Pricing Games By The Hour Is Some Absurd Shit (The Jimquisition) - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um32uDeZzQY

hits the nail on the head. “Cost per hour” is not a useful metric at all.

So if a game is endless, is it going to cost endless amounts of money?

Game length is a legitimate metric but shouldn't be so weighted as heavily as per the culture suggested. IMO I believe that most who use it as a mean to judge a game's worth are those who game to pass time, enjoyment being secondary. Ironically f2p games would be perfect for them if not for that certain stigma.

Pretty dumb title. He used this cost per hour metric to say that pricing games by the hour is wrong but they're not even really related. I mean how much you pay vs how much time you get out of it IS a useful metric. I mean you can't say that both cost and time played are useful but cost per time played isn't, that doesn't make sense. I can see how some people don't care about it but lots of people genuinely do. I mean I've paid $60 for games I've enjoyed for <10hours but I also paid $60 for Witcher 3 which I've enjoyed for >100 hours. If that doesn't mean it's given me more value per dollar, I don't know what to say. And I do see how padding game time can be used to arbitrarily abuse this metric but padding game time should be considered a different issue entirely imo.

Quality over quantity but this title is pure shite. If a game provides no replayability, is 2 hours long but priced at £30 ofcourse the price is a massive factor. The hourly worth of a game depends on how enjoyable it is. I don't mind spending £50 on a game I play for 15 hours if it's genuinely really good. Its not like most people that use the hourly way of thinking a game is worth it literally think they need 50 hours out of £50.

this devalues gaming as an artistic medium so much it's really depressing this isn't that uncommon of a belief in the industry

Like he mentions, some of the best games I've ever played lasted maybe an afternoon tops.

Which is fine, but I'm not going to pay £45 for a game that has zero replayability and only lasts 3-6 hours

And despite playing 100 hours of the witcher I would never ever consider paying £100 for it. A lot of games are grindy as fuck and pad out the play time, even games that are otherwise good, so the amount of time you spend playing it doesn't mean ever hour of it was worth while.

Am I the only one here that disagrees with the video? atleast somewhat. I do think it's a pretty good indicator of value for SOME games. For online multiplayer games it shows how many hours of gameplay people get out of it before they just get bored. I would be more willing to spend money on a game I know has replayability. Of course this isn't true for all games, especially singleplayer/story driven games. But let's say an MMO, if you want to find a main game to play and really sink your life into it would be great to know there is enough content there to sustain people and keep you hooked. I won't look at average playtime if I'm looking for a singleplayer storydriven game, but I am genuinely interested in seeing how long a game lasts as I can't afford to buy new games every week, I'd rather have something that takes a while to finish. Good example of this would be a game I recently played, Divinity Original Sin. It's quite a long game, I read reviews saying it started getting stale about half way in, I wanted context how long that takes and if I'd get my moneys worth by then...

Wat do you mean? Films and books are art. If you bought a book for £10 expecting about 200 pages and atleast a decent story but then got 50 pages of mediocre shite would you accept it for it's "artistic value"? Or if you paid to see a feature film that ended up being about 30 minutes long when you were expecting a feature film. The same applies to games. If someone wants to release a small game as an art form do it cheaply or for free. Most of the time it has nothing todo with art, massive companies want to rush out AAA shite at a high price as fast as possible.