Now that streaming services have invented cable again, games reinvent arcades.
To the top for you!
Well, I believe that game publishers should be forced to work in vats filled to shoulder height with whale semen. Probably best for everyone if neither of us get our way.
Shoulder height? So lenient. Give them a snorkel - one, to share - and fully submerge them.
It’s quite rude to get semen in someone’s hair. We can be better than our hate compels us to be.
How about body and facial hair? The faith would need to be only a couple millimeters.
Jokes on him. I have a steam library of games I’ve never played. Let’s make this retro active and I’ll take all my money back, please.
Yup, I have over 1k unplayed games in my library, which is enough to last me the rest of my life.
The only reason I still buy games is for my wife.
Piracy is there for that reason
Aren’t most games on steam refundable?
2h of playtime within 2 weeks for a no questions asked refund. A 6 year old game with 0 hours may get a refund once, but Steam will start refusing refunds after that.
Yes, if you’re under 2h of play time. But, people with massive libraries likely bought a chunk of those from 3rd party vendors.
Nah, some of have just been on steam for 20 years. The refund policy hasn’t always been a thing.
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Thank you
Congrats you just reinvented the subscription.
And I think we should pay in punches to the face to this CEO, but hey, opinions, opinions
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Well, I guess that’s the end of video games for me. We had a good run there for a while
That’s the end of new AAA games. There’s still loads of older and indie games out there.
Yup, the golden era of AAA games has been over since after the 360/PS3 days arguably.
Now it’s all corporatized and basically trying to nickel-and-dime users - which apparently a large amount of users are perfectly okay with (more or less) due to devs still pushing out battle/season passes, $20+ MTX skins, and lootboxes.
I don’t think all AAA games would go that route. A bunch of them definitely would but some of the publishers that have a passion for games and not just cranking out the same shit year after year would definitely not go that route.
My Steam/GOG/Epic/Xbox libraries alone can sustain me forever. Hell, Civ 6 + Doom mods could do it theoretically.
Let gaming die. That’s just mean no more needing upgrades ever.
You can still play real video games through emulators tho, there are tons of hidden gems in every console! I’ve been finding joy again by playing those
I have all the 8 and 16 bit systems on my hard drive! Turbo Grafx 16 (aka PC Engine) is probably my favorite for hidden gems lol
I’m sure that’s not going to increase grinds
Microsoft will send the bills for Solitaire and Minesweeper next week.
Factorio devs just became trillionaires
Might as well just release it in an arcade and charge quarters.
Modern version: you tap your CC to start playing and it just keeps charging you until you close the app.
quarters
Oh you, you don’t make semi-transparent, delicately clouded business cards with that income.
Now let’s see Todd Howard’s card.
It is literally just a hammer that embosses his name on your forehead and it costs you $9.99 for the pleasure of being hit. Occasionally the imprint doesn’t take and he fixes some of it, most of the time it is incomplete.
Speedrunners be like, “oh a discount!”
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Yeah, they’re going to lose a ton of money if they try this.
Without further research, i have to imagine he means charged per hour of gameplay, so a 40 hour game, a 10 hour game, and a 120 hour game should all be priced differently.
Considering replay value I’m not sure how you actually accomplish that pricing method in a reasonable way, but i don’t fault him for thinking in that way (assuming it is not actually streaming)
Edit:
I’m not saying i agree with the quote. I don’t think it’s fair to be angry at an assumption, so be mad at what he actually meant. Also, the actual quote at least has some level of merit, even if i think it’s a bad idea (certainly not as awful as a subscription model).
Here’s the full quote with source:
“Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick isn’t concerned with upsetting fandoms, as reinforced by his latest comments that video games should be priced on their “per hour value”, aka based on the hours of gameplay you get.”
“Length” of a game is useless out of context. Games like the later assasins creed are bloated garbage with overinflated playtime. On the other hand you have games with procedural generation, optional endgames, post launch content and the simple fact that a small, but still significant amount of players will play through a short game multiple times, because they enjoyed it so much/wanna get better. (In my case, thats Furi)
What I am trying to say is, you can’t really get a proper amount of hours of playtime for any game, unless its like 99% cutscenes.
I agree with you. I didn’t mean to suggest that he’s correct, only that i don’t think he meant to infer a subscription model. In my opinion, that changes it from a particularly greedy idea to simply a poorly thought out one. Unless, of course, he really did mean subscription model.
Edit: Also i can see the logic if this ceo is looking down upon triple a titles that are particularly short but still charge full price.
He’s an exec. It’s safe to say he meant the subscription
I didn’t want to make that assumption because then i run the risk of reacting more based on my own biases and less on the context of that was actually said. I did pursue the source of the quote:
“Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick isn’t concerned with upsetting fandoms, as reinforced by his latest comments that video games should be priced on their “per hour value”, aka based on the hours of gameplay you get.”
I’ll reiterate that i don’t necessarily agree with this idea, but i can at least see where he’s coming from. I’ve absolutely played games that were incredibly short (I’m looking at you, Fable 1), and thought wow, fun, but i spent $50 on this?
All that’ll lead to is games becoming worse, and being dragged out in tedious ways to justify charging more…
Oh for sure. I mentioned above that i didn’t mean to suggest that this idea is the correct one, only that i don’t believe it was intended to mean subscription model. It’s less of a greedy idea and more of just a bad idea (in my opinion). There is also at least some merit to the statement, i.e. if he’s suggesting that triple a titles that are particularly short shouldn’t be full price.
Yarr harr fiddle de Dee,being a pirate is alright to be
Playing devil’s advocate, I can understand the point because I already think in terms of value per hour.
That’s why I can justify buying a less critically acclaimed game with more replayability than I can justify one that you realistically can only play once (starfield vs latest COD). And why I generally don’t play mmo’s because I can get a new game each month for $10, or play a $60 for a year straight. The total number of hours I have in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 or GTA 5 is crazy compared to how many hours I had in the last battlefield.
But it’s not just about total hours. My first playthrough of Outer Wilds, Subnautica, and BioShock, were each more “valuable” than the time I spent in GTA, even though I’ve spent 10-100x the time in GTA. Then you’ve got games like Prey and Minecraft that have high replayability that is consistently high “value” time.
Games currently have an insane value/cost ratio. When compared to a theatre movie that costs ~$10/h, you’d have to have a phenomenal time. Especially compared with the cost per hour of a game like Skyrim or Baldur’s Gate where you have to spend like a thousand hours just to get the whole story of the game.
This is a bit off topic, but there are some first-playthrough experiences that are truly magical, and you’ve named several of the games that did that for me. Subnautica, Outer Wilds, RDR2, Stardew Valley, Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m sure there are more (and older ones too like KOTOR and Paper Mario). Replayability is great, but I love those first playthroughs.
I mean some games do have monthly subscriptions. That’s basically paying for so many hours at a time.
It could potentially make games cost less, if the rates are reasonable (which we all know they won’t be).
It’s not a very different pricing model from what AWS does.
It’s not a very different pricing model from what AWS does.
That doesn’t instill any confidence in me…
Paying for the resources you consume instead of paying for capacity you’re not using isn’t a bad pricing model. Although I prefer HP Greenlake’s model over AWS.
But in the context of consumer product pricing it’s wildly anti-consumer to bill a software running largely on your own hardware consuming your own electricity based on how long you run said software. It’s expecting consumers to accurately project and plan their usage which consumers are pretty famously bad at. It’s also expecting consumers software running on consumer hardware on consumer home networks to function as expected, and all of the three are famously unreliable and janky
The AWS model works so well because of intense automation in horizontal and vertical scaling plus technologies like Kubernetes, Ansible and the entire automated build pipeline. But most importantly it relies on a full team carefully designing the automatic deployment and scaling to maximize benefits and minimize costs
