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.
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.
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.
Raging barbarians replaced with literal demons. XCom unit replaced with BFG squads. I could see that working. There's a mod I play for Civ 5 which adds a barbarian civ which - when they defeat things - turns units and cities into MORE barbs. It's fucking brutal and turns the game into a 'last man standing' rather than anyone being able to win. I love it!
DOOM: Battle for Earth. A 4X strategy/survival game. Basically you try to save Earth with limited resources or prolong it's death. Kinda like They Are Billions.
I'm thinking all the other civs are demons. The trick is the player/slayer can only destroy thier cities, not capture them. So the only cities you can actually have are player made. The rest you rip and tear through.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Constant mandatory skill checks for skills you would never use that can only be leveled via proceedurally generated minigames designed by a hallucinating AI trained on 90s TV show or movie board games. "Why do I need a mastery of macrame to progress the storyline of this FPS?"
Joke's on anyone who actually thinks GTA 5 isn't already predatory as fuck, and to those excited for anything Rockstar Games has to offer going forward.
Honestly tho. If I a game has 300 hours of content, multiplayer, mod support, and is overall good I'll pay more for that game. Not $300 but maybe like $80-$90. That game doesn't and will never exist, at least not from a triple A studio
That's how they used to be in the early days of the Internet. The earliest online multiplayer games like Cyberstrike charged by the hour. Cyberstrike cost six dollars an hour! Games in the BBS days were by the minute.
... Not that I feel there is any reason to bring that back. I am ok with live service games charging a monthly subscription though.
But the idea itself isn't as unheard of as everyone here acts like it is.
Depending on how exactly this is meant, this might not be controversial.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the "long plays" higher than the "short plays".
Games that are played for many hours are already rewarded by being more popular, meaning more people buy them, meaning more revenue. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book. I must have read LOTR a hundred times by now, and the Tolkien estate has benefitted not only from me buying the books multiple times (softcover, hardcover, kindle, audiobook) and giving them as gifts, but also from every other person on the planet doing the same.
Make a better product, and people will use it more, and more people will buy it. This is just drink verification can bullshit.
Honestly, I sorta hope they try it, just so they can blow millions of dollars on something that was absolutely doomed and I would hope it craters the company, or at least some careers.
It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book.
No, it's like paying more for a thicker book.
Also, you just admitted to paying more for the same thing by buying it multiple times. So you're obviously already willing to continue paying for the same entertainment.
Imagine for me a world where executives want to maximize extraction of funds out of consumers. Now imagine "filler" in video games. Finally, imagine games psychology and how to keep the player running after that carrot on a stick.
No, it like being charged hourly to read a book, and the book has a bunch of copied and pasted paragraphs saying "protagonist killed 10 chickens." And the ending to the book costs extra.
And you still have to buy the whole book before doing any of that.
You don’t pay more for a thicker book. That’s an absolutely ridiculous notion and it’s not how the industry works. At all. The value of a book is the quality of the writing, not its length.
Second, I could have read each of those individual books as many times as I wanted. I was buying different products each time. I’mnot paying for the same entertainment at all. It’s more like buying the same e game on Xbox and on switch, if that makes it easier for you.
It’s a stupid fucking idea, and it’s exactly what got Unity rightfully smacked down just a week or so ago.
All that pricing model would do is incentivize even more useless filler than a lot of games already have. If a game can say it offers 100 hours of playtime, but 70 of those hours are fetch quests, how many hours do you think they'd try to charge for?
How many people would buy it, if it were that boring?
Every pricing model can be gamed. Look at the aforementioned sport games. They are often not super expensive, but get new releases with hardly any changes almost every year.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the “long plays” higher than the “short plays”.
So how would live-service games fit into that dynamic? Couldn’t Activision argue that CoD is a live-service game, and therefore, should be priced differently somehow?
Not ragging on you or anything, this is an actual question for discussion.
Not everyone uses every product for the same amount of time. That’s the first problem with this way of thinking. But let’s pretend that isn’t the case and apply this thinking to other forms of entertainment.
If I enjoy playing basketball should I have to pay by the hour to own a basketball?
Chess is one of the oldest games and it has way more hours played than all GTA games combined. Should we have to pay by the hour for a chess set?
Why stop at entertainment? I use my bed more than any game I’ve ever played. Does that mean I should pay by the hour to own a bed?
Seems pretty clear what motivated this CEO to say this.. greed
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I'll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that's fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What mental image do you have of the average game buyer? A mindless idiot who just has to buy everything he's being advertised?
Of course you can make such a game. But nobody will buy it. It's that simple. BTW your construction is called straw man. You know damn well, that some games have been designed for longer playtimes, you just chose to ignore that knowledge.
Why would it be a straw man? It's exaggerated for sure, but the point being: If you pay per theoretical hour of gameplay, games will include a lot more low quality padding.
I uh.... I don't know if @De_Narmset out to do this, but they just described the main gameplay of Cookie Clicker, a $5 game about manually clicking a picture of a cookie. It was released on steam two years ago and has made over $3 million in revenue.
It made more money than Hades, which has won several awards. There are leaderboards for the cookie. It is you whose opinion of what the typical gamer will put up with is actually high.
That's definitely a strawman or just a straight up misrepresentation of what cookie clicker is. You only actually "manually click a picture of a cookie" for about one to five minutes, then you basically never click it again. It's described as an idle game where you play by not playing, and the core mechanic is "number get bigger faster". The game described in this thread is mindlessly clicking a button, no depth, no automation or acceleration. Just click a billion times to win.
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.
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.
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
Why? Because he said a $60-70 game should have nearly that amount of content?
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.
Doom mods for Civ 6? Please tell me that's what you said
Raging barbarians replaced with literal demons. XCom unit replaced with BFG squads. I could see that working. There's a mod I play for Civ 5 which adds a barbarian civ which - when they defeat things - turns units and cities into MORE barbs. It's fucking brutal and turns the game into a 'last man standing' rather than anyone being able to win. I love it!
DOOM: Battle for Earth. A 4X strategy/survival game. Basically you try to save Earth with limited resources or prolong it's death. Kinda like They Are Billions.
At least that's my elevator pitch.
I'm thinking all the other civs are demons. The trick is the player/slayer can only destroy thier cities, not capture them. So the only cities you can actually have are player made. The rest you rip and tear through.
Damn I wish. Who would win, a stack of spearmen or one pissed Space Marine boi?
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
Same here, plus PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii, WiiU. There are hundreds of great games on all of those.
For some reason I seem to really enjoy everything up to 2017. After that it becomes scarce.
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
Uh oh Age of Empires is going to be painful
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.
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!"
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."
https://www.gamingbible.com/news/gta-6-priced-by-per-hour-value-171196-20231116#:~:text=Take%2DTwo's%20CEO%20Strauss,hours%20of%20gameplay%20you%20get
"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."
https://www.gamingbible.com/news/gta-6-priced-by-per-hour-value-171196-20231116#:~:text=Take%2DTwo's%20CEO%20Strauss,hours%20of%20gameplay%20you%20get.
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.
Yeah, they're going to lose a ton of money if they try this.
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.
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
Filler quests. Filler quests everywhere.
Mandatory filler quests on opposite sides of the map with limited to no fast travel.
Or lots of escort missions.
Constant mandatory skill checks for skills you would never use that can only be leveled via proceedurally generated minigames designed by a hallucinating AI trained on 90s TV show or movie board games. "Why do I need a mastery of macrame to progress the storyline of this FPS?"
Joke's on anyone who actually thinks GTA 5 isn't already predatory as fuck, and to those excited for anything Rockstar Games has to offer going forward.
Does that mean the developers will be paid more or the C level executives?
You know the answer in your heart.
Honestly tho. If I a game has 300 hours of content, multiplayer, mod support, and is overall good I'll pay more for that game. Not $300 but maybe like $80-$90. That game doesn't and will never exist, at least not from a triple A studio
Oh no then we have to make all those transport regions... Instant transport for available parties (notifications from global, access behind a paywall)
This guy’s gonna hate speedrunners.
The genie's out of that lamp, indie devs can make great games now so i can safely ignore what the rich assholes want from me.
Does he know about the DLC concept? I feel like he doesn’t
See that requires effort on his part, and CEOs and Execs are very, very much interested in yacht time, not work time.
I feel like this headline may have been taken out of context. It's such a weird thing to say off cuff.
Yeah but now someone’s gonna try that
Charge what you want, I’m still just gonna pirate it 🤷🏼♀️
Who is that charming fellow? I feel he has lots of good ideas
He's so environmentalist he lives in the woods
That's how they used to be in the early days of the Internet. The earliest online multiplayer games like Cyberstrike charged by the hour. Cyberstrike cost six dollars an hour! Games in the BBS days were by the minute.
... Not that I feel there is any reason to bring that back. I am ok with live service games charging a monthly subscription though.
But the idea itself isn't as unheard of as everyone here acts like it is.
This is absolutely not what he is saying, and no one is pretending this is new
Depending on how exactly this is meant, this might not be controversial.
Games like GTA or RDR offer literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, while other titles like all those yearly sports games or something like CoD probably get less playtime per release. So it makes sense to price the "long plays" higher than the "short plays".
No. Seriously, just fucking no.
Games that are played for many hours are already rewarded by being more popular, meaning more people buy them, meaning more revenue. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’d be like charging people based on how many times they read a book. I must have read LOTR a hundred times by now, and the Tolkien estate has benefitted not only from me buying the books multiple times (softcover, hardcover, kindle, audiobook) and giving them as gifts, but also from every other person on the planet doing the same.
Make a better product, and people will use it more, and more people will buy it. This is just drink verification can bullshit.
Honestly, I sorta hope they try it, just so they can blow millions of dollars on something that was absolutely doomed and I would hope it craters the company, or at least some careers.
No, it's like paying more for a thicker book.
Also, you just admitted to paying more for the same thing by buying it multiple times. So you're obviously already willing to continue paying for the same entertainment.
You're so close.
Imagine for me a world where executives want to maximize extraction of funds out of consumers. Now imagine "filler" in video games. Finally, imagine games psychology and how to keep the player running after that carrot on a stick.
I'm sure you see where this is going.
(I realise this is even better under your comment here).
No, it like being charged hourly to read a book, and the book has a bunch of copied and pasted paragraphs saying "protagonist killed 10 chickens." And the ending to the book costs extra.
And you still have to buy the whole book before doing any of that.
No, and no.
You don’t pay more for a thicker book. That’s an absolutely ridiculous notion and it’s not how the industry works. At all. The value of a book is the quality of the writing, not its length.
Second, I could have read each of those individual books as many times as I wanted. I was buying different products each time. I’mnot paying for the same entertainment at all. It’s more like buying the same e game on Xbox and on switch, if that makes it easier for you.
It’s a stupid fucking idea, and it’s exactly what got Unity rightfully smacked down just a week or so ago.
All that pricing model would do is incentivize even more useless filler than a lot of games already have. If a game can say it offers 100 hours of playtime, but 70 of those hours are fetch quests, how many hours do you think they'd try to charge for?
How many people would buy it, if it were that boring?
Every pricing model can be gamed. Look at the aforementioned sport games. They are often not super expensive, but get new releases with hardly any changes almost every year.
So how would live-service games fit into that dynamic? Couldn’t Activision argue that CoD is a live-service game, and therefore, should be priced differently somehow?
Not ragging on you or anything, this is an actual question for discussion.
De facto that already happened - see WoW, it has been running that model for years.
At the end of the day, publishers can charge however they want, and there have been many different attempts already.
Not everyone uses every product for the same amount of time. That’s the first problem with this way of thinking. But let’s pretend that isn’t the case and apply this thinking to other forms of entertainment.
If I enjoy playing basketball should I have to pay by the hour to own a basketball?
Chess is one of the oldest games and it has way more hours played than all GTA games combined. Should we have to pay by the hour for a chess set?
Why stop at entertainment? I use my bed more than any game I’ve ever played. Does that mean I should pay by the hour to own a bed?
Seems pretty clear what motivated this CEO to say this.. greed
OSRS about to go for thousands of dollars.
I get what you mean and it makes sense. I just still hope it doesn't happen cause we all know the devs won't get paid more
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I'll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that's fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What mental image do you have of the average game buyer? A mindless idiot who just has to buy everything he's being advertised?
Of course you can make such a game. But nobody will buy it. It's that simple. BTW your construction is called straw man. You know damn well, that some games have been designed for longer playtimes, you just chose to ignore that knowledge.
Why would it be a straw man? It's exaggerated for sure, but the point being: If you pay per theoretical hour of gameplay, games will include a lot more low quality padding.
I uh.... I don't know if @De_Narm set out to do this, but they just described the main gameplay of Cookie Clicker, a $5 game about manually clicking a picture of a cookie. It was released on steam two years ago and has made over $3 million in revenue.
It made more money than Hades, which has won several awards. There are leaderboards for the cookie. It is you whose opinion of what the typical gamer will put up with is actually high.
That's definitely a strawman or just a straight up misrepresentation of what cookie clicker is. You only actually "manually click a picture of a cookie" for about one to five minutes, then you basically never click it again. It's described as an idle game where you play by not playing, and the core mechanic is "number get bigger faster". The game described in this thread is mindlessly clicking a button, no depth, no automation or acceleration. Just click a billion times to win.