cheap ($20 or under) games

[Don]

I'm looking at my track record of $20 (starting price, not reduced) and under game from Steam and I have a pretty good record there. I think about 80% of the games I'd consider pretty good, and it's not just because they're cheap. The only slack I give to cheap games is that I don't expect cutting edge graphics or full voice acting. It still has to look passable like say Dungeon Defenders, which is why I rarely buy the games that look like they could've been made on the SNES no matter how cheap they are.

Let's say you value entertainment as equivalent of getting a part time minimum wage job so we call it $10/hour, there seems to be a lot of people who determines the value of a game by (hours played)/(cost), and in particular if (hours played * 10)/(cost) > 1 then it must be a good game, so anything you play for at least 6 hours is probably worth it. The argument always boils down to something like you could spend $20 on a halfway decent meal or whatever which lasts like an hour so clearly a game costing $60 that you play for 10 hours must be better.

Of course by that logic you get that any game you ever pirated cannot possibly be bad (because it's free), and that nobody should ever hate a game they played at any resaonable time. In fact given it's pretty much impossible to finish a lot of games in under 20 hours that means if you finish a game it cannot possibly be bad because it provided $200 of value! This completely ignores the fact that even fairly good games could have negative value in entertainment. For example, take a RPG where you're going in circles to level up. It's likely this value is 0 to you in terms of entertainment, possibly negative, but you do this because presumably you think this will lead to some payoff later. You endure a cheap boss that makes you want to smash your controller because it's supposed to be worth it when you beat the boss, but what if it's not? Better yet, what if you never beat the boss?

In this sense expensive games are likely to have extremely high negative overall value because you're more likely to tell yourself 'this got to get better' whereas if the game cost $20 you might just decide to cut your losses. I bought Exceed 3rd on Steam for $4 and I played it for 10 minutes before I realized it's the same old bullet hell game that isn't fun, so my net loss is $4 + 10 minutes. Gradius V which I bought for the PS2 for whatever the standard the price, I played it for like 5 hours thinking the game might turn out to be better or at least to the point where you've unlimited continues (need 15 hours), and then after realizing this is going to involve another 10 hours of dying repeatedly because I'm really not interested in memorizing a bullet hell variant shooter I never played the game again, so my net loss is probably $50 plus 5 hours of mostly negative entertainment. And if you value your time at all, it's likely the difference in time between these two games is a lot more importantly than the difference in price. It certainly is for me.

I know people always talk about this game is too short for its value or whatever but I really think that's just mostly talk. People didn't think Super Mario Brothers was too short for whatever it cost back then and if you were actually good at it, it sure isn't going to take you very long to beat it. In fact this line of thinking says if you just suck at the game or if the game throws more cheap tricks at you then the value of the game goes up, even though they're probably the thing that makes people quit the fastest. It took me 2.5 hours to beat the final stage (starting at the final stage) in Exceed 2 because there's really no point to try to clear the game in one go if you can't clear the final stage. The final stage looks about 5 minutes, and say the stage 1-6 is 2.5 minutes each (probably way low for some of them), then if the game simply do not offer the ability to stage select it'd take at least 8 hours to do the same thing. Of course it'd be a lot more because most of the time you'd spend your 15 minutes to get to the final stage and then promptly die in 2 minutes and then you've to start over. Of course after a few cases like this you would probably just uninstall the game and never touch it again. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks like this but it seems like most developer also operate on the same assumption where (hours played/cost) = large number ==> good game. Of course you only have to look at Diablo 3 to see how this doesn't work. The people who absolutely hate the game are the guys who played hundreds of hours thinking the game might actually turn out better before eventually finding out it's not. And no it's not a matter of just 'stop playing the game if it's not fun'. Everyone knows even the best game can't possibly be awesome throughout the whole game so it's not unusual to tough out some bad parts if you think the game is going to eventually turn out to be good, and obviously Blizzard have a ton of goodwill to make people believe this is indeed going to be the case. But this also means you can pile up a ton of negative value before you eventually realized that the game sucks and you're wasting your time.

Sometimes I wonder where all the money goes into development. For $15 you can get Dungeon Defender which seems pretty passable in everything you'd expect from a game, and even if you've no interest in tower defense games, there's certainly enough content in the game to be a decent length game in any other genre assuming the creator's skills translate equally well to another genre. Sure graphics consume a ton of money, but let's say you're SWTOR that probably sold at least 2 million boxes at $60 each, do you really need $120 million to develop an AAA MMORPG? How much money can those voice actors possibly charge you which is the only thing that's especially different about SWTOR? Or is this is like how airlines don't make money if you take their historical profit/loss, and yet clearly people are eager to be in the business because even if you end up in a net loss, while you're running your company you get to take a lot of money and spend it on stuff that's really not worth it and then you come back and cry about not making enough money?

[Zeus]

One of my favourite ways to determine the value of the game is the dollar-per-hour ratio (of all mode types) since, really, the more you play the more it should be worth to you since that's the whole point of owning the game, not to mention it's a good overall-type measure of how much you like the game. It's simple, easy-to-understand, and (mostly) objective. It's why the Achievements on XBLA work so much better than the Trophies on PSN.

But, like plus-minus in hockey, it's certainly not the only factor in determining value. You also have to consider your love of the series/genre (a Metal Gear game I spend 20 hours is worth more than a Red Faction game I spend the same time with), how much you value graphics, replayability (also included in hours), how much you like/don't like cutscenes and story and how they're presented (I've forgiven lots of gameplay issues for great storyline/cutscenes, such as all RE games, all MGS prior to MGS4, and the TellTale Back to the Future game), other tangible items that come with it (all the CEs I buy), and an unlimited amount of other subjective things. (ie. things which are impossible to quantify, like fun-factor, game-specific appeal, etc.).

So even though I spent more hours playing my 9 boards on Pinball FX 2 because I'm a bit of a video pinball junkie than I have playing Shadow Complex (beat it 100%) or even Black Ops (beat it on Veteran and ignore the online), it doesn't mean that I value it more than those or would recommend it over them.

[Don]

Well obviously the value of a game should be summation of its value to you at any given time over the time it played over the time you played the game. For example a controller smashing difficult boss would be mostly negative value until you finally beat it, and then maybe the joy of beating that guy provides a large enough positive value to offset it. Of course there's also the case where you find out it does not, or you just never beat the boss to begin with before you got tired of the game. While we certainly cannot calculate it, it's clear this value exists or you wouldn't hear people complain about how this game has a cheap boss or the ending sucked or leveling up is a pain, as those are all indicative of a game where the negative value you get is not really worth the payoff at the end, and you can possibly end up with a net negative value before you realize it.

Dollar/time works well for a game that does not function on negative reinforcement but almost any game that lasts 20+ hours relies on negative reinforcement in some way, probably because it's just really hard to come up with good gameplay for so long without dipping into the 0/negative value range. The ones that don't are probably transcendent but then it's not like anyone is going to complain about spending $60 on a transcendent game. The problem is that I think the more expensive a game is the more likely it's going to rely on negative reinforcement if only because it has to have a 'X hour of gameplay' quota to meet and yet there's really no correlation between spending more money to buy a game and the amount of good gameplay you get. MMORPG is probably the best example of this. Most of the game basically involves grinding some pointless task for some big payoff, but if you don't enjoy the payoff at the end then you can easily argue that this game was a total waste of your timem and that's not an unusual thing to hear from people talking about MMORPGs they hated. While certainly a cheap game can rely on the same thing, they probably have far less ability to get away with negative value before you just stop playing the game since the monetary investment is small. But I think it's because devs know that they're dealing with very limited attention span due to the price tag, this actually encourges them to make the game short & good because there's a good chance no one would ever finish your game even if it's long & good, and realistically long & good games are nearly nonexistent so you shouldn't assume you'd just happen to get it right. Aside from Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy X (and that's because you can run away from any battle 100% of the time) every RPG I've played can be strictly better if it was shorter, because going around fighting the same old random encounters is just not as interesting as other things you could be doing, or at least you'd hope. That doesn't mean a RPG without random encounter is best, but certainly virtually any RPG goes a bit overboard on the random encounters probably to flush out the 'X hours of gameplay' quota.

I think the cheaper games are more likely to realize you're just not going to make a game that takes 60 hours to complete and it was good throughout. You're better off trying to make a game that takes 20 hours to complete and was good, and hope you got enough replay value to stretch out the other 40 hours. Even if you don't, presumably your first 20 hours starts out better than a generic 60 hour game (these games rarely start out exciting) so at least people might look at it favorably. I remember Vagrant Story was supposed to be a 10 hour game and then because people complained '10 hours too short!' they added a bunch of pointless puzzles and mazes so you can waste another 10 hours, but that sure didn't help the game any since people just complain about the dumb mazes and puzzles that seem to do nothing except waste your time (which is correct). Yeah people would complain if the game was only 10 hours too, but I think people would complain even more compared to a 20 hour game where 10 hours of it was designed to waste your time.

[Don]

A side note about MMOROPGs, these games obviously tend to rack up absolutely crazy playtime hours, but I think people are missing the point when they look at the time. First of all MMORPGs are almost like an online chatroom for a lot of people and the reason they play it is to socialize, so sure they might be farming something for 10 hours but the driving force is the social aspect and it'd really be no different than being in a chat room for those 10 hours. Also, MMORPGs are a reasonable hedge in the sense that MMORPGs are probably in general the highest quality games developed as a genre, since revenues from WoW or even lesser MMORPGs completely blow any comparable series out of the water so there's clearly financial support for MMORPGs being good. It's not that $15/month isn't a lot of money, but rather $15/month is a small amount money for WoW or another solid MMORPG because you know this game has staying power. Some of the rare items in FF12 seem to have a 'farming' time as long as a MMORPG but nobody is going to really care that you took 200 hours to farmed an Excalibur or whatever, but if you got some legendary weapon in WoW, you at least have other people to show it off to and you've reasonable assurance that WoW is likely a relevent game in the forseeable future.

[Julius Seeker]

For me, the RPGs that have the greatest value are those that give a main game with a story; and then have a lot of post-game content which may be in the way of additional storylines, areas to explore, collectible content, etc...

Pokemon White and Dragon Quest 9 both present 40-50 hour RPGs, but then have enough extra post-game content to extend the play for hundreds of more hours (there is online content unlocked or provided for free in both titles). Essentially, afterwards, the direction of the game shifts - in Pokemon White it switches from defeating on your quest to defeating your rival and the Final 4 - to building up your Pokemon collection with the most skilled, powerful, and rare Pokemon possible through a large series of side quests and minigames. Dragon Quest 9 is similar, it changes from a crusade against a fallen angel into a long drawn post-game story of expanding your own Inn, helping to rebuild a Kingdom, and exploration of lots of randomly generated dungeons to find things that you need for many of those quests; this section of the game is actually several times longer than the main story - and quests were unlocked over time as time progressed (had to connect to the Internet). This additional "build something up" is one approach I like to extend a game. I think extending the card game and collection aspect of FF8; or having some sort of "rebuild a city/country" game after completing Xenogears would have really made great additions. Lunar Eternal Blue's Epilogue is another sort of example of this approach. This is the first of two value-extending approaches that I like.

Chrono Trigger's New Game + is the other one I like - it allows the player to replay the game and approach situations with more power than before, and get different outcomes; including 14 other endings or variations on the ending. This is one major reason why Chrono Trigger often tops lists; because of how they approached this.

In both cases, Pokemon White/DQ9 and Chrono Trigger - it gives a very solid game, but then gives the option to extend the actual playtime of the game for much longer periods.

On the point of most RPGs should be shorter; I agree... Although I really don't mind if they put in padding in a post-game portion.



Anyway, I don't agree with the dollar/hour of play argument; that is not how I view value at all. I see the price of a game merely as an inhibitor from buying too many games. It is the time value that matters to me.

Essentially, when I think about the next game I want to purchase, it is more a question of whether or not I want to spend the time on this game; not whether or not I want to spend $60 on this game. The $60 is a price of admission, and in the long run it is a trivial expense for the enjoyment most games available are likely to provide just given that they're in a genre you like; but there's no point in buying 20 games each time I go to the store if I am only going to play 1 or 2 of them.

In other words, if two games are released, one is $60 and one is $3 - and I know for a fact that I will enjoy the $60 approximately 10% more than the $3 game - the catch is I don't have time for both right now, and chances are I wouldn't get back to them later; - In cases like that, I will get the $60 game over the $3 game; the price of time trumps the price of admission.

[Don]

Well I use the price to establish the amount of graphics/voice acting I can expect since those two aspects usually do correlate exactly with how much budget the game has, especially graphics.

I don't get why a lot of people seems to just have lower expectations for cheap games, or that it's okay if a game costs $20 and it totally sucks. Again by that logic you can never say anything you pirated as bad because it didn't cost anything! If Diablo 3 came out at $20, it'd sell more copies but it wouldn't make me feel any better about the game (though I might quit earlier and then have an overall higher opinion of the game because I quit before the game got terrible).

I don't actually like the games whose value is beyond finishing the game. It sounds nice but it really doesn't work. The main story of Chrono Trigger is still the key point to the game. The extra endings and New Game + is cool but that's not the best part of the game. In some cases you got something like FFX where the extras get in the way of the game, like you can't get Wakka's ultimate weapon without doing Blitzball even though he's one of the most useful characters if you're doing the monster arena thing since you need him for Shinryu and he can also hit fliers without requiring 255 accuracy. I played Triple Triad a lot but I can easily see someone being completely uninterested in it, and that's okay in FF8 because you can pretty much never touch Triple Triad in the entire game. But there are a lot of games where the 'extra' stuff isn't really mandatory and they just get in the way. It seems to me a lot of developers are designing for replayability and not realizing they made a game no one would even want to finish even once. Sometimes it feels like the early game has to be so bad so that you'd appreciate the game later on, or the generic 'this game gets better' argument (which is rarely true). Chrono Trigger didn't exactly start off weak.

It's true you can't design assuming your game sucks but some developers have way too much confidence. Let's stick to RPGs. The most likely source of gameplay in a traditonaal JRPG is the battle system itself. Imagine a game without battles, it'd probably take less than 5 hours to complete anything and half of that is probably just the time it takes to load the next screen + unskippable cutscenes. Final Fantasy 9 has one of the highest encounter rates and there's nothing particularly good about the battle system (it's pretty much same as any other FF), and this is a common thing people bring up when they don't like the game. Final Fantasy 10 has a relatively innovative battle system (for a FF game anyway) but you have the option to avoid 100% of all combats with an early, easily obtainable ability. If you want to fight the King Behemoths and whatnot you can do that, or you can just run away. The monster arena is obviously just an endless amount of battles and this works out well. If you don't like the battle system of FFX you can fight the minimal number of battles you need to get to a sphere level high enough to beat the game (which isn't very high). The game does not assume you must love the battle system, otherwise Flee wouldn't be so easily obtainable. Yet way too many games are designed more like FF9 where you are thrown some gameplay element you don't necessarily like with no real way to avoid it because whoever designed it thinks you like going around in a circle for 25 hours, or instantly dying to some cheap boss over and over. I get that some people might actually like that kind of stuff, but that shouldn't be how you assume your audience is. Given it's pretty trivial to have difficulty settings you can always control the outcome with that. Torchlight 2 on Elite is very tough and casual is faceroll, and you get the same loot in either one. If your audience only cares about getting max loot or finish the game ASAP they can play it on casual (or just give them max levels). Again, if that's the kind of stuff your player want there's no reason to tell them otherwise. If someone really enjoys difficulty, they'd play it through the standard way on elite without any help. I remember seeing some statistics that says 33% of all players hacked in Diablo 1 when playing online, but that still means 67% of Diablo 1 players played the game legitmately, and I'm sure it's not because it was hard to find Diablo 1 hacks. These 67% of the people who didn't hack presumably enjoy a challenge so they play it that way.