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GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour (www.forbes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to c/gaming@kbin.social

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While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.

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[–] wolfshadowheart@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It definitely should not. Gamers use it because there are a range of genres of game. JRPG's ala Monster Hunter and Disgaea are pretty much a 300 hour minimum. There is no way GTA ever produces something worth 300 hours of gameplay, the closest they've gotten is their Online versions which frankly, would be horrible if they were priced per hour.

Racing games would have very little merit in price per hour. Sports games probably in between.

Then there's the whole fact that pacing can be implemented at the whims of the creators. It takes 4 hours to get energy so you can continue? Well, that 4 hours of paid playtime baybee, payyup!

How about games with little to no story? Should the new CoD only be $25 because it's campaign sucks? It's short after all. Or will they try and include multiplayer time, you know, something independent and timeless. Will they become arcades and start charging you per round?

Horrible, horrible idea. No matter hour you look at it, hours per game are only good for gamers with specific intentions, be it their limited time, their desire to 100%, or to see if it simply respects their time in the first place.

[–] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It's very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.

It's yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don't need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.

And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It's very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.

It's layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can't tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.