Are Games Worth $80? Not a Chance

How much is a game worth to you? I’m not talking a specific game. Not the wishlist, dream game that you’d trade your firstborn for. Just a game. $80? My guess is it isn’t even close.

The average gamer isn’t spending anywhere near that much. Maybe a few times a generation or in support of a certain publisher. Perhaps you’ll splurge at Christmas or when a console launches. But those are outliers. Factor in deals, bundles, deep discounts and what are you left with? For me, probably less than $20.

The days of spending full price on games are gone. I have too big a backlog, too little time and not enough interest in the modern slate of titles to go out and spend, spend, spend. The next game I’ll buy full price – whether it’s $80 or $100 – is the third part of the Final Fantasy 7 trilogy. They can charge me whatever they’d like. But it’s not anywhere near the norm.

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said $80 is “a steal in terms of the amount of entertainment that the top games, top quality games bring to people compared to other form of entertainment”. And he’s right, in a way. Add up all those potential hours, and the amount of people and skill involved in making it. But that’s not how real people value their entertainment. A film or book that really hits in a single digit number of hours is infinitely better than something that meanders for 100 hours just because. Especially when we’ve hit a point in gaming where we’ve seen it all before. Publishers are playing it safe.

And if this finely crafted game is worth $80 at launch, it’s a real steal at $15 six months down the line.

Saving $80 and Winning Every Time

Because, really, what do you get for your $80? You get the buggy beta version of this great game, you get to wait years for the DLC, you get to scratch your FOMO and be among the first people to talk about something online. If that’s worth the money to you, fair enough. But very few products matter that much.

More and more games are slipping through the cracks. Go and take a look at everything that released last year. How many did you play? How many did you hear anything about a month after release? Even something like the latest Dragon Age has disappeared from our radars, consumed by the constant churn of major titles. It came, people called it woke, it went. The circle of life.

And at the same time publishers are suggesting an increase in prices. They’re saying $80 is well worth it for the amount of effort they have to put in. It’s a foolish way of looking at an industry that is in constant struggle with its biggest fans. The entire marketing cycle is  now about hoping gamers get excited about THIS particular variation on a familiar theme. They are terrified to try something new, and terrified of looking generic. The guy in his basement putting together a meme game is more likely to hit the zeitgeist than some of the supposedly bigger efforts.

I’m in the wrong. The industry is struggling. Its biggest successes are forever games I have no interest in, and its biggest failures are things I want to want to enjoy. But I don’t owe anybody $80. They’ve fed me too well, too often, and too quickly have shown a willingness to offer it all up for pennies. None of this is bad. But the industry needs a better solution than “charge more money”. They need a much better solution.