Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I’ve paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I’m on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I’ve gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
Let’s see, 70-100+(!) bucks for the (yawn) twentyseventh COD with a 4 hour campaign, or 20 for a game that is complete and lasts for dozens if not hundreds of hours?
Yeah, my choice is easily made.
factorio has mods that last thousands of hours. they’re free additions, and the full game with its dlc is only like 60USD. is ridiculous.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW
I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver
The price has crept up with the paid expansions, but holy shit do NOT sleep on the Castlevania one. It doubles the base game content, and fits in great.
I’m burnt out on it at this point. In the whole bullet haven gameplay loop.
I had to drop my “under 5 bucks” rule because games don’t drop that low anymore. 10-15 is where it’s at now, for better and for worse
Yeah the subtext of the article is the more interesting point, that good quality indy games are perhaps a bit more expensive.
I’m still holding to it, but I agree, it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff on sale for less than $5. Especially if you’ve been on Steam for a long time and have a large library already.
SUICIDE SQUAD FOR $3.50 GAMERS REJOICE
~/s, obviously~
Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.
If Price matched “Hours of Fun”, almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
Fallout New Vegas still hooks me in.
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I’ll play the game forever at this point.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero
I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.
I think one thing that really gave Blizzard and Nintendo titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.
For me it really depends on the game and whilst the “glitzy” is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they’re games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added “highly curated” to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much “play once”.
Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don’t Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of “story” games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it’s after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.
My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - “Glitzy AAA open-world-ish” RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they’re a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can’t be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don’t have the patience to babysit somebody else’s ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).
It’s not that AAA can’t do games with massive replayability, it’s that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either “curated experiences” or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is “self-assembling” emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.
I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.
These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn’t optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.
Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
That plus so many games that are genuinely good and I have lots of hours into are in the $5-20 range.
So much truth
Plus those 70$ games invest so much of that $ in fucking you with DRM.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
It seems you fly a lot. Are you a pilot?..
No, I have a business that requires I fly a ton.
I’ve got to be honest, the price of a game is probably the least important factor on whether I make a full price purchase.
I’m not going to rush out and buy something I’ve no real interest in. I can count on one hand the number I’ve made this generation. On PS2 I’d be grabbing something every week or two, but now I just can’t get excited for the latest and greatest updates on old formulas. Half the time I buy just to encourage them to make more games like that, like I did with Talos Principle 2, Astro Bot and Split Fiction.
I might pick it up later if I feel inclined, or see it on a decent discount. Like Clair Obscur, that I picked up for £29 in a sale just because I remembered it existed and fancied something to play over the winter holiday.
I just started waiting as long as I needed to, years if necessary, for the games I want to drop down on a sale to under $20. I really don’t care how long I have to wait. There’s enough games out there now to keep me busy.
Best example of this is the borderlands franchise. Wait a year or two and get the game + dlc for 80% off.
deleted by creator
Megabonk, my beloved…
My rule is I’m only willing to pay a dollar for every expected hour of play, so you can imagine I buy few things at full price.
The last two games I paid full price for were Elden Ring and Mandragora. I am far more likely to pay full price for an indie title that I’m excited about than anything else, because as an artist myself, I fully understand the impact of a pre-purchase on an indie studio.
It all depends on what you’re looking for. I’ve put hundreds of hours into games and gotten way less than $1/hr, and I’ve also had a great experience paying significantly more.
So I don’t see games in terms of $/hr, especially these days when I’m more limited by time than money. Instead, I look for unique experiences with cost being a much lower factor. Generally speaking, I spend much less than $1/hr since I buy a lot of older games, but I’ve spent far more ($5-10/hr) on particularly interesting games.
But yeah, generally speaking, I’m willing to pay more for indies than AAA titles because indie games are more likely to offer that unique experience.
I like some of the early access development styles used in things like Enshrouded and Satisfactory, so mostly ive been spending on games like that. I like the idea of collaborating with a player base to create a game together I think.
Oh definitely. I’ve enjoyed the experience of helping devs mold a title into something better in exchange for a lower price.
I like your dollar an hour rule though, I might use that in the future. Its funny though, my most played game was free and I have 2000+ hours in it!
Edit: I forgot rocket league was 30$ originally! Still a good deal!
Yeah, the games I’ve spent very little on I’ve put a ton of time into, like Vampire Survivors, Noita, and Dungeon Defenders.
That’s generally how I follow it also. Though I add the stipulation that they’re enjoyable hours, and it’s not hardline. I know not every game can be measured that way. If it’s a particular genre or series, l might take the dive anyway. For indies, it goes even further than that. Some I track for years before release, so I pre-order as soon as it becomes available, just to support as much as I can. So $/hr is a good baseline, but it’s deeper than that.
I’m totally ok paying $30 for a ten hr game, I appreciate shorter games. But if it’s boring or unfun for a whole hour in, I’m getting a refund.
I don’t have the time anymore, the price isn’t really the factor. Anything new has to compete with my existing library and backlog, and other things on my wishlist. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse, games aren’t really aging out of relevance at the rate they used to.
And if I DO want a triple A game, I wait a couple of years and then for a Steam sale.
25 bucks? That‘s cute. AAA studios are charging $80 for remakes or $250 for DLC packages. They‘re out of their minds.
