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 headline is clickbait. The actual article was posted in another thread and while I don’t have it available to me right now, the gist was basically that the CEO was just explaining how they had calculated the price of their games based on operational/production costs and average expected entertainment-hours.
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.
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.”
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.
“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?
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
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