They "apologize" about "confusion" and "angst" that us stupid peasants have? That doesn't sound very apologetic to me. That sounds like they're doubling down.
Heck, this worse. We wouldn't lose massive amounts of money when posting on Reddit. This is about the existance and viability of development and companies.
I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I haven’t bought anything at $70, and don’t intend to start.)
If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and don’t include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their ‘Video games haven’t changed price since the 90s! The price isn’t keeping up with inflation!’ argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. There’d maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.
Outside of Wow, I never found a AAA game that can hold my attention past 100 hours, hell 40 is a strech. Its almost never worth it at full price let alone 70.
I have a handful of $30 1000+ hour indy games I may be playing 20 years from now.
I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games I’ve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really don’t want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, I’ll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, I’ll probably just ignore it, as much as I’ll hate doing so.
It’s been a slippery slope but I personally don’t mind current MH (World & Rise) microtransactions because they aren’t at all necessary for the game not prevent any kind of unlock.
Otoh, if they cracked down on modding because they weren’t selling cosmetics…
Hours per dollar isn't a great metric for all sorts of reasons, but I do fully understand typically getting more value for your dollar out of indie games. That's not the only thing that makes this an apples and oranges comparison though. Games in the 90s and 00s were often cranked out in 9-18 months, with a number of developers in the single and double digits, compared to a lot of productions today taking hundreds of people to develop for 5 years before they come to market. Capcom in particular hasn't been getting too crazy with development timelines, because their projects usually aren't overscoped compared to their competitors, but we're still talking way more salaries to pay for a much longer period of time to create a single video game these days. Rather than DLC, it was designing games around strategy guides, hint hotlines, and coin operation in the arcades, resulting in decisions like making the first level really easy and the next level really hard, so you couldn't finish it with one rental, and you'd need to pay for additional materials to find out the obtuse answers to problems in the game. Duck Tales may have sold 1.67 million copies while its break even point was way, way, way lower than it is for the likes of Dragon's Dogma 2, which might need to sell that many copies to make back the money it took to create it, and it's not even a foregone conclusion that it will sell that many either.
Hours per dollar isn’t a great metric for all sorts of reasons
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much I’ll spend on a game. If I’m only going to spend 20 hours on it, I’ll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (‘Finished’ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), I’d feel pretty bad about that purchase.
I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but it's trivial to make a game longer, and a tight 5-10 hour game can frequently be more valuable to me than a 70 hour game, a lot of Capcom's games among them. Part of the reason Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are getting slammed in reviews right now is because they made games that could be played for hundreds of hours, and that happened at the expense of making great games that you'd be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? I'll wager a guess it cost you more than $3 even if it was really long.
And all hours are not created equal either. An action game that takes 50 hours would probably be exhausting, but a turn based game like an RPG or a 4X would feel right at home there, since you're spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.
Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically play… if I’m buying a AAA action game, it’s something something like Sekiro, and I’ll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, I’m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesn’t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - I’ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. I’m also not against short games… I often prefer short games, but I also won’t pay $60 for them; I’ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. I’m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
There’ve definitely been games that I didn’t get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have played… Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and it’s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. That’s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); it’s a “waste” from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes that’s okay, and I’m willing to splurge. I’ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
How we each choose to spend our money is very much a personal decision, and if you feel you need more length out of a game in order to get your money's worth, no one can really tell you you're wrong. Something to consider though is that your dollars spent decides what gets made in the future. If enough people feel the way you do, it's no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because they're not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, I've seen plenty of my favorite franchises become worse off for being larger, longer experiences (that also cost them more time and money to make, meaning these games come out less frequently), and I'd love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.
Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesn’t have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.
Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns don't have that, and I definitely won't get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but they're still my favorites. It's been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope it's not because the market those games are targeting have a $1/hr threshold to meet. $1/hr is also a fairly arbitrary metric in the face of inflation, because it essentially means that games need to keep being made on scrappier and scrappier budgets as time goes on in order to meet it. It's a fool's errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully that's not what it sounds like I'm doing, but personally, I find it to be a poor measure of the value of a game or any kind of entertainment for that matter.
I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldn’t expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldn’t buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesn’t really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games I’ve bought lately have been $10-$15 “boomer shooters”.
I don't buy modern AAA FPS either, but that's because they've been chasing those longer play times lately, or they end up not particularly interesting like Immortals of Aveum and then blame the market for not buying their game. I'm waiting for the indie scene to get past boomer shooters and start emulating the era just after that, and I'll gladly pay more than $15 to have it. There are a couple of candidates, but nothing for sure.
In the shooter space, just things I'm hopeful for, but I don't know how likely it is they'll scratch that itch. I've got my eyes on Mouse, Core Decay, and Phantom Fury.
Back of the napkin math says they more than broke even on their $80M investment into the game post-launch. I enjoyed the game at launch (which I know wasn't necessarily the norm), and I largely enjoyed the expansion. Unfortunately, this is what I have to scratch my FPS campaign itch these days, but it's still a pretty good one of those combined with a pretty good RPG. It would especially be nice to see them up the ante on the RPG aspects, because next to Baldur's Gate 3 this year, you don't get anywhere near the same sense of freedom and creativity.
I also enjoyed the game on release, I had very few bugs and the ones I did encounter I was able to work around in various ways. The most memorable one was a bug where killing the enemies would prevent the next objective from being scannable, preventing it from continuing and completion. Everything else was pretty minimal and I was able to 100% the game. Post game I spent modding which I also got a lot of enjoyment out of a little over 200 hours total in the game.
Haven't been able to get to Phantom Liberty yet, and I haven't started a new playthrough for the update be has I'm attached to my save (which is silly lol). I'll get to it.
I feel you on the lack of compelling FPS games these days though. Like Dishonored, but with guns!
Eh. Can't say I had fun watching my higher end weapon break on the stronger, bullet sponge enemies later on, and replacing it with a crappy short swords that do barely any damage. ToTK though was certainly better thanks to fusion.
That it kind of the thing tho, if you just violently smash your sword around, it's gonna break. Like katanas are pretty flimsy and a german greatsword for example could just snap it off. Let's take elden ring for example and you use your sword to find an invisible wall, that's terrible for a sword and it would go to shit really quick. So i guess in a way it's realistic. But i really don't like it when games do that. All it does for me is that i'm never going to use the nice things in the game, because they break, then you need a new one or repair it or whatever.
I'm fine with encumbrance... especially in these Bethesda games. All they do is litter the world with garbage for the player to pick up and carry around for no reason other than make the game longer.
Not shocking. I just hope people learn from this and react by not getting into the gaming industry until the shortage of workers forces it to change. Same thing with the entertainment industry outside of gaming at large.
The way the movie / tv industry treats most of its employees who aren't at the very top is just horrible, and if people didn't have such stars in their eyes for Hollywood and such, working conditions would be so much better all around, along with pay and mandatory breaks.
I've been in the entertainment industry, and so has my sister. It's amazingly how terrible people are treated, including crew and lower end actors, and all for a product that's not really necessary or all that important for the survival of the world. People don't think about it, but we've been around for MILLIONS of years without TV and Movies. Sure there were plays and such, but it doesn't take much for humanity to amuse itself. Simple conversations, board games, some sticks and balls... if the writer / actor strikes kept going on, and new content stopped coming out, it'd suck at first, but we'd get used to it.
Yeah I am hoping they overhaul or embrace a new engine because that is what apparently killed mutliplayer for Cyberpunk. I dream of playing as trauma team and extracting patients.
I see where he's coming from, as when cross-play isn't available niche online games can die quickly and exclusives are annoying, but if there was only one platform holder, that status would quickly be exploited with high online fees and tighter controls of how games are purchased/resold.
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