"Gamers aren't overcharged, they're undercharged"; New study claims games are too cheap.

[NumLock21]

43 minutes ago, matrix07012 said:

The guy has direct ties to EA.

 

 

 

Best answer to this thread. 

[pyrojoe34]

By this logic then mattresses are too cheap. Lets say you pay $1000 for a bed that lasts 10 years. That means you're paying less than $0.04 per hour for the bed. Since other things are more expensive per hour that obviously means that beds are too cheap. Computers are also too cheap. If you buy a $1500 laptop that you use for an average of 4hrs a day for 3 years then it's only $0.34 per hour. The internet is also too cheap. If you use it 5hrs a day and pay $50 a month that's only $0.33. All entertainment should obviously be the same cost per hour... since concerts are about $30 per hour we should raise the price of everything to match that price...

 

What a ridiculous way of quantifying the value of something... cost per hour... really? I'm not saying that the price of games is too much/little or that prices can't be adjusted, but using this as a justification is a complete false equivalence and useless metric.

[MimigaKing]

It's strange how they say games are too cheap. I own a PS4 and a Switch, not including all those older generations and I don't buy games for either of them anymore. They always were 60$+tx CAD. Nowadays, most AAA games are 80$+tx. 

 

I'm sorry for the devs of those games but I can't afford to pay 100$ for a game providing me with 20-40 hours of "actual, sensible and fun" playtime while I can sub to WoW or any other MMORPG and play for 6 months for the same price which in return provide me with almost unlimited amount of good playtime. 

 

Let's not forget that good MMO playtime is not being reminded to me every 10 minutes to "you could pay 10$ and get it now!" shit. 

[jaggysnake57]

[Taf the Ghost]

29 minutes ago, imreloadin said:

Ahh gotcha, thought you were taking the "it's just a screwjob from Bethesda" route that I saw in the other thread about it being ported to the Switch.

 

I've always wondered about people who post stuff like that, maybe they think Todd Howard will be waiting under their beds to get them if they don't buy it for every console they own

Are you sure Todd Howard isn't under your bed, waiting to sell you a copy of Skyrim?

[UlsterRose]

It's not that games are too cheap, it's that the budget for AAA titles are way too fucking high, and they have to recuperate by charging ridiculous prices for them and adding microtransactions up the ass.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

Right, okay, I misread that... But that means we're still talking about 912hrs of gameplay in a year out a single purchase.

 

Okay, kudos to anyone who can squeeze THAT much entertainment out of a single purchase... But who outside of an EXTREME minority gets 900+hrs out of a single game???

Yeah... According to him the proper price would be somewhere around 80 cent per hour of entertainment.

Just looked through my Steam library and apparently I have overpaid for almost all my AAA games.

My average play time on AAA games seems to be around 15 hours. That means the cost of the AAA games I have bought should be 15 * 0.8 = 12 dollars.

 

So instead of paying ~60 dollars, I should pay 12 dollars.

According to him, if games were fairly priced then a 60 dollar game should last you 75 hours. It's only when you start getting into numbers like 100 hours of playtime where games are somewhat "underpriced" at 60 dollars (and no micro-transactions).

 

Again, this is also assuming his idiotic "dollar per hour of fun is a good measurement and video rental/cable TV are the yard sticks" is a good measurement.

 

 

Edit:
Hahaha, I looked up what this magical 912.5 hours in a year game should cost according to him.

He thinks that a game for 730 dollars would be a fair price.

912.5 hours (what he seems to think people spend on a single game) * 0.8 (the dollar per hour he thinks is fair) = 730 dollars.

Yeah... Games sure are undercharging at 60 dollars am I right? Clearly the new COD game should cost 730 dollars. I am sure Activision would greatly benefit from charging 730 dollars for the next COD game.

[Yoinkerman]

If I stay logged in all day every day my cost/hour approaches 0!

 

I use math to cover up my bogus reasoning!

[ZackBarletto]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Your children will be buying copies of Skyrim on the next-next-next-next generation of consoles if Todd Howard has anything to do with it.

How do you mean? I dont know Todd Howard:/ shame on me. haha. Does he do everything he can to make people buy it or something

 

But if i can keep modding it and my kids love it, then sure i don't see why not:) Value is relative to what you enjoy playing. If they kept MW2 around and didn't let it go to hack heaven, then id probably still be running around in that game too!

[imreloadin]

33 minutes ago, ZackBarletto said:

How do you mean? I dont know Todd Howard:/ shame on me. haha. Does he do everything he can to make people buy it or something

 

But if i can keep modding it and my kids love it, then sure i don't see why not:) Value is relative to what you enjoy playing. If they kept MW2 around and didn't let it go to hack heaven, then id probably still be running around in that game too!

It was a joke on how they just ported it to the Switch and the fact that it's a 5 year old game

[PocketNerd]

For folks chocked on the whole 2-hours/day calculation... Consider it as 2-hours/day on average. While there are certainly days where I don't play any games (let alone the same game) I can be pretty confident that the 2-hours/day as an average is pretty achievable depending on how you choose to spend your free-time.

[Ganz]

13 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

For folks chocked on the whole 2-hours/day calculation... Consider it as 2-hours/day on average. While there are certainly days where I don't play any games (let alone the same game) I can be pretty confident that the 2-hours/day as an average is pretty achievable depending on how you choose to spend your free-time.

I don't think it's the 2 hour a day average.  It that it is calculated at 2 hours a day for a whole year which equates to ~900 hours on a single game which is the outrageous part.

[mynameisjuan]

I mean to play devils advocate:

 

Witcher 3:  "Fifteen hundred people were involved in the game's production globally", 10 million copies sold (at $60 at best thats $600 million), 3 1/2 years to make.

 

At best that is ~115k per person and since these companies hire damn good programmers, thats about right for a yearly salary. But thats with no sale prices so the profit might be much much lower. Also thats the average accross all people working on the game which will raise and drop drastically between managment, programmers, designers, voice actors, etc...

 

I see nothing wrong with raising prices because in the end they are still a business and need to make a profit, not break even. I mean could they of saved the salary of one person that is sculpting rocks to that extra detail across the map? Hell yeah they could have but thats not up to me to tell them that. Thats what my wallet is for.   

[Belgarathian]

Oh well, back to piracy it is then.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Holy crap as someone else pointed out this guy says games are cheap if you spend over 912.5 hours in the game. What about the average game where you might spend ~10 hours? All of a sudden games are expensive and should actually drop in price.

And as someone who prefers to play single player the gradual death of that is annoying, how many games coming out from major developers actually have 10 hours of single player game play in them. Not many.

[IKnight]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

And as someone who prefers to play single player the gradual death of that is annoying, how many games coming out from major developers actually have 10 hours of single player game play in them. Not many.

The other thing with multiplayer games is that servers aren't kept running for long after a newer game has come out, so planned obsolescence has a great impact on games too. 

 

7 minutes ago, Belgarathian said:

Oh well, back to piracy it is then.

I pirate games to try them (demo them, if you like,). If I enjoy a few hours of the game, I buy it. I have spent way too much money on games I hated after 30 mins. 

 

3 hours ago, pyrojoe34 said:

By this logic then mattresses are too cheap. Lets say you pay $1000 for a bed that lasts 10 years. That means you're paying less than $0.04 per hour for the bed. Since other things are more expensive per hour that obviously means that beds are too cheap. Computers are also too cheap. If you buy a $1500 laptop that you use for an average of 4hrs a day for 3 years then it's only $0.34 per hour. The internet is also too cheap. If you use it 5hrs a day and pay $50 a month that's only $0.33. All entertainment should obviously be the same cost per hour... since concerts are about $30 per hour we should raise the price of everything to match that price...

 

What a ridiculous way of quantifying the value of something... cost per hour... really? I'm not saying that the price of games is too much/little or that prices can't be adjusted, but using this as a justification is a complete false equivalence and useless metric.

Which is why $10,000 mattresses exist  

Seriously though, I wouldn't mind spending $80 for a game if it meant that everything was included with no additional costs ever. 

[Ganz]

55 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

I see nothing wrong with raising prices because in the end  -snip- Thats what my wallet is for.   

 

20 minutes ago, IKnight said:

-snip-

Seriously though, I wouldn't mind spending $80 for a game if it meant that everything was included with no additional costs ever. 

This exactly how I am.  I pay and am willing to pay what I think something is worth. Not what someone else tells me it's worth.  I haven't bought a game for $60 in a long time.  I either wait until it goes on sale because I personally don't think it's worth full price (won't play it a lot OR don't know if I will play it a lot)  or I shell out for one of the special editions etc when I know I will play the game a lot and want to support the devs.

[Rune]

This is why we can't have nice things.

[Sfekke]

5 hours ago, Cookybiscuit said:

Yeah the prices of games that have a billion DLC's are pretty insane. I clicked on RS:Siege on Steam the other day and it's like £11 for the game itself and like £70 for the "ulta mega special" edition, crap like that just puts me off as you don't know what you're leaving on the table when you buy it. 

 

Rarely I pay more than £20 for a game these days, I think probably the only two in the last couple of years is GTA5 and Borderlands Pre Sequel, everything else I just wait for a sale, not worth paying £40 for a game on launch when it'll probably be broken anyway.

I do pretty much the same.

When I buy a game I wait for a sale (which sometimes doesn't take long)

Take need for speed payback, it already got a sale on PSN. € 40 instead of the € 70. It isn't out that long is it?

What I also do is wait for Steam Sales, preferably summer or Christmas. I snagged up Just Cause 2 for € 1.99. I would have bought it 2 years ago for way more, even though I bought it now I still enjoyed it. Extra even the sequel is also out, which if that drop I'm getting it on PC (Got the dysfunctional PS4 port on PS Plus)

 

 

Not just with games, if I can I wait for example with clothing I'll wait until sales hit. Saves up to 70% which is insane.

People their mentality is "It is out now, it is new now. I need it now"

They use that against use, my tip : Have some (excuse my language) f*cking discipline people!

I always got told "Waiting is part of the joy". I live & breath by that mentality.

 

TL;DR

Sales are a goldmine for consumers.

[Sfekke]

3 hours ago, MimigaKing said:

It's strange how they say games are too cheap. I own a PS4 and a Switch, not including all those older generations and I don't buy games for either of them anymore. They always were 60$+tx CAD. Nowadays, most AAA games are 80$+tx. 

 

I'm sorry for the devs of those games but I can't afford to pay 100$ for a game providing me with 20-40 hours of "actual, sensible and fun" playtime while I can sub to WoW or any other MMORPG and play for 6 months for the same price which in return provide me with almost unlimited amount of good playtime. 

 

Let's not forget that good MMO playtime is not being reminded to me every 10 minutes to "you could pay 10$ and get it now!" shit. 

True.

While I see how you are right, I myself am not an MMO person.

I do enjoy Overwatch since lootboxes are something I can 100% ignore unless I gain them from XP.

[PocketNerd]

1 hour ago, Ganz said:

I don't think it's the 2 hour a day average.  It that it is calculated at 2 hours a day for a whole year which equates to ~900 hours on a single game which is the outrageous part.

Ah, gotcha.

[Monkey Dust]

It depends on the game, more tiers at different price points, allowing for the very best and biggest games to be more expensive, would be a good thing IMO. Game developers & publishers have become far too conservative. The $60 ceiling on game pricing creates a ceiling on development costs. I would love to see more games of the scale, and with the attention to detail, of GTA V, but at $60 a pop devs know will have to shift a lot of copies just to break even.

 

No one like to pay more for stuff, but if you look at where gaming has got to; day 1 DLC, micro transactions in full price games, broken unfinished games, the demise of the single player experience. We may have to dig a little deeper in our pockets if we want gaming to continue to be a pastime worth spending time on.  

[PhantomJaguarr]

This gives me more incentive to wait for the games I want to buy to get on sale. 

[Eaglerino]

Even more motivation to get games from shady key reseller sites

[Belgarathian]

2 hours ago, IKnight said:

The other thing with multiplayer games is that servers aren't kept running for long after a newer game has come out, so planned obsolescence has a great impact on games too. 

 

I pirate games to try them (demo them, if you like,). If I enjoy a few hours of the game, I buy it. I have spent way too much money on games I hated after 30 mins. 

 

Which is why $10,000 mattresses exist  

Seriously though, I wouldn't mind spending $80 for a game if it meant that everything was included with no additional costs ever. 

Yeah - there's that too. 

 

But basically piracy exists because perceived value is less than the price. I'd also be willing to bet that it's a somewhat elastic model of price/demand, except a portion of the lost demand ends with piracy.