It doesn’t need to be based on playtime. It’s honestly weird to base price exclusively on that. Quality isn’t easy to define for video games but if you explicitly say your game is lesser than a counterpart… maybe it’s not worth as much.
I think that was their point. If not, it’s a good one. The argument could be made that the devs think that their experience, though lesser than BG3 in scale is equal to it in overall value, when you add in quality of writing, worldbuilding, game mechanics, etc.
I think that’s unlikely to actually play out in practice, but it’s perfectly consistent with what they’re saying here.
By analogy, I could buy a setting book like Paizo’s Lost Omens: Shining Kingdoms. Or I could buy an adventure like Claws of the Tyrant, and there’s no particular reason to expect the former must cost more than the latter.
It’s just really hard when we’ve been for decades conditioned to largely see every game as priced at something like $60. It’s created a group of consumers who are incredibly price sensitive, but also likely to look on anything priced under $60 with a jaundiced eye.
Variation did begin to pick up once they started making indie games for consoles, but I was referring to games you could find on the shelves for an average home console. And I wasn’t going from memory, I was going off something I read a while back.
Since as long as I’ve been a gamer, the average MSRP of a game has been quite steady despite the fact that the purchasing power of that price tag has completely collapsed.
An average Atari 2600 game cost $39.99 but that’s closer to $170.70 in today’s money. A game for the PS4 had a sticker price 50% higher, but the actual value of that money is nearly ⅓ as much.
If you have better data than the article I’d love to hear of it. I hated how they referred to typical MSRP as the “average” price when it’s clearly the mode and not the mean.
My only point was that the price of these games has been at a certain level without regard for the drastic decline in the value of the dollar. Demand for games should be on the elastic side, so it’s weird that (most) prices have been so steady.
It doesn’t need to be based on playtime. It’s honestly weird to base price exclusively on that. Quality isn’t easy to define for video games but if you explicitly say your game is lesser than a counterpart… maybe it’s not worth as much.
I think that was their point. If not, it’s a good one. The argument could be made that the devs think that their experience, though lesser than BG3 in scale is equal to it in overall value, when you add in quality of writing, worldbuilding, game mechanics, etc.
I think that’s unlikely to actually play out in practice, but it’s perfectly consistent with what they’re saying here.
By analogy, I could buy a setting book like Paizo’s Lost Omens: Shining Kingdoms. Or I could buy an adventure like Claws of the Tyrant, and there’s no particular reason to expect the former must cost more than the latter.
It’s just really hard when we’ve been for decades conditioned to largely see every game as priced at something like $60. It’s created a group of consumers who are incredibly price sensitive, but also likely to look on anything priced under $60 with a jaundiced eye.
That’s recency bias. The PS3/360 era had lots of variation on price for games.
Variation did begin to pick up once they started making indie games for consoles, but I was referring to games you could find on the shelves for an average home console. And I wasn’t going from memory, I was going off something I read a while back.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
Since as long as I’ve been a gamer, the average MSRP of a game has been quite steady despite the fact that the purchasing power of that price tag has completely collapsed.
An average Atari 2600 game cost $39.99 but that’s closer to $170.70 in today’s money. A game for the PS4 had a sticker price 50% higher, but the actual value of that money is nearly ⅓ as much.
If you have better data than the article I’d love to hear of it. I hated how they referred to typical MSRP as the “average” price when it’s clearly the mode and not the mean.
My only point was that the price of these games has been at a certain level without regard for the drastic decline in the value of the dollar. Demand for games should be on the elastic side, so it’s weird that (most) prices have been so steady.