Video Game Pricing - Fair or Not Fair

[Zeusthecat]

I toured a studio once where this criticism was brought up, and the response was "We don't pay you to work here, we pay you to live while you work here". Personally I've never had a problem with crunch time when I've had to endure it, but then again I don't have a family or anyone that really depends on me.

 

I have a real issue with the whole mentality that if people are truly passionate about making games, they should have no problem with crunch. 40 hours per week is plenty and as the expectation of hours worked gets higher and higher, you slowly squeeze out pretty much anyone who isn't a single person without any other life commitments. I mean, maybe it's not that extreme but I imagine that mentality makes it near impossible for anyone with kids or a family that they hope to spend any time with to make any kind of life long career out of video game development.

 

I think paying people a salary based on a 40 hour work week and squeezing 60, 70, or 80 hours out of them is an absolutely disgusting practice that I can't believe so many people are okay with. But I guess it means we get cheaper games made by a bunch of like-minded single dudes so yay? Sorry for the hyperbole.

[eot]

I never think about what a fair price would be, I think about what I'm willing to pay based on how much I'm expecting to enjoy a given game, as well as how hyped I am for it (that's essentially momentary lapse of judgement). These days the chance of me enjoying a game enough that I feel a drive to keep playing it are pretty low, and I'm rarely all that hyped for games either. As a result, the times when I'm willing to pay $60 for a game are exceedingly rare, it has to be something like the sequel to my favourite game of all time (as Dark Souls II was). The games that I love I would gladly have paid more for, but I wouldn't be able to find the games I love if I paid more for them. I'm a student with basically no income though, I'm not sure how my spending habits would be affected by having more money. I've always been quite frugal.

On the other hand I bought a PS4 just for Bloodborne, I haven't bought any more games for it because I think they're too expensive. I guess I can't rationalise that.

I have a real issue with the whole mentality that if people are truly passionate about making games, they should have no problem with crunch. 40 hours per week is plenty and as the expectation of hours worked gets higher and higher, you slowly squeeze out pretty much anyone who isn't a single person without any other life commitments. I mean, maybe it's not that extreme but I imagine that mentality makes it near impossible for anyone with kids or a family that they hope to spend any time with to make any kind of life long career out of video game development.

I think paying people a salary based on a 40 hour work week and squeezing 60, 70, or 80 hours out of them is an absolutely disgusting practice that I can't believe so many people are okay with. But I guess it means we get cheaper games made by a bunch of like-minded single dudes so yay? Sorry for the hyperbole.

I don't think this is a problem that would be solved by games costing more. Does Infinity Ward not crunch their asses off making CoD even when it's raking in billions for Activision? It's a cultural issue within the game development community. Some people put up with it, some defend it and too few stand up against it. The ones who don't like it can find better paying jobs elsewhere and there are people lining up to replace them. It's not unique to the game industry, but people who give up their lives tend to do it for money, not to be exploited because they're passionate. I think it's disgusting. If you need people to work 80 hour weeks for months on end you fucked up as a manager.

[Zeusthecat]

I don't think this is a problem that would be solved by games costing more. Does Infinity Ward not crunch their asses off making CoD even when it's raking in billions for Activision? It's a cultural issue within the game development community. Some people put up with it, some defend it and too few stand up against it. The ones who don't like it can find better paying jobs elsewhere and there are people lining up to replace them. It's not unique to the game industry, but people who give up their lives tend to do it for money, not to be exploited because they're passionate. I think it's disgusting. If you need people to work 80 hour weeks for months on end you fucked up as a manager.

 

I agree that games costing more would most likely not fix this. But I think for some small segments of developers, it would. And yes, if you can't make a profitable product without working your employees to the bone then you don't have a sustainable business model. It's even sadder that on top of that expectation, people are often let go as soon as the product ships. Work them to the bone and then fire them. Rinse and repeat.

[Turrican]

For me, the price isn't so much of an issue as the practice of the developer/publisher and whether I feel they have put their heart and soul into the game or are trying to give the gamer out there real value for money.

 

So for example, I paid £32 to pre-order Xenonauts twice and then never played it, because I appreciated what the developer was doing and what a struggle it was for them.  Also, despite finding Witcher 3 a pretty boring game, I will probably buy the expansion when it comes out (whether I play it or not) because I really appreciate what CDPR are doing, the effort they put in and the updates and free-lc they provide their playerbase with.  Same with the Cities: Skylines expansion.

 

But there are other companies (such as Creative Assembly, anything by Ubisoft or EA) where I will wait until a game is deeply discounted in a sale before I buy it - just because I feel that these companies are especially cynical and don't really care about their products.  Then there I companies whose games I will never buy again no matter what they produce (Bungie, Netherrealm).

 

Then on the positive side, there are games I am definitely buying day 1, no matter the cost - anything by From, anything by Rockstar, anything by Klei, pretty much anything by Paradox, Xcom 2, Anything Elder Scrolls, etc - regardless of the price.  

 

I suppose in short, I don't mind paying for quality but I don't like feeling like I'm being bent over by liars.  

[Akidu]

I don't mind personally. I also agree with mooses point about not pricing to a standard by default. 

[itsamoose]

I don't mean to pass the blame here on prices, but does anyone see the whole pricing thing as being a product of how most game reviews/criticism works? Most reviews I watch and read tend to be focused around making a value judgement on the game's content. I've encountered this personally where games I've worked on were reviewed well, but with the caveat that the reviewer saw the price point as being too high and ended up reducing the score as a result or telling the reader to wait for a sale. On the other hand, I've seen reviews that make a point of mentioning the price point as a positive thing that improves the score. I don't know if this is something that reviewers are explicitly told to do, or is just an industry standard/expectation. It's a bit of a bugbear with me since the price of a thing is always relative to the individual, and I just don't think a reviewer infusing their own personal value proposition into their work is all that beneficial to anyone but the reviewer. It's one of those things that from what I can tell is unique to games--I don't think I've ever read a book or movie review that even mentioned the price.

I wonder how much the cost of a game dictates what people expect from it, or what it should be (whatever that means). On the development side at least the cost is often something considered from the start, but I've never gotten a sense why this is the case other than the need to conform to some expectation.

[dartmonkey]

Jeremy Parish usually makes a point of not commenting on price, which I admire. I think some reviewers may do so because that's what's expected of them by their readership. Misguided or no, the 'value' of a game is usually measured by the number of hours it takes to complete, and generally reviewers give their readers what they want. Most of the things I've read/listened to about Rare Replay finish by commenting on the price and saying that 'you can't go wrong' and that it's a 'great-value' package, even if you hate most of the games.

 

Although I (and, I think, most people here) would prefer to play the 6-8 hour version of Alien Isolation for several reasons, the vast majority of players would feel like they hadn't got their £40 worth. It feels like 99% of people trot out the 'quality>quantity' adage (much like 'gameplay>grfx') but change their tune once they've crit-pathed through Ground Zeros in 40 minutes and feel short-changed.

 

Interestingly, I forgot to mention a game I paid full price for just the other day, perhaps because it wasn't a £40 proposition. 3D Streets of Rage 2 was £4.49. Cracking game, that.

[Gormongous]

I don't mean to pass the blame here on prices, but does anyone see the whole pricing thing as being a product of how most game reviews/criticism works? Most reviews I watch and read tend to be focused around making a value judgement on the game's content. I've encountered this personally where games I've worked on were reviewed well, but with the caveat that the reviewer saw the price point as being too high and ended up reducing the score as a result or telling the reader to wait for a sale. On the other hand, I've seen reviews that make a point of mentioning the price point as a positive thing that improves the score. I don't know if this is something that reviewers are explicitly told to do, or is just an industry standard/expectation. It's a bit of a bugbear with me since the price of a thing is always relative to the individual, and I just don't think a reviewer infusing their own personal value proposition into their work is all that beneficial to anyone but the reviewer. It's one of those things that from what I can tell is unique to games--I don't think I've ever read a book or movie review that even mentioned the price.

 

I understand what you're saying, but I also don't want a reviewer with opinions on a game that they're reviewing as a value proposition to force themselves to review it from the artificial perspective of someone with infinite money and time. That makes the review less useful, even if I don't share the financial or personal situation of the reviewer themselves.

 

Also, and I know people don't like this argument on a philosophical level, but you don't hear price coming into discussions of books or movies because books and movies typically cost as much as the cheapest game, with the vast majority of games almost an order of magnitude more expensive. For instance, if a showing of a certain movie cost sixty dollars or the equivalent, all around the world, for some reason, you can bet that a majority of reviews would mention it. Sixty dollars is not a trivial amount of money for most people, the way that a tenner for a movie ticket is.

[SecretAsianMan]

What's funny to me about comparing the price of games to movies is that people complain about the price of movies all the time.  I hear people complain about the price, the fact that it's too crowded, and the fact that if you're in the theatre at the movie's start time you get 30 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.  I'm of course talking about major studio releases and not smaller indie films.

[itsamoose]

Also, and I know people don't like this argument on a philosophical level, but you don't hear price coming into discussions of books or movies because books and movies typically cost as much as the cheapest game, with the vast majority of games almost an order of magnitude more expensive. For instance, if a showing of a certain movie cost sixty dollars or the equivalent, all around the world, for some reason, you can bet that a majority of reviews would mention it. Sixty dollars is not a trivial amount of money for most people, the way that a tenner for a movie ticket is.

 

I can see the point here, I'm just not quite sold on it.  If it is OK to have the cost of a game influence it's review, doesn't this just always mean that cheaper games are predisposed to have better reviews?  I have no problem with a reviewer telling me the length of a game, what they determine to be it's replay-ability, what they determine to be the quality of it's mechanics, etc.  When they take the next step and say that game X is only worth Y money they are essentially making the value judgement for you, or in some way determining what a game should be based on it's cost rather than the game itself.  Sure $60 means something different to everyone, but isn't it up to them to make the judgement based on their personal financial situation?  Does a bad game become a good game at a 50% discount, or a good game become bad at a 50% markup?  I don't deny anyone the right to make that determination for themselves, but often times it leads to games being both dismissed or celebrated for nothing other than their price point.  Additionally, the value proposition comes up in all types of games, not just AAA priced games but $10 indies as well.  I can't help but see reviews basing their judgement on the cost of a thing as just being something that at best is only valuable to people in a similar financial situation, relative economy, and time of the reviewer.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Also, and I know people don't like this argument on a philosophical level, but you don't hear price coming into discussions of books or movies because books and movies typically cost as much as the cheapest game, with the vast majority of games almost an order of magnitude more expensive. For instance, if a showing of a certain movie cost sixty dollars or the equivalent, all around the world, for some reason, you can bet that a majority of reviews would mention it. Sixty dollars is not a trivial amount of money for most people, the way that a tenner for a movie ticket is.

When Blu-Ray first became a thing, I remember movies being more expensive -- maybe around $40-50? I saw a lot of reporting that the technology was cost prohibitive and people should wait to invest in a Blu Ray library.

I might be imagining that coverage or misremembering people saying the players were too expensive (I wasn't in a position to buy high end video technology at the time, so I didn't care that much), but it's kind of worth noting?

[Gormongous]

I can see the point here, I'm just not quite sold on it.  If it is OK to have the cost of a game influence it's review, doesn't this just always mean that cheaper games are predisposed to have better reviews?  I have no problem with a reviewer telling me the length of a game, what they determine to be it's replay-ability, what they determine to be the quality of it's mechanics, etc.  When they take the next step and say that game X is only worth Y money they are essentially making the value judgement for you, or in some way determining what a game should be based on it's cost rather than the game itself.  Sure $60 means something different to everyone, but isn't it up to them to make the judgement based on their personal financial situation?  Does a bad game become a good game at a 50% discount, or a good game become bad at a 50% markup?  I don't deny anyone the right to make that determination for themselves, but often times it leads to games being both dismissed or celebrated for nothing other than their price point.  Additionally, the value proposition comes up in all types of games, not just AAA priced games but $10 indies as well.  I can't help but see reviews basing their judgement on the cost of a thing as just being something that at best is only valuable to people in a similar financial situation, relative economy, and time of the reviewer.

 

I don't really have a holistic answer for you, but why is it alright to highlight a game's length and replayability, but not its price? Surely twelve hours means something different to everyone, and I've seen way too many games celebrated just for being two hundred hours long. Is longer always better? As I see it, here are multiple value propositions within a game, and I'm having trouble not interpreting a desire not to bring up price alone among them as much more than the typical Western hesitance to enter money into any conversation.

[itsamoose]

I don't really have a holistic answer for you, but why is it alright to highlight a game's length and replayability, but not its price? Surely twelve hours means something different to everyone, and I've seen way too many games celebrated just for being two hundred hours long. Is longer always better? As I see it, here are multiple value propositions within a game.

In this case the price valuation is temporary, relative to the individual, the current economic situation, and a number of other factors that likely won't be the case in a year or more. I don't think a game's quality should be determined by it's length, but in today's market shelf lives aren't what they used to be. Sure retail has something like a 3 month shelf life, but digital games will still be easily available a decade down the line. I feel as though the way that games are examined in most reviews are based on things that are both relative and temporary. Given that game prices have remained pretty static for decades, the value proposition will always be skewed towards punishing games that ask for a higher price for no other reason than their price. I think recent years show that this is at least somewhat responsible for the race to the bottom on prices or having games adapt free to play mechanics.

To bring it back to the price-fairness issue development costs keept going up, and rather than simply raise prices like every other industry, we have to nickel and dime our way up there. Ultimately I think the real solution will be to figure out more ways for people to pay for a game, but if we could get people to drop this idea that a game at a particular price point needs to be a certain thing, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. Making a judgement on the value of a game is fine but it seems to me, particularly in talking to friends who work in publishing and movies, that games are unique in that their price defines the expectation.

[Gormongous]

In this case the price valuation is temporary, relative to the individual, the current economic situation, and a number of other factors that likely won't be the case in a year or more. I don't think a game's quality should be determined by it's length, but in today's market shelf lives aren't what they used to be. Sure retail has something like a 3 month shelf life, but digital games will still be easily available a decade down the line. I feel as though the way that games are examined in most reviews are based on things that are both relative and temporary. Given that game prices have remained pretty static for decades, the value proposition will always be skewed towards punishing games that ask for a higher price for no other reason than their price. I think recent years show that this is at least somewhat responsible for the race to the bottom on prices or having games adapt free to play mechanics.

To bring it back to the price-fairness issue development costs keept going up, and rather than simply raise prices like every other industry, we have to nickel and dime our way up there. Ultimately I think the real solution will be to figure out more ways for people to pay for a game, but if we could get people to drop this idea that a game at a particular price point needs to be a certain thing, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. Making a judgement on the value of a game is fine but it seems to me, particularly in talking to friends who work in publishing and movies, that games are unique in that their price defines the expectation.

 

Isn't any product in any market punished for asking a higher price for no other reason than their price? Certainly, a game at a particular price point doesn't need to be a certain thing, but it needs to be something, which I agree is not perfect, but the thing to criticize is capitalist economics as a whole, not consumer expectations in a certain market.

 

I also think that, at least in the PC realm, the rise of Steam sales and deep discounts has lessened the effect of price in discussions of game quality, because it's known to be temporary. Still, games can also change drastically in content and presentation because of patches and DLC, so not reviewing an aspect of a game because it's potentially temporary seems like a bad idea overall.

[SecretAsianMan]

Isn't any product in any market punished for asking a higher price for no other reason than their price? Certainly, a game at a particular price point doesn't need to be a certain thing, but it needs to be something, which I agree is not perfect, but the thing to criticize is capitalist economics as a whole, not consumer expectations in a certain market.

 

I also think that, at least in the PC realm, the rise of Steam sales and deep discounts has lessened the effect of price in discussions of game quality, because it's known to be temporary. Still, games can also change drastically in content and presentation because of patches and DLC, so not reviewing an aspect of a game because it's potentially temporary seems like a bad idea overall.

 

To drill down a little further on this, I'd argue that pretty much every aspect of a game is going to be temporary.  A game that looked amazing a few years ago looks like crap compared to the latest offerings.  Gameplay concepts get refined and evolve, even storytelling has grown.  What this says to me is that price is simply another point on the score scale and that by trying to tie a "value" to a game via its price is simply another angle to look for that mythical "objective" score.

[itsamoose]

Isn't any product in any market punished for asking a higher price for no other reason than their price? Certainly, a game at a particular price point doesn't need to be a certain thing, but it needs to be something, which I agree is not perfect, but the thing to criticize is capitalist economics as a whole, not consumer expectations in a certain market.

 

I also think that, at least in the PC realm, the rise of Steam sales and deep discounts has lessened the effect of price in discussions of game quality, because it's known to be temporary. Still, games can also change drastically in content and presentation because of patches and DLC, so not reviewing an aspect of a game because it's potentially temporary seems like a bad idea overall.

 

I assume by punished you mean sells less, but this is built into the idea of pricing.  You don't need to sell as many copies if you can sell it at a higher price, so I don't think this pans out.  What ends up happening in games however is that games who don't come out at a particular, or expected, price point are dismissed outright or that is somehow counted against them.  Even to the point of the creative director of Bungie needing to apologize and promise to lower the price for Destiny's next expansion.  For example back when Braid came out $15 was seen as a great value for a game of that scope, but today a $15 indie game is almost considered to be high and many devs I've spoken with (myself included) have been forced to lower their release price to $10.  In many cases these games are more feature rich than their predecessors, but gamers (for lack of a better term) seem to put such an arbitrarily high emphasis on the price of their games.  I think the difference between this and say people complaining about movie prices is that people will still go to movies if they increase the price over time, but this has proven to not be the case in games.  If this trend continues games will become more like hollywood, where large studios dominate not only the blockbuster titles but start making most of the indie and mobile stuff as well.  

 

I'm not arguing against considering the price so much as I am the idea that the price seems to be the thing that dictates the category the game is placed in.  I know full well as an indie developer I will get shouted down if I try to make a $50 game, even if the content in the game justifies it, for no other reason than I am not part of some large studio or whatever it is AAA means.  On the other hand if I take a publishing deal (effectively slapping a Microsoft or EA label on the game) people will accept that price.  Again I don't think any one thing is responsible for this, but it has created a situation where particular types of games either don't get made or have specific features added to them to account for what should have just been a series of small price increases.

[clyde]

An analysis of the value of computer games in comparison to free donuts and coffee for the adults.

http://sundaysoftware.com/site/cost/

-via Porpentine