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.
I enjoy low priced games as much as the next person but I'm inclined to agree. At least a little.
In terms of currency per hour some games are outright bargains when you compare to a cinema trip and yet the triple A's cost more to produce than your average film.
He's certainly correct, at the purely analytical, quantitative level. But if humans were purely analytical and quantitative, then laissez-faire capitalism would function perfectly.
The problem arises from games having more costs than just monetary though. The cost of a film, asides the ticket price, is a couple hours of sitting on your ass. The cost of a video game, willingly paid by every gamer, is actually hours of practice with hand eye coordination, various video game systems and conventions, time spent learning that specific game, etc etc. You can see, objectively, this is a lot of "investment" required. Which is one of the big reasons not everyone is much of a gamer.
The executives should be factoring this cost in too though, because your subconscious does when it decides how much "fun" you're having at whatever you're doing right now.
Well you have to take the price of the system you run the game on into account. If you spent hundreds of dollars to buy a game and a console (pc gaming is even worse), you need a lot of content to reach parity with something like a cinema ticket or a Netflix subscription.
This hobby is expensive, particularly because it's main demographics is children or cash strapped young adults. Maybe it's good value if you spend hundreds of hours on a few games, maybe take-two is feeling that it doesn't get its fair share from these hundreds of dollars, but they should not be deluded into thinking it's cheap for the customer.