The price points for games always seemed very high to me. In an ideal world they'd offer a "no ads, full price" version and a "discount with ads" version. My guess is we'll probably just be left with "full price with ads" as the only option.
How is $20 high? I'm continually amazed how much fun a $20 game can provide.
For the price of a movie ticket and a coke, you can get a dozen hours of entertainment. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.
And the $60 are AAA games where you'd easily get 30-40 hours worth. These have budgets of ~$70 million; they have to make their money back somehow.
One of the secondary reasons I've avoided Oculus is that it is a closed system; you can only buy from a single provider. You're much more likely to find sales on VR games on Steam.
Video games on Steam are the best ROI for entertainment period, right up there with a good pair of hiking boots.
> For the price of a movie ticket and a coke, you can get a dozen hours of entertainment. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Or maybe the movie ticket with overpriced coke is just a bad deal?
A lot of it is also pretty relative down to a personal level and preferences: Some people can entertain themselves with a deck of cards, not even worth $1, for a nearly unlimited amount of time.
Think about entertainment options and name one that is a better deal than $60 for 20 hours worth. It's just not common, perhaps outside of books. Life is expensive and publicly available entertainment is far from an exception.
A 20$ VR game is usually (if it is linear) about 3-6 hours long.
"Superhot VR" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 6 hours.
"Star wars: Tales from the galaxy's edge" (25$) 2-3 hours, if you are a completionist, about 4 hours.
I think the longest single player VR game that exists now is "The Walking dead: saints & sinners" (40$) which is around 11-14 hours long, but it is barely linear, it is more like a fallout/far cry game but with far less interesting locations. Completionist have played it for 30 hours in total.
Be careful. By putting a lot of emphasis on length, you'll end up with ubisoft games, where 80% of it is filler content to get to the 100 hour completion time and only about 20% are actually fun and worthwhile. (I'm overexaggerating but you get the idea).
What rank? I've felt a huge difference in competition at 2500+. 10k to 5k wasn't bad, but the moment 2500-3000 and consistent 300pp plays just to maintain it hit I felt the burn.
I don't grind PP, Never got into that scene. I've just been working on songs, and as it stands I can't crack Expert+ Ghost, Light it up, and Spin Eternally. That seems to be my limit.
If you like action sci-fi RPG, I'd recommend Space Pirates and Zombies 2. I played the whole thing in its optional sit-down VR. One non-completionist run through took me about 30 hours.
Asgard's Wrath took me about 40 hours for my first play through. And the internet seems to suggest about 29 hours just for the main story and up to 80 hours for the completionist
Steam sales aren't what they used to be. Once they added refunds the sales got watered down, because you could just refund and re-buy if the price got lower at a later date in the sale.
There's also a ton of free/discounted games on the Epic store, 3rd party key resellers, and subscriptions like Xbox Gamepass. These are all possible because the PC remains an open, competitive platform - so that point stands.
The micro transaction and "pay to not wait" model is just an overall terrible experience. Mobile gaming has solidified itself as watching a series of software timers count down.
Yeah, it's sad. I would like to play mobile games, but every time I check it out it's the same thing. There's an initial cool gameplay idea that's fun for ~1 hour that is then stretched into eternity, which makes it ultimately unsatisfying.
There isn't any point chasing customers like yourself. If it was even $10-$20 you'd probably be saying it should be $5, if it was $5 you'd say it should be 0.99c
We've seen this all before with the iOS App Store and the end game is just everything free with intrusive ads.
That's not a customer problem. That's a platform problem. On a platform where ads are allowed developers stop being developers and start being eyeball farmers and their products suffer for it.
The point in chasing customers like me is that I won't watch ads, but I will spend money, even $20+ for an iOS game. Streaming services have figured this out and offer ad-free versions. Some iOS developers will allow you to pay for a game to remove ads. (The problem on iOS is there is no easy way to determine which games are like this, or to filter based on things like this in search.)
>> The price points for games always seemed very high to me. In an ideal world they'd offer a "no ads, full price" version and a "discount with ads" version.
How do you go into a shared VR environment and have ads appear for one user and not another?
I'm on-board with "just make everyone pay for apps" but it's very hard to decide what's going to be worth $30. My favorite VR game is free, but I went ahead and paid for the optional content (non functional) because I want to support the developers.
I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now. The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years? One additional problem is that everybody wants to cash in on subscriptions and micro transactions for continuous money, even when you’ve already paid “full” price.
> I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now.
But that’s only one half of the story. The other is how tools, assets, hardware, knowledge and training have become much more affordable, streamlined and widespread.
What used to be a somewhat niche industry with barely any formal entry ways, is now a massively formalized industry dwarfing even Hollywood.
Just the publishing side alone saw a massive falling of gates with the emergence of the indie scene. IMHO there are very real economies of scale effects to this.
I don't know if I agree with this. Not that you're wrong but I don't think it's the full picture.
15 years ago games were still largely physical. That $60 included the physical games, cases, manuals, distribution, warehousing, etc. These days everything being digital companies don't have to pay that anymore. Sure there's a commission you have to pay on Steam/EGS but I highly doubt it's close to what having a physical distribution method cost.
So the way the $60 pie is split up today is totally different, and I imagine a much, much larger portion of that goes to the developers.
> The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years?
Not really. $60 is an introductory price, but most games at that price launch with at least one $80+ special edition and are supplemented with $40+ of post-launch content with much higher margins than the original game. And that's before considering some of the more contentious monetization practices like micro-transactions and "loot boxes". In many cases devs and publishers slash the initial price of a game shortly after launch (usually a year or two) to increase player counts, because more players generally means more sales of post-launch content.
And that's something else nobody ever seems to bring up when discussing the stagnant price of video games - the ever-increasing sales volumes. The cost of producing additional copies of a game is negligible, especially with the rise of digital distribution, so each copy sold after breaking even is pure profit. Since there is basically no production cost, developers (in theory, at least) dump part of their profit into the development of their next title. This allows them to stay competitive and results in skyrocketing budgets. The high budgets are a sign of a successful industry, not a struggling one.
Despite the increasing budgets and seemingly stagnant launch prices, video game developers are more profitable than ever. It's because they are selling more copies than ever and have figured out plenty of ways to bring in extra revenue after the initial sale. If you ask me, things should go the opposite direction. A huge selection of cheap, high-quality indie titles have affected the relative value of "AAA" titles, to the point where I rarely consider spending full price on a game launched at $60. Either way, the industry has recently been dipping its toes in the water with a new $70 shelf price. We'll see if it sticks.
The price points for games always seemed very high to me. In an ideal world they'd offer a "no ads, full price" version and a "discount with ads" version. My guess is we'll probably just be left with "full price with ads" as the only option.