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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh God, Factorio will cost me my life savings
Oh shit… I thought the $/hr was a good idea until you mentioned Factorio.
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.
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
Which is what he said
What are you, a weenie?
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.
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.
The blocks look fancy but do EXACTLY the same thing.
This dude just speedran 2024 and 2025
Doesn’t seem fair that some people get paid so well for fucking up so badly.
We’re living in a dystopia so boring that the future is easily predictable.
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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Oh yeah, make me hate this rotten company even more dude. Keep it coming.
Then that would mean all those games that only had 40 hour campaigns that sold for $60 were $20 too expensive.
€200 for Vampire Survivors?
not enough tbh
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.
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.
… or perhaps pennies per second.
Even a penny a second works out to $36 an hour.
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.
