What justifies/determines the price value of a game to you?

[veloper]

I don't consider videogames so much a product and buying games to me is more like supporting what (and who) I like and want to see more of.

So for me it's in order of importance:
1. enjoyment
2. quality
3. the amount of work that must've gone into it
4. favor
5. length of the game minus padding

Example: even if I liked Minecraft, I would still consider it overpriced, even before millionaire Notch became a multi-billionaire. For a game like XCOM, I didn't hesitate to chip in and buy it full-priced. If I want to see more turn-based tactical combat, a game like that has to succeed in making the publisher happy and willing enough to fund a large team.

 

[Rolaoi]

My desire to play it. I'll spend a lot of money on old, rare games which I want to play. For instance, I've built a collection of horror game I'm proud of, but getting physical copies of those games often times required spending far larger amounts of money than I would normally spend on a video game.

For normal purchases outside of collecting, I tend to go by age. I wanted to buy Resident Evil Revelations on the Wii U, but the price never dropped to a reasonable enough level to justify buying a nearly two year old game.

 

[Spanglish Guy]

Hmm, a number of things depending on the game and what genre it's in but usually I will try to estimate how long I would play it. As well as that I look at the content within the game and decide whether it's enough for me to make a purchase or if I would enjoy the actual content itself.

So things I look for:

-Personal enjoyment
-Longevity (length and re playability)
-Quality
-Who made/published it

The first two can be interchangeable in terms of importance. I may see a game I really like the look of but if it's only say a five hour game and it's priced at something like £20 I would skip it at first and wait for a sale unless I really wanted to support it.

For most full priced games (around the £30 to £40 mark) I tend to end up waiting for them to go on sale. A growing number of them don't seem to justify the asking price. Last full priced game was actually quite recent, I bought Divinity: Original Sin and in my opinion that game fully deserves the £30 I spent on it.

 

[RedDeadFred]

The amount of hours of enjoyment it will provide me with.

Note: this doesn't necessarily meant that the game has to have a really long campaign, or a multiplayer component. If I thoroughly enjoy a short game (Portal for example), I will replay that game many times.

 

[Danny Dowling]

if it's all 2D and pixelly it'll be worth less; may as well expect some nice 3D shit for my money. Length is also a factor; if it's a shorted game it should be less, pretty straight forward. And last and certainly not least how good it is; if it's mediocre i'm not paying big money for it. simples.

 

[MHR]

For me, I take it on a case-by-case basis depending on how much fun I'm going to have with it, and I cross-reference that to the production value. If I know a game concept is going to bring me hundreds of hours of potential enjoyment, but they're charging a "founder's fee" or whatever they're gonna call an arm and a leg on Steam early-access for an obviously unfinished game, they can go screw themselves.

Portal 2 didn't bring me as many gameplay hours as I generally like to get out of my game purchases, but I wasn't going to not buy Portal 2 as soon as possible, so it's not like there's any room for regret. However, next time a game like that comes around, big on hype, short on gameplay hours and replayability, I'm going to wait for a sale. Some games I love are indie games or low cost/production value games, and I'd be willing to pay a lot for certain titles, but thankfully this is almost never the case. Personally, I'm hyped up something awful for SPAZ 2, and they could charge me 60 freakin' dollars for it on release and I'd still buy it with a smile, but luckily the universe and Mimnax aren't that cruel.

Objectively, in the harsh reality outside of the fantasies in our heads, a videogame company can charge as much as they can get away with. People buying $59.99 pre-orders are willing to pay that for an as-of-yet-unknown shit or non-shit game, so objectively that's now what the game is worth. Individual people can say it's not worth it to them, but to many people it is. The game will of course get sale discounts later on, sometimes sooner rather than later if it's bombing and publishing company hubris allows, but as we know about AAA game publishers, if the game doesn't sell well at 60 bucks, they don't make the next game higher-quality and sell it for cheaper, they scrap the whole franchise and move on to ruining something else.

 

[StriderShinryu]

That's a tough question because, to me, it comes down to a mix of both quality of experience and longevity. I agree with the perspective that a quality experience is and should be the goal, and it's where much of the value in a game rests, but I'm also not rich in either time or money. I don't think it's a fair statement to put all of the value of a game in how good of an experience it is because, to the vast majority of people (me included) that's not the case. For example, I loved Gone Home. I think it's one of the best games I have played in a long time and found immense value in it's short play time, but I still would have been disappointed if I had paid $60 for it. It's an exquisite experience but it's also a game you can only really experience once in a single 2 or so hour play through. If a game can keep me interested and occupied for hundreds of hours, however, then I have no issue at all paying $60 for it even if, at the end of the day, it's not quite as outstanding.

Of course, the best value of all is a game that combines not only an excellent experience with amazing longevity for a very low price but those are few and far between unless you're talking about picking something up notably after release and on sale. My personal "best value" game would have to be The Binding of Isaac.

 

[Bad Jim]

I concern myself with whether a game is worth my time or not. I get about six quid an hour in my job, so a £35 game takes me about six hours to earn the money for. With a typical playthrough that takes ten hours, the time cost exceeds the monetary cost. With older games purchased during sales, the monetary cost is negligable but the time cost remains.

 

[Dandark]

I usually determine worth by how many hours of enjoyment I will get out of it, both initially and later on if I replay it.

A crappy grind game that has "Endless hours of content" will be worth very little as it won't occupy me for long but something like Borderlands 2 which is also really long and can feel like grind but that I actually really enjoy and will replay many times past my initial playthrough is worth a lot more to me than an average game.

I will usually also throw in some other factors. If it's made by EA then I expect it to have crappy practices and probably be cut up into DLC so I count that kind of stuff as a negative.
If it's made by a company I like or trust then I will count supporting them as a positive though the game itself is still the main thing I take into consideration.

 

[Danbo Jambo]

Enjoyment. Length, technical quality, story etc. - they're all just mathematical breakdowns of it. If I enjoy it and how much I enjoy it determine what it's worth to me.

I'd then say how much I can return to it to enjoy it again factors next.

 

[Varrdy]

I don't have many games compared to some but the ones I do have tend to be ones I can play over and over without getting bored with them too much. Games like the Mass Effect trilogy, Fallout 3 (although I think I might have finally run my course with it, to my great shame!), New Vegas and Skyrim, where you can shake it up and play through with a new character / class / skill-set and so on. Also, if it means getting the game right there and them, I don't mind paying a premium.

I pre-ordered Fallout: New Vegas and to date I have racked up over 700 hours of play-time, so I have got my money's worth. It's the same story with Skyrim, a game that was not my preferred genre and I wasn't into dragons and swords and potions and all that shit but I wanted a change. I picked it up at full retail price and I'm currently running at 620 hours play-time.

While I don't have Mass Effect on Steam, I can imagine that my play-time figures for each game would be very similar because, like New Vegas and Skyrim, I enjoy them very much and there is enough variation available to shake things up and keep it interesting and enjoyable. The quality is generally high enough to help me see past the bugs and glitches of New Vegas and, of course, that ending to a certain trilogy...

On the other hand, I wish I'd waited for LA Noire to come down in price before leaping in - while I enjoyed the game very much and was very impressed with it, once you've completed it once there's no real incentive to do it again as the methods and outcomes don't change.

 

[Danny Dowling]

the price that's a lot more important than the money for me is the time. Time is something you pay for in games. Let's take Destiny; I haven't played it in 2 days so I've missed 2 rotations of bounties, that's a good 30 hours of potential invested time I didn't pay the game. An FF game (the old ones) would take me 35-45 hours to beat, that's a huge investment of my time. FF3 on DS cost me £5 but it also cost me 45 hours.

Luckily, FF3 was the tits and it was a good 45 hours.

 

[Dragonbums]

For me the more expensive the game is, the longer it should be or have good replay value. How much I enjoyed the game also plays into that as well.

So a game that is short, but gave me immense enjoyment doesn't feel all that bad on my wallet. That still doesn't mean though I wouldn't appreciate it being a bit longer.

 

[Qvar]

Considering an enjoyable game (I don't know how much enjoyable is it going to be, so I assume a standard), I'll pay between 1 and 2,5? for every 5 hours of gameplay that I can get form it.

 

[Gamerpalooza]

Enjoyment and quality.

I'll be spending a lot of money on those amiibos for them...little features.

 

[Death_Cometh]

I think the problem is that the metrics for figuring out a games value are now more complicated than ever considering you have physical and digital copies, free-to-play games, DLC, annual releases and things like Games with Gold and Playstation Plus giving away free games every month.

In the past you could just go I bought this game for x amount and got y amount of hours out therefore the value is good/bad. Now you can get 1000s of hours out of games like Dota 2 and Team fortress 2 which don't cost you a thing. I also question the value of a retail copy verses a digital copy of a game because I would never pay full retail price for a digital copy of a game.

Playstation Plus and Games with Gold have made me reluctant to buy semi-recent games because there is a good chance that they might show up for free on one of these services anyway. Now instead I will wait and see if I get these games free. Even very good sales don't tempt me as much as they used to.

 

[Rayce Archer]

I base it on movies. Assuming I enjoy a movie, I end up paying around 10 dollars for 2 hours of entertainment. So if I pay sixty dollars for a video game it should provide at least 12 hours of enjoyment, or I wasted my money. This is actually a really forgiving metric, yet lots of games manage to fail it. Deus Ex: Invisible War, for instance, only entertained me for the three minutes it took to shoot my cyborg college roommate in the face in that weird simulation of JC Denton's mind, but I paid 12 dollars for it, so a big loss there. And it took me exactly two hours to get sick of Bastion (the kid decided to run around some repetitive platforms for a real long time looking for stuff he didn't walk close enough to the edge to trigger) but I paid fifteen bucks for it so that's a loss too.

As movies get more expensive the metric begins to lose validity. It was a lot more strict back in college when the local theater would let you in for 6 bucks with a student ID. Under that metric, even games I liked such as Wolfenstein: The New Order would fail since it's on the hook for 20 hours of entertainment and the fun parts don't add up that high.

 

[Something Amyss]

Fun, followed by content and to a lesser extent length.

If a game's fun, if I really love it, I will pay full price even if there's only like 30 minutes of gameplay and not many options.

Fun first. Then content (and I'll lump gameplay into content), and then the length of structured play time.