I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I havenāt bought anything at $70, and donāt intend to start.)
If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and donāt include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their āVideo games havenāt changed price since the 90s! The price isnāt keeping up with inflation!ā argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. Thereād maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.
Not to mention, unless your game was Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt, you sure as shit werenāt selling 19.6 million copies of anything. #3 was Super Mario 3 with 18 million copies sold, #4 was Super Mario 2 with 8 million, and itās all down hill from there. Capcomās highest selling NES game on the list was DuckTales at number 37, with 1.67 million copies sold, so their comparison to āthe Famicom eraā is a crock of shit.
Hours per dollar isnāt a great metric for all sorts of reasons, but I do fully understand typically getting more value for your dollar out of indie games. Thatās not the only thing that makes this an apples and oranges comparison though. Games in the 90s and 00s were often cranked out in 9-18 months, with a number of developers in the single and double digits, compared to a lot of productions today taking hundreds of people to develop for 5 years before they come to market. Capcom in particular hasnāt been getting too crazy with development timelines, because their projects usually arenāt overscoped compared to their competitors, but weāre still talking way more salaries to pay for a much longer period of time to create a single video game these days. Rather than DLC, it was designing games around strategy guides, hint hotlines, and coin operation in the arcades, resulting in decisions like making the first level really easy and the next level really hard, so you couldnāt finish it with one rental, and youād need to pay for additional materials to find out the obtuse answers to problems in the game. Duck Tales may have sold 1.67 million copies while its break even point was way, way, way lower than it is for the likes of Dragonās Dogma 2, which might need to sell that many copies to make back the money it took to create it, and itās not even a foregone conclusion that it will sell that many either.
Hours per dollar isnāt a great metric for all sorts of reasons
Iād love to hear your thoughts on this, because Iāve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much Iāll spend on a game. If Iām only going to spend 20 hours on it, Iāll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (āFinishedā as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), Iād feel pretty bad about that purchase.
I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but itās trivial to make a game longer, and a tight 5-10 hour game can frequently be more valuable to me than a 70 hour game, a lot of Capcomās games among them. Part of the reason Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are getting slammed in reviews right now is because they made games that could be played for hundreds of hours, and that happened at the expense of making great games that youād be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? Iāll wager a guess it cost you more than $3 even if it was really long.
And all hours are not created equal either. An action game that takes 50 hours would probably be exhausting, but a turn based game like an RPG or a 4X would feel right at home there, since youāre spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.
Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically playā¦ if Iām buying a AAA action game, itās something something like Sekiro, and Iāll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, Iām not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesnāt matter if there was 60 hours of content there - Iāll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. Iām also not against short gamesā¦ I often prefer short games, but I also wonāt pay $60 for them; Iāll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. Iām absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
Thereāve definitely been games that I didnāt get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have playedā¦ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and itās over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. Thatās my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); itās a āwasteā from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes thatās okay, and Iām willing to splurge. Iāve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
How we each choose to spend our money is very much a personal decision, and if you feel you need more length out of a game in order to get your moneyās worth, no one can really tell you youāre wrong. Something to consider though is that your dollars spent decides what gets made in the future. If enough people feel the way you do, itās no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because theyāre not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, Iāve seen plenty of my favorite franchises become worse off for being larger, longer experiences (that also cost them more time and money to make, meaning these games come out less frequently), and Iād love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.
Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesnāt have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.
Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns donāt have that, and I definitely wonāt get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but theyāre still my favorites. Itās been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope itās not because the market those games are targeting have a $1/hr threshold to meet. $1/hr is also a fairly arbitrary metric in the face of inflation, because it essentially means that games need to keep being made on scrappier and scrappier budgets as time goes on in order to meet it. Itās a foolās errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully thatās not what it sounds like Iām doing, but personally, I find it to be a poor measure of the value of a game or any kind of entertainment for that matter.
I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldnāt expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldnāt buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesnāt really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games Iāve bought lately have been $10-$15 āboomer shootersā.
Outside of Wow, I never found a AAA game that can hold my attention past 100 hours, hell 40 is a strech. Its almost never worth it at full price let alone 70.
I have a handful of $30 1000+ hour indy games I may be playing 20 years from now.
I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games Iāve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really donāt want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, Iāll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, Iāll probably just ignore it, as much as Iāll hate doing so.
Itās been a slippery slope but I personally donāt mind current MH (World & Rise) microtransactions because they arenāt at all necessary for the game not prevent any kind of unlock.
Otoh, if they cracked down on modding because they werenāt selling cosmeticsā¦
I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I havenāt bought anything at $70, and donāt intend to start.)
If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and donāt include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their āVideo games havenāt changed price since the 90s! The price isnāt keeping up with inflation!ā argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. Thereād maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.
Not to mention, unless your game was Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt, you sure as shit werenāt selling 19.6 million copies of anything. #3 was Super Mario 3 with 18 million copies sold, #4 was Super Mario 2 with 8 million, and itās all down hill from there. Capcomās highest selling NES game on the list was DuckTales at number 37, with 1.67 million copies sold, so their comparison to āthe Famicom eraā is a crock of shit.
Hours per dollar isnāt a great metric for all sorts of reasons, but I do fully understand typically getting more value for your dollar out of indie games. Thatās not the only thing that makes this an apples and oranges comparison though. Games in the 90s and 00s were often cranked out in 9-18 months, with a number of developers in the single and double digits, compared to a lot of productions today taking hundreds of people to develop for 5 years before they come to market. Capcom in particular hasnāt been getting too crazy with development timelines, because their projects usually arenāt overscoped compared to their competitors, but weāre still talking way more salaries to pay for a much longer period of time to create a single video game these days. Rather than DLC, it was designing games around strategy guides, hint hotlines, and coin operation in the arcades, resulting in decisions like making the first level really easy and the next level really hard, so you couldnāt finish it with one rental, and youād need to pay for additional materials to find out the obtuse answers to problems in the game. Duck Tales may have sold 1.67 million copies while its break even point was way, way, way lower than it is for the likes of Dragonās Dogma 2, which might need to sell that many copies to make back the money it took to create it, and itās not even a foregone conclusion that it will sell that many either.
Iād love to hear your thoughts on this, because Iāve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much Iāll spend on a game. If Iām only going to spend 20 hours on it, Iāll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (āFinishedā as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), Iād feel pretty bad about that purchase.
I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but itās trivial to make a game longer, and a tight 5-10 hour game can frequently be more valuable to me than a 70 hour game, a lot of Capcomās games among them. Part of the reason Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are getting slammed in reviews right now is because they made games that could be played for hundreds of hours, and that happened at the expense of making great games that youād be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? Iāll wager a guess it cost you more than $3 even if it was really long.
And all hours are not created equal either. An action game that takes 50 hours would probably be exhausting, but a turn based game like an RPG or a 4X would feel right at home there, since youāre spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.
Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically playā¦ if Iām buying a AAA action game, itās something something like Sekiro, and Iāll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, Iām not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesnāt matter if there was 60 hours of content there - Iāll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. Iām also not against short gamesā¦ I often prefer short games, but I also wonāt pay $60 for them; Iāll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. Iām absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
Thereāve definitely been games that I didnāt get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have playedā¦ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and itās over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. Thatās my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); itās a āwasteā from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes thatās okay, and Iām willing to splurge. Iāve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
How we each choose to spend our money is very much a personal decision, and if you feel you need more length out of a game in order to get your moneyās worth, no one can really tell you youāre wrong. Something to consider though is that your dollars spent decides what gets made in the future. If enough people feel the way you do, itās no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because theyāre not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, Iāve seen plenty of my favorite franchises become worse off for being larger, longer experiences (that also cost them more time and money to make, meaning these games come out less frequently), and Iād love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.
Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesnāt have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.
Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns donāt have that, and I definitely wonāt get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but theyāre still my favorites. Itās been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope itās not because the market those games are targeting have a $1/hr threshold to meet. $1/hr is also a fairly arbitrary metric in the face of inflation, because it essentially means that games need to keep being made on scrappier and scrappier budgets as time goes on in order to meet it. Itās a foolās errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully thatās not what it sounds like Iām doing, but personally, I find it to be a poor measure of the value of a game or any kind of entertainment for that matter.
I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldnāt expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldnāt buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesnāt really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games Iāve bought lately have been $10-$15 āboomer shootersā.
Outside of Wow, I never found a AAA game that can hold my attention past 100 hours, hell 40 is a strech. Its almost never worth it at full price let alone 70.
I have a handful of $30 1000+ hour indy games I may be playing 20 years from now.
I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games Iāve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really donāt want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, Iāll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, Iāll probably just ignore it, as much as Iāll hate doing so.
Itās been a slippery slope but I personally donāt mind current MH (World & Rise) microtransactions because they arenāt at all necessary for the game not prevent any kind of unlock.
Otoh, if they cracked down on modding because they werenāt selling cosmeticsā¦