Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game
dinckelman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The amount of options isn’t the issue.
For most 25-40€ games I buy, i can get a great experience for the next 30-50 hours.
Indie games absolutely crush the statistics, where some sub-15€ roguelikes have such insane replayability, that i’ve clocked over a thousand hours into a couple. Not to mention how incredibly creative, unique, and story rich some of them are.
Meanwhile, what used to be 60€, and is now 80€+, is some “cinematic” 20fps on console slop, that you can barely get 5 hours of real gameplay out of. I don’t wanna sit there and watch a movie with an occasional A button press. Or even worse, play something like the Assassins Creed reboot, that had 500 hours of gameplay, 490 of which is just useless collectibles around the map.
It kills me the the Jedi games, TLoU2, GoW games, they’re fun but they’re what, max 30 hours to beat? And they’re trying to up the price to 80?
Red dead 2 deserves 80. Cyberpunk in its current state could deserve 80. Both are around 100-120 hour games and I’ve replayed them multiple times. 30 hour games by proportion deserve a quarter of the price.
Never will understand people equating monetary value with how long they spend time with a game. Quality /= quantity or else Ubisoft and gacha games would be the best games of all time.
Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.
Brokkr@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Would be interested to know what games you have >500 hours in. Especially if they aren’t multi-player online games.
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Oxygen not Included
Caves of Qud
Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
Dwarf Fortress
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, though that’s going back a few years.
Some others with a fair bit of playtime:
Steel Division II (really primarily a multiplayer game, but I only play single-player)
Elite: Dangerous. Though I don’t remember how I accumulated that many hours. Wasn’t super-impressed with the game, and would have sworn that I’d have more time in X3 (though maybe that gets split across the DLC or something).
Stellaris
Noita
Nova Drift
Starfield
Rule the Waves 3
Carrier Command 2 (Primarily intended to be played multiplayer, but I play single-player)
Kerbal Space Program
SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net 6 hours ago
Out of those I’ve devoted a ton of time to rimworld and oxygen not included, are any of the others on your list similar, or others you’d recommend for someone who likes them? I tried dwarf fortress but I found it to be… not my bag. I didn’t get very far into it tho.
(I do like mods, so that’s an ok requirement)
tal@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.
I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)
For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:
Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.
Kenshi. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.
The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.
Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend Satisfactory if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. Mindustry is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are probably my open-source Android favorite games. Dyson Sphere Program has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.
There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:
Rise to Ruins is a colony sim does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.
Prison Architect. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.
Timberborn. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.
Gnomoria is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.
Klei, the guys who developed Oxygen Not Included, are currently working on a new 3D colony sim called Mind over Magic. I have not played it, but if you’re desperate for more ONI and like colony sims, might be worth investigating.
zolar@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
That is a fine collection of games there! :)
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lots of love for Starbound, that game is underrated af.
trinsec@piefed.social 2 days ago
RimWorld ...
Yermaw@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Minecraft, slay the spire, civilisation, atomicrops.
Balatro could have been a contender but I lost interest suddenly and unexpectedly.
Tetris spoiler
NeuronautML@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Stellaris, civ v, oxygen not included, city skylines, x4, workers and resources: soviet republic, kerbal space program.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 day ago
To be fair, while paradox games like Stellaris or the crusader kings games you mentioned, certainly have a lot of replayability (I don’t really care much for CK myself but have over 1000 hours on both Stellaris and EU4), they’re not great examples for where cheaper games by smaller companies offer more than expensive ones from bigger ones. Partly because paradox is fairly sizable and well known these days, but mostly because those games are quite expensive, just split into numerous expansions that come out over time. One can opt out of getting them, sure, but they’re where a lot of the different options that bring the replayability come from.
NeuronautML@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I’m right there with you. I absolutely hate Paradox’s DLC policy and I’m guessing they lose a ton of paying clients the moment they hit the store page and get a 200-500€ price tag for the full experience, or even over 100€ for just the best hits for a really old game. I know they have mouths to feed, but i really don’t like the way they do it and how they abuse their position of niche games nobody else makes. Nevertheless, even though you may choose not to purchase their expansions, you still have extremely healthy modding communities to carry you over.
Still, i wasn’t coming so much from the angle that it’s a smaller company providing better value than larger companies, rather showing to the OP that there are non multiplayer games that easily can provide over 500 hours of entertainment.
teft@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Witcher 3, Fallout
Really any RPG you can easily get 1000 hours of play.
dom@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Factorio, stardew, civ vi are my top 3.
poleslav@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour DCS: 1294.7 hours. Money spent eh $300 = $0.23 an hour Witcher 3: 1131.5 hours. Current cost: $40 = $0.03 an hour. Civ vi: 589.9 hours. Current cost: $60 = $0.10 an hour Stardew valley: 579.3 hours. current cost $15 = $0.026 an hour Fall out new Vegas: 543.6 hours. Current cost: $10 = $0.0018 an hour
Now if we add in the $2000 worth of peripherals I have to play dcs it’s cost balloons quite a bit but, it’s not terribly difficult to get high playtimes in cheap games. I would also say the cost per hour for me is double or triple what it actually is, as these are the current prices, and besides dcs I buy everything only on sale lol.
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.
echutaaa@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Factorio, eu4, stellaris, satisfactory, slay the spire, etc
dinckelman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
For indie and cheaper stuff specifically? The Binding of Isaac is over 1k hours between my two copies. Rimworld, Factorio, and Terraria are all close to 500h as well. If Minecraft counts as one for you, this is an outlier with roughly 4k hours since 2011.
Otherwise, I am quite into MMOs and story-rich singleplayer RPGs, so there’s a handful of them with well over several thousands of hours played too.
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?
dinckelman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes. I didn’t like it nearly as much, if at all. I’ve heard mods make that game infinitely more enjoyable though, so maybe i’ll try it again some day
DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online 2 days ago
FTL for me
mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 days ago
Peglin for me. Cheaper world games I have an insane amount of hours in.
icecreamtaco@lemmy.world 2 days ago
XIV, but I never engage with other players aside from solo queue for dungeons etc
msage@programming.dev 2 days ago
Terraria is the easiest one.
I wish I had more time to play other single player time sinks like Dwarf Fortress, or even BeamNG.drive.