While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
Man, did any of you read the article?
“Zelnick is admitting that even though maybe this should be the case, that because of the nature of the market, there simply cannot be a pricing model like that, and the move to $70 recently is sort of the maximum they can hope for.”
There absolutely can be a market like that. We’re in a digital utopia where we don’t actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn’t charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just “own” it.
But I suspect most of his stats show that there’s a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn’t even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn’t want to say goodbye to that money.
I don’t want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?
Microtransactions? Battle passes? Episodic releases? Is the guy purposefully playing dumb?
Goes further back than that. In the late 90s early 2000s basically all 3 of the MMOs on the market were subscription models (Ultima, Everquest, and Warcraft are the ones that spring to my mind). Essentially a pay per time scheme where if you were playing the game you paid for it monthly.
This guy is just so far down the modern game industry rabbit hole he forgot that it wasn’t as profitable as the soul sucking microtransaction/whaling hellscape that’s become the norm.
I’m still not going to buy games at $70. I don’t care enough about their BS to pay that much.
Plenty of great games in the $20 to $30 market all day long. I’ve put a few hundred hours into a handful of games that were that cheap over the last few months and have bought zero $50+ games. [EDIT: I did buy Zelda TOTK for $50, correction]
For example, I would like to buy Armored Core 6 but I’m not going to pay the “discounted” price of $53 that it’s available at now. I can wait until it’s further discounted, while I play lots of other games that I already have.
I bought the new Zelda game for $70, and while fun, didn’t feel worth $70. I won’t be paying $70 anymore. Most games just can’t put out the value required unless they actually build the game from the ground up with a phenomenal story, good replayability and (optional) co-op.
You guys are competing against Deep Rock Galactic, Baldur’s Gate 3, Subnautica, Battlefield 1, Risk Of Rain 2 / Risk of Rain Returns, and many other total gems. If you aren’t beating those high standards, you can’t charge $70.
I actually did buy the new Zelda but I waited until I found it on sale for $50 a few weeks after launch. It was a temporary deal but I knew it would likely be the best price on TOTK for a long time given the trend of high prices staying high for Switch games. My kid and I are still playing it so it was worth the high price considering the market status quo.
This is Lemmy, nobody reads the article. They just react to the headline they know is cherry picked and find a way to work it into whatever circlejerk suits their fancy.