This.

This × 1000.

*Scrathes hair*

... Does he get paid for saying these atrocities?

I occasionally play online with games like Street Fighter IV, Mario Kart Wii and Tatsunoko vs Capcom.  However I can 100% say that if I had to charge a fee to play online, I wouldn't play at all

He is 100% right.

A game nowadays can give you even hundreds of hours of entertainment and yet we pay no more than $60 for it.

I got 100 hours with Dragon Age paying only $60 (actually I got it for free but... you understand the point).

Over 250 hours with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for just $50.

Over 150 hours so far with Bad Company 2 for just $50.

Over 100 hours with Fallout 3.

And I've spent over 1500 hours on Oblivion paying only $90 (PC version and later the X360 version). Although that's an extreme case.

The value or bang for buck in games nowaydays can be amazing. No wonder publishers must change their payment model or else revenue will go down because we simply don't have time to play all these games.

I second all of this, but I beg to differ on the deeper issue.

Personally, I am quite familiar and intimate with pay to play as I paid $15/month from January 2007 until July 2009 to play the World of Warcraft. Coincidentally, I did not purchase any new PC games during that time.

Digging deeper, I can understand why publishers would want more pay to play games online because it presents a semi-permanent revenue source with lower marketing and development costs, but I firmly believe if it became the new business model as Pachter is advocating for, then we would see a huge dropoff in new releases and dozens of game developer studios shutter because the market would resemble monopolistic competition where you have the online FPS, the MMORPG, the sand box GTA style MMOG and on.

Pay to play is good for the publishers, but if it became the norm then the video game industry as we know it would cease to exist and evolve into an ugly leviathan where the content demanded is almost entirely top down by the developers via content patches World of Warcraft style because 3 to 6 good online games would demand well over 50% of the total video game monies.

This is a great idea, but what about those cheap gamers that play their singleplayer games for like 200 hours?

To solve this problem every next gen console should come with a coinslot so  you have to "insert coin" every hour or so.

Yes, less single player games that are long would be made if they couldn't charge more than $60 for them. But why wouldn't games like Uncharted, Bad Company 2, Crysis, GT5, Rage, Total War, Age of Empires, Red Dead Redemption, Fable III, Kane & Lynch 2, Left4Dead and Assassin's Creed be able to charge for online and still be competitive (I listed games that I happen to like)?

I mean, I don't want to play Call of Duty, Starcraft, Halo or World of Warcraft, I'd still only pay for the type of games that I like. So why exactly would we only get a few giants to monopolize the market?

ironic. a few years ago a read that WoW was killing gaming because people play it for years paying for it and neglecting new releases. and now the same has to happen to all genres to "save" the publishers?

like Killiana1a said: with such a system there will be (about) one big game in every genre. everyone will just play "the best" shooter online because no one would pay for multiple online shooters at a time. ...and why buy any new ones if you don't want to play them online because you already pay for another one?

thats why almost all mmos struggle. most players have a WoW subscription and even if they are looking for some diversity, they buy Warhammer or Aion or LotRO and play the free month. After that 90% of them quit though, because they already have their WoW subscription and won't pay for multiple games at the same time. The drop-off of all the "WoW killers" after just the first month was HUGE.

plus, you don't get free content patches and not even dedicated servers in most games as you do with MMOs,  why should i pay a monthly fee for p2p hosted games? lol

about games giving too much value nowadays: i disagree. DLC is usually a joke: 1-5 hours additional gametime doesn't mean anything in the long run... in fact, those usually are the most expensive hours per dollar/euro of the games.

my average time per game used to be WAY higher in the 90s or early 00s than it is now. i played games like Grand Prix 2, The Settlers 2, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Football Managers, Dungeon Keeper etc. for YEARS. If anything, these new cinematic games lack the replay value of the classics and are played a lot less by me. The other difference between those classics and games nowadays is that there have not been sequels every single year, making last years game obsolete. of course there have always been sequels, but nowadays every big IP releases at least one title per year. i am not surprised fewer players are buying them with each year. actually it surprises me that so many are still buying them each year.. and day 1 when the price is very high, too.

Then obviously you aren't the type of gamer that the publishers have a problem with. You pay your $60 for a cinematic game, mostly for the single player and that's it, that's all fine.

But this is about the people who put hundreds of hours into one single game due to the addictive online. Should these gamers also get away with just paying $60 for a game that gives them ten or twenty times more hours of entertainment than the single player guy gets? All resulting in a big segment of the consumer market buying only one or two games per year because they simply don't need more. That's the question.

And the pricing of a 2-3 hour DLC is actually an effort by the publishers to try to reflect the "real" value measured in hours. It's their way of trying to increase revenue and to address this "problem" of the gamer market (on average) getting too much value for their buck nowadays.

uh what a douche xD