Thank you. Every time there has been a thread where people start complaining about games being "expensive" I have pointed out that they really aren't that bad considering inflation and such. I'm glad that someone finally made a post about it.
Cheer Up: Games Don't Cost You As Much As They Used To
- Thread starter Greg Tito
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I seem to remember Activison charging £50 for modern warfare 2. This wasnt inflation it was corporate douchebaggery.
I mean on the PS1 when the game went classic it went to £19 as a rule. Now you get a different cover, and a huge mark-up.
On a side note. If companies are bitching about pre-owned games, perhaps they should try not marking up their prices. People cant afford to spend £40 each time they want a game.
I mean on the PS1 when the game went classic it went to £19 as a rule. Now you get a different cover, and a huge mark-up.
On a side note. If companies are bitching about pre-owned games, perhaps they should try not marking up their prices. People cant afford to spend £40 each time they want a game.
Oooh yeah they are cheaper. Here, think about this. I just got Steam in April. By know I have 6 games in my library, and I have only paid 15 dollars. That is what I call cheap. Plus, for the amount of high quality content you get in a game, I am glad the prices have not reached 100 dollars a game. If even one of our crap games were released back in 2000 or so, it would still be amazing, and would cost a whole lot of dough. Now think of that while you play your Half-Life 2 that you got for 3 dollars on Steam
Not only that, but back when I was younger, games cost a couple of hundreds of crowns less, capping at around 400 (that's freakin 60 dollars), and even when taking inflation into consideration it was still a hell of a lot cheaper than it is now.IamQ said:
60 dollars isn't much for games at all. I just wish they cost that much in Sweden.
Still cherry picking. Of course you'll find some longer games back then and some shorter games now, since not all games are the same length, but the average length of the games is not going down. Five hour campaigns like those in MW2 are exceedingly rare.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Not to mention that it was very easy to make old-school RPGs last dozens of hours, because they were all super repetitive grindfests. It still remains that you're comparing the exceptionally long games of the past with the exceptionally short games of the present, and that's a terrible way to make your point. Red Dead Redemption will have taken me over 30 hours to finish. Fallout 3 and Oblivion were about 100 hours each, and that's not doing everything. Dragon Age is by most accounts a very long game (I haven't played much yet). See? I can find them too.
Of course you'll get some developers making super short campaign games like MW2, because their primary focus is the multiplayer. In a case like that, the single-player campaign is almost an extra feature. It's not what drives sales, and there are tons of people who never even touch it. But those same people will put hundreds of hours into the multiplayer.
But this is all off-topic anyway.
Which, in turn, overlooks the increasing average development costs for games. Bigger market, but also higher 'bottom line'. Smaller developers still exist, and frequently price their games less.Dexter111 said:
DLC and transactional items are additional content beyond the basic game; you might argue that it should be in the game at release, but if the company wants to release the game at the already non-inflation-adjusted price that the public already complains as 'too expensive', it is additional content for no additional compensation. Something that in prior game generations would likely just have been left out (or in some cases stretched into a sequel), since if you couldn't include it in the main product by the deadline, who would pay the logistics cost of delivering the post-release content in the time before widespread internet access?
Subscription-based, online-only content is a far, far newer market, and their pricing systems have been pretty consistent in the USD 10-15/mo range. Are there any significant numbers of them increasing their subscription fees over time?
Heh, both sides of this argument have to pick their cherries.rockyoumonkeys said:
I honestly feel that from the standpoint of ALL GAMES since 1977 to now, games on average have gotten MUCH longer, with MUCH MORE stuff on them.. Pick up a random Atari game, it probably has a single level that you play until you're bored with it. Pick up a random NES game, and it probably has about 4-5 levels and is stupidly hard to make those 4-5 levels last.. There were a few huge games like the Marios, Zeldas and Metroid, but in general, games were pretty short, or had lots of levels that were all basically the same.
Pick up a random SNES game, and if you happen to land on a JRPG, you could have a hundred hours worth of game in a single campaign.. average JRPG finish time for me back then was about 35-45 hours.. Some people play them a lot longer before finishing them. If you landed on something like Street Fighter 2, that has very little single player "campaign" to chew through. Pick up an adventure game like Mario World or Joe and Mac and you have a pretty lengthly (and in some cases brutal) adventure ahead of you.
Pick up a random N64 game, and in general, you were going to get something pretty short, when compared to a SNES game. There are a couple of exceptions, but most games in the N64 were lacking length when compared to their last gen counterparts. Even a game like Ocarina of Time didn't have too much more "campaign" to it then Link to the Past. The campaign was better you could argue, but it wasn't really longer.
Since the N64, I think games have been staying generally the same... probably averaging about 20 hour complete time... some games peak higher, or have a lot of non-story related stuff to do, or incentives to replay the game many times, and others have multiplayer to make up for a lack of a single player element.. and as long as the games are very successful, I don't really see that as a problem - In Yahtzee's Halo Reach review he mentions how a game's multiplayer might end up being completely empty, and if THATS the case, then yeah, that really really sucks.. But as for his other complaint, I don't really have a problem with that part of it, in any case, I can't count "Multiplayer Being Full of Twats" against a game's claim that Multiplayer is its important aspect.
*NOTE*I'm going to apologize for this next bit to jeffers, because it's going to sound condescending and douchey, but honestly, it's not meant that way, so try and take what I say as not being a personal attack, I don't have the patience to get into an actual flame battle today, especially not in a news comment section
*NOTE*As for your actual examples, Halo 1's campaign was not a "15 hour game". Maybe it was your first console FPS so you sort of sucked at it or you played it on a difficulty too high for you and spent a lot of time in the loading screens.. Or maybe nostalgia is clouding your memory of what it actually was, but Halo was about a 7 hour campaign, which is basically what MW2's campaign is. Neither games should really be judged solely on their single player campaigns (although, you can definitely judge their single player campaigns in their own right).. The games themselves were designed as multiplayer games with single player games attached to them.. It's sort of like how fighting games try and sometimes put a narrative over the fights, but really, fighting games are just multiplayer games.. Most First Person Shooters are the same way. They're multiplayer games.
As for your other examples, those are about right, but if I pick Mass Effect and Final Fantasy 13 to go next to them, you can see how they're hardly relevant examples.. Mass Effect is sort of like Deus Ex and takes a good 15-20 hours to beat if you take the time to do it right (I could probably rip through it in 7, maybe less), and Final Fantasy 13 allegedly doesn't even get FUN until 60 hours in.. So there ya go
In summation, I think if you picked any random game made in the last 4 years, and then any game made in the last 33 years.. you'd PROBABLY have a longer and more entertaining experience with the first game you picked. If you pick only classics, then the average game today has very little chance to compete.. both those classics are truly diamonds in the vast unquenchable rough.
People have put hundreds and thousands of hours into Oblivion. There are a couple of said lunatics that frequent this forum. KOTOR took me 22 hours the first time I beat it, which is pretty much all I ask for in a good game... and again, lauding JRPGs for their length is silly, because that's their one great asset. They are all ginormous, and have always been (and still ARE ginormous).. Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, Final Fantasy 13, all of them are 40-60 hour behemoths, if not more. And they're new.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
One thing to keep in mind (especially if you do any gaming on your PC) is that there is a myriad of indie/small downloadable games available that wouldn't have been possible before speedy internet connections were widespread. You can get a lot of entertainment for your money through budget titles like Castle Crashers or Torchlight, which favour things like simplicity, artistic style, and fun over HD graphics. Granted, there are also great AAA titles out there - Dragon Age: Origins springs to mind - but if you have a Steam account, browse the XBLA, or dip into the PSN, you can find a lot of entertainment for relatively little if you don't quite feel like dishing out money for a full-price new release off the shelf of your friendly local GameStop. (plus, you don't have to go outside, either.)
true that. Those "indie games" if they even got made in the NES era, were then published by publishers like LJN and sold at stores for 60 dollars.Enigmers said:
Now adays, you can pay 60 dollars for the AAA titles, but then you can get those independant games, usually directly from the source, for a lot less.
