Valued time

A thorny subject, if ever there was one, is what I'm going to tackle here. There's been quite a lot of debate over what the dollar (or whatever other currency you use) value per hour of gameplay you should get in your games. So, let's take a look at the big picture.

A lot of it stems from the fact that many past games, particularly wide open ones with immense replay value, were very generous about that value, frequently leaving other forms of entertainment in the dust. To put this in perspective, the DVD for The Avengers costs $13, for a movie that lasts just over two hours. Even with the extras on the DVD (which few people would check out, I know I've rarely spent time on those on the movies I own), that's going to be less than four hours total of entertainment. In comparison with things like the Elder Scrolls series (I've sunk just over 400 hours into Skyrim)...there's no contest here.

But not all games are priced equally, and some fairly short games cost a lot more per hour of gameplay. For example, Jazzpunk is current $15, and I've put 6 hours into that game, getting all the achievements and basically doing everything that I could do. (And that's with me spending about an hour of that doing nothing but playing the "Wedding Qake" minigame.) So, the first question is: should we judge all video games by the same standards of value?

My answer is both yes and no. There has to be a certain lower bound, a certain amount of value guaranteed to make it worth your while. And to be frank, I'm not certain Jazzpunk qualifies. Sure, I had fun for those six hours, but that's not nearly as much as that price would dictate. Part of me wants to set it around roughly two dollars (or whatever currency equivalent) per hour.

The counterpoint is that the story and gameplay dictate a certain pace, and maintaining that pace is critical for the game. It does no good to stuff a game full of hours of collectathons and minigames if that rightly can be called nothing but filler. On some level, some games benefit from being shorter, in terms of making their point more cleanly.

Balancing those two factors are a critical part of game design and production, and it seems too many game studios tend to err on the side of charging too much for too little. Even with an indie game like Jazzpunk, where the sense of humor kept me going at it, there was just not enough meat on those bones to carry it.

Of course, the logical response is to cry "wait for a Steam sale". Except that Steam sales are frequently a case of loss leaders; they are actually selling the game below cost in order to generate interest. They aren't a good index for measuring the value or popularity of a given title (I might touch more on this in a future blog).

So, with this in mind, consider your next purchase carefully. Is the game worth it? That's for you to know, and me not to. After all, the things you enjoy and get value out of will likely be different than what I get value out of. At the end of it all, value is subjective like that.