Dragonā€™s Dogma 2 is the first Capcom game priced $70, but it sounds like thereā€™s more to come.

  • @KoboldCoterie
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    4 months ago

    Hours per dollar isnā€™t a great metric for all sorts of reasons

    Iā€™d love to hear your thoughts on this, because Iā€™ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much Iā€™ll spend on a game. If Iā€™m only going to spend 20 hours on it, Iā€™ll 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 (ā€˜Finishedā€™ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), Iā€™d feel pretty bad about that purchase.

    • ampersandrew
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      1ā€¢4 months ago

      I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but itā€™s 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 Capcomā€™s 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 youā€™d be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? Iā€™ll 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 youā€™re spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.

      • @KoboldCoterie
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        4 months ago

        Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically playā€¦ if Iā€™m buying a AAA action game, itā€™s something something like Sekiro, and Iā€™ll 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, Iā€™m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesnā€™t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - Iā€™ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. Iā€™m also not against short gamesā€¦ I often prefer short games, but I also wonā€™t pay $60 for them; Iā€™ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. Iā€™m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.

        Thereā€™ve definitely been games that I didnā€™t 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 itā€™s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. Thatā€™s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); itā€™s a ā€œwasteā€ from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes thatā€™s okay, and Iā€™m willing to splurge. Iā€™ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)

        • ampersandrew
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          1ā€¢4 months ago

          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 moneyā€™s worth, no one can really tell you youā€™re 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, itā€™s no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because theyā€™re not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, Iā€™ve 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 Iā€™d love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.

          • @KoboldCoterie
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            1ā€¢4 months ago

            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 doesnā€™t 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.

            • ampersandrew
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              1ā€¢4 months ago

              Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns donā€™t have that, and I definitely wonā€™t get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but theyā€™re still my favorites. Itā€™s been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope itā€™s 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. Itā€™s a foolā€™s errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully thatā€™s not what it sounds like Iā€™m 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.

              • @KoboldCoterie
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                1ā€¢4 months ago

                I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldnā€™t expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldnā€™t buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesnā€™t really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games Iā€™ve bought lately have been $10-$15 ā€œboomer shootersā€.

                • ampersandrew
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                  2ā€¢4 months ago

                  I donā€™t buy modern AAA FPS either, but thatā€™s because theyā€™ve been chasing those longer play times lately, or they end up not particularly interesting like Immortals of Aveum and then blame the market for not buying their game. Iā€™m waiting for the indie scene to get past boomer shooters and start emulating the era just after that, and Iā€™ll gladly pay more than $15 to have it. There are a couple of candidates, but nothing for sure.

                  • @KoboldCoterie
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                    1ā€¢4 months ago

                    Anything upcoming that youā€™re particularly excited about?