Submitted 11 months ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to games@lemmy.world
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.
The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
Do people get refund if the game have a bug or a glitch that slow them down?
Or hell, what if I play the game for 20 minutes and hate it? Do they pay me? Do I give them 25 cents?
An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.
The games will go all grind to maximize profit per player.
As a Morrowind player, I feel attacked
Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)
Stupid metric by some rich asshole who is solely focused on making more money.
I read something like this and my immediate thought is “torches, pitchforks, guillotines.”
Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games
Seriously I’m tired of all these gaming CEOs that don’t play games therefore are so out of touch. Guy is just another Kotick clone.
Theoretically he can go fuck himself. All that is going to do is make games drag out mindless crap with no actual value entertainment-wise.
The most successful games are already like that, and I hate it. Give me a good story in a compact experience (luckily, still many examples for that).
First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.
Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you’d spend 3 times as long trying to do the same thing, and know they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.
Sounds like someone wants me to not buy their overpriced game.
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.
Too bad it will be at a minimum $70, and i bet with the hype, even $80, while also being chockful of microtransions.
Yup. For every idiot like this, there’s an indie game or even a Larian Studios offering MUCH better bang for your bucks.
Sure, great idea, why wouldn’t I want more low quality padding content in my games? It’s not like they alteady have too much of it.
That’s a subscription. He should try it and see how that goes.
GTA+ is already a thing…
Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their “+” more attractive.
The less someone actually plays games, the more this idea will make sense to them.
Gamers, especially older gamers, will know this is a BS metric.
“We were going to charge $60 but then we added 40 hours of tailing side quests so now we’re charging $120” - Ubisoft.
Hours of gameplay is a god awful metric and only a corporate dipshit could utter such a stupid fucking sentence.
4k+ hours on path of exile. I played D2 probably more hours than my kids have been alive.
Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that’s all people do. Here’s the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
“In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.”
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I’m sure will continue with 6. I’ll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I’m still a fan, but I’m not giving them another cent.
"I will pirate because you didnt give me sp dlc" is one of the craziest reasons ahaha. GTA 5 was good value all things considered, was a great game.
I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is “i’m going to pirate your next game” then you’re probably just pushing them further into a direction you don’t want them to go.
That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it’s no better value than any other story driven single player game.
gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it’s been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
we can complain about a lot, I’ll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst “very very competitive”.
That may be true for many, but I’m willing to bet most of those “hours” they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn’t included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don’t try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they’ll ignore after release, and don’t be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
the makers of the software they use also have their own algorithms for determining pricing yes.
Executives are assholes and should not be listened to, ever.
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.
Doesn’t seem fair that some people get paid so well for fucking up so badly.
This dude just speedran 2024 and 2025
We’re living in a dystopia so boring that the future is easily predictable.
I agree, that’s why i think Take Two owe me $23 because i finished GTAV in 37 hours.
Though i hope Wube, Bethesda, and Fromsoft won’t bill me for my playtime…
"breaking news: a czech man known only as kovarex has rocketed to the top of the most wealthy men in the world list. Legislation is currently being drafted to regulate the use of the drug ‘factorio’ with several legislators describing as ‘extremely addictive. Like, so addictive. Really guys.’ "
I played 3 GTAs, and I only enjoyed gta 2. They owe me money
I’ve often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it’s very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.
This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous ‘story’
I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don’t want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn’t always the case.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price This is exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter?
I don’t know if shorter games should command a lower price. It depends on the value you get out of it.
Well, fuck them, at this point indie games are often better than AAA titles anyway.
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
I always prefer a good 5 hour experience over a bland 60 hour experience.
It does sound like the next step here would be adding as much low quality filler content as possible to spread out play time.
Just add a bunch of GOW-style “slowly crawl through the narrow space” parts to pad the play time!
Unrelated question, does anyone know any good pirate sites?
Man, imagine if movies or books charged you by the hour. Lord of the Rings would make bank!
Thing about a book (and a movie) is, that once it’s out, it’s done (99.99% done).
For a game like GTA Online (be it V or VI), there are ongoing server costs, massive content updates, support, all that jazz.
I’m not saying I support it, just that I understand
your understanding is misplaced; their ongoing costs are MASSIVELY offset by their in-app purchases already. to claim they need more is just greed.
That’s why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions. The studio needs to have a constant revenue stream to maintain the development and the infrastructure cost.
That’s why live services game needs to end
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.
Then why are not GTA games priced at $20-30?
Because they offer thousands of hours of play time? Like seriously, all the things you could say against this idea and you choose to go go with “But GTA, one of the games with the most lively open worlds, where you can do so much exploring and random stuff, doesnt have much play time”
I don’t think he said that… I think he meant playtime is overpriced which considering the amount of people worldwide that play gta and the profit ratios it definitely is
So practically he wants to create a SaaS model to eternally milk their user base. As much as I like the game devs working for rockstar, their management is an utterly horrendous bunch of scums and in a way I wish that GTA6 is one giant flop.
Good luck with that.
grabs pirate hat
They’re gonna price it at 100$, i can feel it in ny bones
LMAO yeah right, eat shit take two
MW3s campaign for $4. Cool.
By that logic, imagine how much a soccer ball will cost!
If that cost goes above $1/hr I’ll probably just not buy. That’s my base cost I’ll accept for paying for a game. If I’ve gotten $1/hr I find that I’ve gotten my moneys worth
Awesome proposal. Some indie games would suck me dry and I’d be paying 1/4 of the price for AAA releases! Is this the redistribution of wealth Marx has been talking about?
So he’s suggesting AAA games be about $5-$10 right?
Oh God, Factorio will cost me my life savings
systemglitch@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thank fuck for I die devs making the best games right now at an affordable price.
I have over a thousand games in my steam library and my most played is dominated by indie games.
guyrocket@kbin.social 11 months ago
I am curious which indie titles you would recommend.
taaz@biglemmowski.win 11 months ago
jomoo99@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What’s your genre?
I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website 11 months ago
I have over 1600 hours in Binding of Isaac.
systemglitch@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I was going to reply, but most of the games I would recommend are already listed out.
Some gems are missing, but I’d need to be at my PC to figure out which ones.
However, I did not see Unexplored 1 mentioned by anyone off the top of my head.
localhost443@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
VaultBoyNewVegas@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Disco elysium
USSEthernet@startrek.website 11 months ago
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab.