Video Game Pricing

[mjk45]

derpysquirtle64 said:

EnricoPallazzo said:

You know sometimes it's difficult for me to agree with "today's games have less content".

It depends on the game. Single player adventure games have been 12-15 hours adventures for a very long time. RPG's still have mostly the same length (around 40 hours). FPS games still clocks around 6-10 hours. Assassins creed games actually got bigger. Racing games have been the same or with more content. Take a look on how much content you would have in a sonic game for genesis, a Mario game for SNES, Zelda, Halo, Final Fantasy (excluding XV), Persona, Uncharted, Far Cry, Fifa (the offline portion).

It seems to me it's one of those things where we think we have less content, but actually it's the same or more, especially when compared to SNES or PS1 eras. Of course we have the cash grab/microtransactions monsters but it seems to me they are mostly for online games.

True, but the problem is with most modern AAA games. Their so called content is just a repetition of the same thing over and over again just for the sake of saying - we have 40 hours of content in our game. Not to mention that they usually have ton of DLCs and in-app purchases attached to them. And I'm not even talking about the game quality. Back in the past when you paid 60$, you knew that the game is most likely polished to the point that it won't have some game breaking bugs. These days, it is not guaranteed and almost every game has a day one patch and continues development even after launch. 60$ early access, so to say.

It's the nature of things as they develop complexity increases, and with complex systems it becomes harder to pick up the bugs ,you can no longer debug your code by hand like in the old days, the growth of the codebase along with the demand for larger and increasingly varied and open worlds, has lead too many games not being able to cover all contingencies that millions of player interacting with the game find, some in ways never dreamed off. so it becomes a whack a mole situation and this complexity ties in with day one patches where time becomes an issue since patching is an ongoing task, so using the time between a game going gold and retail release gives the developers that time hence dayone patching.