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

[AresKrieger]

Yeah and I don't buy the shitty games from those companies at 60 bucks what makes you think I'll pay over 100, go to hell NY dipshits

[Paranoid Kami]

This is stupid. It's popular so it should cost more? Yeah I know gaming is cheap in comparison to going out with friends and buying food/entertainment, but it's a product being offered to everyone in the world to buy rather than just those in a small geographical area.

[JuNex03]

Cost per Hour... yeah, you can only come to this conclusion if you considered games as a "service" instead of an actual product.

[TetraSky]

Ok, so what about games that have zero replay value and are less than 3 hours, at full price?
That's over charging according to their cost per hour method of comparing.

And who plays the same game every single day, for an entire year, without ever getting tired of it...

No two games are the same length,comparing a game to a movie or TV is like comparing an orange to an apple, it's not the same. While movies and TVs generally are always the same length (24 minutes tv show without ads to over 3 hours for movies)while games can be as short as a few minutes to hundreds of hours.

[Bcat00]

I'll just point this out. The analyst started off with a major in HISTORY!!!!.

HISTORY PEOPLE!!

HISTORY~~~!!!~!!!!

[mr moose]

My game library has one game at 143 hours and all others at an average of 18 hours.  Not sure who plays as much as they think people do, but it's not me.

[TOMPPIX]

[mr moose]

17 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

I wonder if this breaks any investment/consumer laws over there, claiming to release independent study into the value of a product when you work for the company that makes said product?  

[Wanaknow]

20 hours 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???

I believe he calculated with 1 game-free-day per week, that would reach about ~0.38$/h
Still we are talking about 782.5 hours per game. 

 

The actual play time seems to be an average of 60h (just an assumption by looking at GameLengths.com and howlongtobeat.com)

So if we calculate no season-passes, DLC, Micro transactions, ect. we would be talking about 1$/h (highly different depending on the game itself and "replayability")

[Xander Cousins]

What I find amusing by this 'Study' is that it is based of the BASE game. that means Pure vanilla. You think about previous game Like MW3, MW2, Halo 4, Destiny, etc you have actually paid nearly £150 for those games if you include the DLC. 

 

Destiny1 Vanilla costs around £45-£50 (due to being on 360) You had 3 expansions all costing £20 each or £50 overall if you have the season pass. They then went on to give us taken King which was £25-£30  if I recall and finally Rise of Iron coming in around £25-£30 pounds So if you bought that as you went you pretty much spent £160 on the game (based of highest costs) and that's without using the micro transactions. Same goes for old titles like MW3 you bought it at £30-£35 bought I think 3-4 DLC's which cost £15-£20 each so that's already £130 roughly

 

So to say Games are undercharged is kinda false. If you are Vanilla players then meh maybe. But they will only get so many hrs out of a Base game. The 100+ people put into games are ones that usually put money into the games DLC and all.

 

So sorry this 'Study' isn't by far complete let alone a valid argument.

 

Secondly the payment that a company gets from making a game is based on how many sells. If they have Sold so many copies at Z'd price they have got a good payout anything more is a bonus and goes into funding content for that game. Game Companies aren't going huh lets sell this at £60 and that can be the wage a worker gets for working on this game for so many years.... 

[ERM64bit]

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

My game library has one game at 143 hours and all others at an average of 18 hours.  Not sure who plays as much as they think people do, but it's not me.

Lol it's definitely me. According to PSN & Steam, I play games to their max.

Destiny: appx 547 hours, I dropped off when my clan dissolved around Rise of Iron

Fallout 3: 414 hours

Fallout 4: 339 hours

Skyrim: 468 hours

Diablo III: 417 hours, and is about to climb with Season 12

 

These are just the main one, I don't feel like pulling up older titles. But to the main point of this article, I don't think avg. gamers are willing to pay over $100 for AAA titles. I know going into Destiny, at about the time of the Taken King expansion I started to get pissed off with Bungie. The expansions were simply creating a new limit, meaning you had to fork up more money if you wanted the newer, better weapons because eventually your old weapons would get nerfed. I can't tell you how many times I had to switch up weapons for Trials because weapons that I worked towards would get nerfed in an update or a newer, better version would become available, meaning I had to buy the expansion to keep up. I think this is the business model that game makers are moving towards, but I think it's going to alienate some of their crowd.

 

[Belgarathian]

17 hours ago, Paranoid Kami said:

This is stupid. It's popular so it should cost more? Yeah I know gaming is cheap in comparison to going out with friends and buying food/entertainment, but it's a product being offered to everyone in the world to buy rather than just those in a small geographical area.

No... What they’re saying is that per hour of enjoyment, video games have some of the lowest costs. Therefore there is room to increase the costs of games so that the cost per hour of enjoyment is equal to that of going to the movies, etc.

 

Basically he’s saying that people are already willing and able to pay for more expensive forms of enjoyment, so there is room to increase the price of games to that of equivalent forms of enjoyment I.e movies. 

 

An example would be: 

 

• A movie ticket costs $10, and the movie is 120min long. Therefore the cost per hour is $5. 
• Witcher 3 costs $60, and I spent 70 hours on the game. Therefore the cost per hour is $0.86
• There is therefore room to increase the cost of Witcher 3 up to $350 where the cost per hour would be $5. 

 

That said, we all know that very few would pay $350 for Witcher 3, so that scenario would be unlikely to happen. There is room for game prices to increase $10-20 however, or as we’ve seen - micro transactions & DLC.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

In other news, cars are overpriced, because 1 unit of car is several thousand dollars, while one unit of banana is less than a dollar. 

 

Also, staring at a wall costs $0 per hour of entertainment, underpriced AF, 10/10 would buy again.

[Paranoid Kami]

2 hours ago, Belgarathian said:

No... What they’re saying is that per hour of enjoyment, video games have some of the lowest costs. Therefore there is room to increase the costs of games so that the cost per hour of enjoyment is equal to that of going to the movies, etc.

 

Basically he’s saying that people are already willing and able to pay for more expensive forms of enjoyment, so there is room to increase the price of games to that of equivalent forms of enjoyment I.e movies. 

 

An example would be: 

 

• A movie ticket costs $10, and the movie is 120min long. Therefore the cost per hour is $5. 
• Witcher 3 costs $60, and I spent 70 hours on the game. Therefore the cost per hour is $0.86
• There is therefore room to increase the cost of Witcher 3 up to $350 where the cost per hour would be $5. 

 

That said, we all know that very few would pay $350 for Witcher 3, so that scenario would be unlikely to happen. There is room for game prices to increase $10-20 however, or as we’ve seen - micro transactions & DLC.

I don't mind DLC as long as it's cosmetic. I've bought many guns skins in CS:GO for instance. Increasing the base game price however is an incredibly bad thing. It results in less people buying it, which decreases the playerbase for multiplayer games.

[flibberdipper]

The only thing that comes to mind in this case is "fuck off you cashwhores" cuz' this is some Grade A bullshit. Instead of charging people even more for a game why not just make less of a profit and not fuck over your employees.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Look man, I just wanna play my games. I don't particularly care how much it is, as long as the game is worth it for the price.

[Mooshi]

Refrigerators are too cheap. You use it for how long and it keeps you fed and nourished for years? 

 

This is how retarded this sounds.

[ARikozuM]

 

Well... 

 

.40 x 833 = $333... 

 

Then add some crate keys, +$0. 

 

I'm not paying $333 for a game. 

 

Edit: Skyrim is even worse at 1432 hours! I'm not paying $700! 

Spoiler

Though, the Bijin Warmaidens mod would definitely be worth it. 

 

[kuddlesworth9419]

On 21/11/2017 at 10:08 AM, IKnight said:

Yeah exactly. And this study claims that people play games for 2 hours per day. I somehow doubt this, considering most people have responsibilities; jobs, school, kids.... 

I used to play a lot of games when I was a kid but now I have a job I haven't actually played a game like that in 5 months. The last game I played was Wolfenstein II but I finished that in my two days I had off. Whenever I have free time I spend it reading manga, watching films or YouTube. Video games just aren't a very good way to spend your time if you're limited. I would rather play a short single player experience then anything else. Or at least a game that has no filler in it. I found The Witcher III game to be really great because it was long yes but the quality of the missions and story was really good so it never felt like I was wasting my time when I could be doing something more interesting. 

[Fetzie]

Let's look at it the other way: if movies cost ten times as much as video games per hour of entertainment, maybe they should reduce the price of watching a movie to be more reasonable.

[William Payne]

If talking about hours of entertainment it depends on the game. Back when I used to game heavily I had no responsibilities besides school. On days when I didn't have to go to school, say a weekend or school holidays, I lived on little sleep. I would generally sleep in so say I got up at 10am or even midday, I wouldn't go to bed until 6am the next morning. Also im not really into short fast paced games. The games I like are very very very long huge campaign games that can take weeks and weeks to finish even with a large amount of hours put into it. 

 

When I do game these days it is very much on a small scale now. 

 

[William Payne]

But yeah cost is a factor to people. 

[Fetzie]

21 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

How much do movie tickets cost there? Kinda curious, it's less than 10.5 USD in my area

Where I live in southern Germany, a movie ticket is between 10 - 30 euro depending on the length, popularity and if it is in IMaX or 3D. Then you can add another ten euro for snacks and drinks per person.

[Grinners]

If hours of entertainment determined price then chess boards would cost many thousands of dollars...

 

Supply and demand are the only factors that determine price. 

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

On 11/21/2017 at 5:10 AM, Volbet said:

Movies (be they rental, bought or theater movies) are completed products. You pay and you get the full experience.

A niche exception would be The Hobbit...