this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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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.
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.
Anything upcoming that you're particularly excited about?
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.