Jimquisition: The Old 'How Long Should Games Be?' Debate

[binary solo]

TheGoldenBoy said:

shikamaru317 said:

It's very subjective. They spoke about this on the latest Co-optional Podcast, everybody has their limit. For some people it's $3 per hour of content, for some it's $2 per hour of content, and for others it's $1 per hour of content. Personally it's 1:1 for me, I feel like a game should have at least an hour of content per dollar, though depending on the game that can come from singleplayer alone or singleplayer + multiplayer, and I also factor in rather or not I think I'll replay a game's singleplayer at some point. I have a tight gaming budget and I want to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Some would argue that I'm taking a quantity of quality approach, but there are plenty of long games that are also very good, so that argument kind of falls on it's face. Fortunately most games are long enough for them to have an hour of content per dollar after they go on sale, so if a game doesn't have that 1:1 ratio at release I usually get it on sale or rent it and still feel like I'm getting my money's worth. 

So should games that are longer than 60 hours (greater than 1:1 ratio) be priced more because they have more content? Something like Skyrim for example?

It is crazy for anyone to suggest a simple formula of hrs:$ for pricing. But it is also very odd for pretty much all games that are released on disc to have a standard price. If a company does it's market research well it will be able to come up with a prediction of optimal price vs sales. Activision deliberately raised the price of CoD a few years back, because it knew fans would pay, and they did in huge numbers. It had nothing to do with hours of gameplay, because every game with competitive multiplayer has a theoretical infinite number of hours of game play. All it was was Activision seeing that the market would buy millions of copies of CoD at an elevate price and that it was worth making and extra $5 per game as a trade off for losing a negligible amount of sales at launch because of the higher price.

But at a diffrerent scale, if your market research says you will sell 500K-1 million at $60, but you will sell 1.5M-2M at $45 what do you do? Do you launch at $60, grab that high price market but risk putting the lower priced market off, and if you take too long to get to $30 then the lower priced market might have moved on ot other games. Or do you launch at $45, and reap the benefits of a higher uptake at launch which gives you the bonus of positive PR on sales. Or does the market look at a $45 price tag and say "the game must be shit for launching at a low price, because all good games launch at $60", and you get rubbish sales anyway because of gamer perception?

I'm pretty much with Jim Sterling on this in terms of his length is largely irrelevant compared to quality of the enetertainment. Whether I agree with him or not about the flaws in the game that lead him to score it 6.5/10 remains to be seen, as I've not played it yet.