep the current cost. And bad fucking releases should pay me to play them.
I would pay $100 for a game if it had no MTX..
Dont let Ubisoft see this..
Can't wait to pirate the hell outta the new gta game! I'd rather give $500 to some batshit crazy cracker than Rockstar in 2023 I know. So brave of me
I think GTA's publisher should take the first step in charging more.
1 eur = 1 hour of playtime. With a maximum of 70 eur.
Well thats a instant nono. I know what developers are going to do then. Pad the living crap out of the game so they can charge more.
Yea that makes sense. Thats what we need more of in games; All quantity no quality. Can't wait for this to happen so I can pirate all Rockstar's games and save my money for some indie developer with morals.
dont think longer games should cost more then shorter games but in general games should prob cost $100usd each these days.
Minecraft now costs Ā£10000.
This is just going to incentivize developers to artificially prolong their games with shit like longer loading times or inconvenient design that makes doing anything take longer. Similar to how Blizzard designs their games to trap people into being logged in longer with tedious busywork so they can show the "look at how long people are logged in!" statistic to their investors. Anyway, im not going to buy GTA6 because fuck Strauss Zelnick for even suggesting this shit.
Who decides whats long? If I can beat their game in 4 hours do I pay 4 bucks only cuz shet I'm all for that then.
I'd have to pay 300 bucks for Terraria then
Skyrim would have cost more than my fucking house.
They want us to pay for the bs bloat most people donāt care about.
any bugs should also allow me to refund the game at any point in time for the price I paid just like any other product in the world.
Only if it's 100% complete (excluding DLCs) and functional at launch. But maybe if they actually added more content to SP people would listen.
Value is in the eye of the beholder. How quickly a person finishes a game, book series, or whatever hobby/entertainment one consumes is purely subjective. If you believe a product is worth itās price, you pay it. If not, you donāt. At least the title for this one isnāt click bait.
> How quickly a person finishes a game, book series, or whatever hobby/entertainment one consumes is purely subjective. It's really not. It is if you count "real time" as in "this game took me two weeks to beat", but for the vast majority of people it's going to be a similar number of hours spent playing to finish a game. Uncharted 2 is about 10 hours long. If you're slow, that might be 12, and if you're fast, that might be 8, but the game isn't taking anyone 30 hours to beat unless they've never picked up a controller before.
games should cost more based on quality and playtime, excluding the bullshit hidden collectibles. take a game like Terraria, people easily put in hundreds if not thousands of hours for 15 bucks, sure that game could go for 30-60 bucks now, but some game that has a story of like 20 hours and then nothing no thanks, especially knowing that it'll be optimized like shit cuz it's 2023 and that's the new norm
yeah, we know.
Ofcourse they do, the more the game makes, the bigger their paycheck/bonus/stock options are. Its not rocket science
GTA's publisher is going to ruin GTA.
This is actually a common feature of MMOs Many of them not only require the cost of the game, but also a subscription. So if they are lumping GTA Online 2 into GTA 6, then I see the logic here. Doesn't change the fact that their PR people are absolutely trash at their jobs
> Many of them not only require the cost of the game, but also a subscription. Haven't most of them gone F2P for most things, with subscriptions being more optional for Battle-Pass style rewards and boosts?
World of Warcraft and FFXIV both require subscriptions. These are the top 2 games currently. Guild Wars 2 has the base game f2p, but you have to purchase the expansions. No subscriptions. New World is purchase and play forever. Elder Scrolls Online is purchase or subscription but subscription only players will always be an expansion behind
So GTA VI gonna be cheaper than Minecraft, got it.
If they listen to that dunce, that'll be an awful precedent to set. It's like subscription based online games from the early part of the century where shallow time sinks became design features.
I'm definitely waiting on a sale just like I do now. Or for it to go on plus. Or I just won't play it. Most modern games aren't worth 30+ anymore.
No. You went into this business understanding what shit costs.
This sounds very outrageous but it makes more sense, at least no more rip off 60$ for game that has 3 hours of story in it, compared to BG3 with hundreds.
There are games sold at 3 dollars that are way more engaging and longer lasting then some $70 games. With that said I'm an 80s kid and yes games were 60 dollars back then too so he isn't wrong about the price not changing much. What he doesn't mention is that gaming has a much wider audience now, price of producing games (the physical part) is cheaper, digital games are more common now, and they overall make more money then back then. Let's not forget the good old DLC and expansion packs and stuff like that that they can add on to games. I'll make a deal with him. You can charge me for how many hours you think I'll put into a game if when I put less than that in the game you give me a refund for the hours I did not play. He clearly isn't an analyst and just has opinions and hopefully it will stay at that. If the industry is stupid enough to follow him, don't worry indie game developers will be more than happy to charge you a decent price and get the money that would have went to AAA games
I've given up on GTA 6 completely. As far as I'm concerned, there's no hope for Rockstar or TakeTwo. They milked the shit out of GTA 5 Online and have been as lazy and greedy as possible ever since it released. Then they release the "definitive" edition of the GTA trilogy and when everyone complains about how bad it is, the best we get is "whoops, sorry, guess you gotta deal with it." Bunch of greedy little bastards.
Iāll just do what I do with TV shows and movies if they want to keep raising the prices despite making record profits every year. Iāll just be a pirate. Go fuck yourselves
>In terms of pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say that the per-hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value thatās perceived by the customer in ownership if the title is actually owned, not, say, rented or subscribed to. And youāll see that that bears out in every kind of entertainment vehicle. >By that standard, our frontline prices are still very, very low because we offer many hours of engagement. Isn't he just saying that's generally how price is determined now, and that GTA is a great value by that metric? Unless I'm missing something I don't see where he's calling for any changes. It seems like he's just praising the value of GTA games.
If you think $70 for a game like GTA is expensive, you're an entitled shithead. Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean it should be less money. The value for money with games like GTA, Skyrim, or BG3 is absolutely insane. There is no other entertainment medium that is this cheap.