GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour

Thank fuck for indie devs making the best games right now at an affordable price.
I have over a thousand games in my steam library and my most played is dominated by indie games.
- I am curious which indie titles you would recommend.
  
  Edit: Some of these are not necessarily indies (solo or small team devs), it's more like indie/niche games I consider good.
  Outer Wilds
  Subnautica
  Slay The Spire
  Noita
  Dome Keeper
  Risk Of Rain 2
  Inscryption
  Barotrauma
  Baba Is You
  The Binding of Isaac
  Battlebit Remastered
  GRIP: Combat Racing
  Factorio
  Dyson Sphere Program
  Against The Storm
  Banished
  Caves Of Qud
  Darkest Dungeon
  Deep Rock Galactic
  Duskers
  Fly Dangerous
  Foxhole
  Forts
  Frostpunk
  FTL
  Graveyard Keeper
  Hardspace Shipbreaker
  Hollow Knight
  Hotline Miami
  Kingdoms And Castles
  Loop Hero
  Magicka & Magicka 2
  Nebulous Fleet Command
  Nebuchadnezzar
  OpenTTD
  Oxygen Not Included
  Peglin
  Project Zomboid
  Rimworld
  Mindustry
  Space Engineers
  Shapez
  Songs Of Conquest
  Starbound
  Starmancer
  Stardew Valley
  Tin Can
  Terraria
  Trailmakers
  ΔV: Rings of Saturn
  Vampire Survivors
  Vectorio
  Wizard With A Gun
  HADES
  Non Steam (yet):
  Beyond All Reason
  Starsector
  Not in any specific order, my steam library is about 80% either Indie or non-AAA.
  
  What's your genre?
  
  I was going to reply, but most of the games I would recommend are already listed out.
  Some gems are missing, but I'd need to be at my PC to figure out which ones.
  However, I did not see Unexplored 1 mentioned by anyone off the top of my head.
  
  Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It'll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
  In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
  
  Disco elysium
  
  Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
  Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
  Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
  Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
  Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
  Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it... a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
  Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
  Death's Door, top down dungeon crawler/RPG.

The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
- Do people get refund if the game have a bug or a glitch that slow them down?
  
  Or hell, what if I play the game for 20 minutes and hate it? Do they pay me? Do I give them 25 cents?
- An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.
  
  The games will go all grind to maximize profit per player.
- As a Morrowind player, I feel attacked
  
  Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying 'dollars per hour' while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)

Stupid metric by some rich asshole who is solely focused on making more money.
- I read something like this and my immediate thought is “torches, pitchforks, guillotines.”
  
  Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games

Theoretically he can go fuck himself. All that is going to do is make games drag out mindless crap with no actual value entertainment-wise.
- The most successful games are already like that, and I hate it. Give me a good story in a compact experience (luckily, still many examples for that).
  
  First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.
  Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you'd spend 3 times as long trying to finish the same game, and now they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.

Sounds like someone wants me to not buy their overpriced game.
- Yup. For every idiot like this, there's an indie game or even a Larian Studios offering MUCH better bang for your bucks.
- Rockstar's games are the rare few I'd say are worth a full $60
  
  Too bad it will be at a minimum $70, and i bet with the hype, even $80, while also being chockful of microtransactions.

Sure, great idea, why wouldn't I want more low quality padding content in my games? It's not like they already have too much of it.

That's a subscription. He should try it and see how that goes.
- GTA+ is already a thing..
  
  Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their "+" more attractive.

The less someone actually plays games, the more this idea will make sense to them.
Gamers, especially older gamers, will know this is a BS metric.
- "We were going to charge $60 but then we added 40 hours of tailing side quests so now we're charging $120" - Ubisoft.
  Hours of gameplay is a god awful metric and only a corporate dipshit could utter such a stupid fucking sentence.
- 4k+ hours on path of exile. I played D2 probably more hours than my kids have been alive.

Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that's all people do. Here's the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
"In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that's perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to."
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
- He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I'm sure will continue with 6. I'll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I'm still a fan, but I'm not giving them another cent.
  
  "I will pirate because you didnt give me sp dlc" is one of the craziest reasons ahaha. GTA 5 was good value all things considered, was a great game.
  
  I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is "i'm going to pirate your next game" then you're probably just pushing them further into a direction you don't want them to go.
- That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it's no better value than any other story driven single player game.
  
  gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it's been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
  we can complain about a lot, I'll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst "very very competitive".
- That may be true for many, but I'm willing to bet most of those "hours" they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn't included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
  If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don't try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they'll ignore after release, and don't be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
- Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
  
  the makers of the software they use also have their own algorithms for determining pricing yes.

Executives are assholes and should not be listened to, ever.

Can't wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.
- One correction:
  Apple releases "iTetris" for $3000. Their fans claim it's way better than the original. It's the same game with only 8 levels, but you can pay extra for more.
  
  The blocks look fancy but do EXACTLY the same thing.
- Doesn't seem fair that some people get paid so well for fucking up so badly.
- This dude just speedran 2024 and 2025
- We're living in a dystopia so boring that the future is easily predictable.

I've often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it's very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.
This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous 'story'
- I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don't want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.
  And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn't always the case.
  
  I don't know if shorter games should command a lower price. It depends on the value you get out of it.
  
  And shorter games should naturally command a lower price
  This is exactly the thing that doesn't make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It's half the length of The Last of Us 2

I agree, that's why i think Take Two owe me $23 because i finished GTAV in 37 hours.
Though i hope Wube, Bethesda, and Fromsoft won't bill me for my playtime...
- "breaking news: a czech man known only as kovarex has rocketed to the top of the most wealthy men in the world list. Legislation is currently being drafted to regulate the use of the drug 'factorio' with several legislators describing as 'extremely addictive. Like, so addictive. Really guys.' "
- I played 3 GTAs, and I only enjoyed gta 2. They owe me money

Well, fuck them, at this point indie games are often better than AAA titles anyway.

Ok so somebody should ask this CEO how he expects gamers to pay potentially $200 per game.
What an idiot, games are priced at what the market will bear and they've pretty much reached that limit now.
- When you get paid in 6-7 digits annually, ideas start to form that the peasants aren't paying you enough of their 2 digits.
  He's out of touch and thinking about profit, like the blizz ceo pushing games-as-a-service
- What are you, a weenie?
- Which is what he said

I always prefer a good 5 hour experience over a bland 60 hour experience.
- It does sound like the next step here would be adding as much low quality filler content as possible to spread out play time.
  
  Just add a bunch of GOW-style "slowly crawl through the narrow space" parts to pad the play time!

If video games were priced by hours of dev time, I could kind of agree (with the theory, in practice it doesn't really make sense). But let's be honest here - that's not what he means at all.
- Not only is it not what he means but this same asshole would probably force devs to add padded objectives just so he could claim it takes more hours to finish. The new GTA will have 1000 missions where you have to walk across the whole map to retrieve some object that needs to be walked back to the other side if this dick gets his way. It’ll be the first game in history where it takes 2 years to 100% it and costs $200 so it’s a steal - only $100 per year of gameplay!
  
  For some reason I can't see your answer on the post: despite us being both from lemmy.world and me being able to otherwise access your profile and see your posts and comments, the only way I can see it is in my notifications, not as an answer to my post. Anyway.
  That's why the original argument is inherently flawed: for the same price, I'd rather have 20 hours of carefully crafted content than 500 hours of AI generated fetch quests in a basic, procedurally generated open world from the latest version of the Ubisoft game framework. As a customer, I'm not buying playtime, I'm also buying the quality of that playtime.
  This is also why we don't pay for a movie, an album, or even a show or an exhibition by their duration.

Man, imagine if movies or books charged you by the hour. Lord of the Rings would make bank!
- Thing about a book (and a movie) is, that once it's out, it's done (99.99% done).
  For a game like GTA Online (be it V or VI), there are ongoing server costs, massive content updates, support, all that jazz.
  I'm not saying I support it, just that I understand
  
  your understanding is misplaced; their ongoing costs are MASSIVELY offset by their in-app purchases already. to claim they need more is just greed.
  
  That's why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions. The studio needs to have a constant revenue stream to maintain the development and the infrastructure cost.
  That's why live services game needs to end

Then why are not GTA games priced at $20-30?
- Because they offer thousands of hours of play time? Like seriously, all the things you could say against this idea and you choose to go go with "But GTA, one of the games with the most lively open worlds, where you can do so much exploring and random stuff, doesnt have much play time"
  
  I don't think he said that.. I think he meant playtime is overpriced which considering the amount of people worldwide that play gta and the profit ratios it definitely is

Unrelated question, does anyone know any good pirate sites?
- 710+627=? x.to
  
  What happens if I post 1337x.to here?

- I'd be shocked if GTA6 has an offline/solo mode, with how much they've milked GTA5 Online for.
  
  The fuck over SP got is the biggest crime after the cucking we got over Anthem.

Of course it's a Forbes article.
- Forbes says companies should make more money. Wow hot take Forbes thanks

They're gonna price it at 100$, i can feel it in ny bones
- I hear something in the distance... Like waves crashing upon a shore...and... And I hear...
  Yar har fiddly dee...
  
  Go for it, i ain't interested in GTA 6, legal or otherwise.

So practically he wants to create a SaaS model to eternally milk their user base. As much as I like the game devs working for rockstar, their management is an utterly horrendous bunch of scums and in a way I wish that GTA6 is one giant flop.

Good luck with that.
grabs pirate hat

LMAO yeah right, eat shit take two

MW3s campaign for $4. Cool.
- I’d still wait for the sale

By that logic, imagine how much a soccer ball will cost!
- ♾️💵‼️

Awesome proposal. Some indie games would suck me dry and I'd be paying 1/4 of the price for AAA releases! Is this the redistribution of wealth Marx has been talking about?

Shit like this is why I pirate.

So he's suggesting AAA games be about $5-$10 right?

Any company that attacks modders can die in a fire. I for one won't be buying this crap.
- Paradox and Bethesda/Microsoft can be first on that line.
  Thanks for killing cities skylines and starfields potential over selfish bullshit... I'm not bitter, you're bitter!

Check out my new game: Paint Drying Simulator! With real time paint drying action! 6000 hours of play time! Only $129.99!
- Wow, that's like less than $0.03 per hour of playtime? Sign me up.

Oh God, Factorio will cost me my life savings
- Oh shit... I thought the $/hr was a good idea until you mentioned Factorio.

High quantity, low quality?
Maybe video games should be priced at value per hour
- It would encourage me to complete games as fast as possible and stress me the fuck out. Renting games per hour is a dreadful idea

Wellllll I think it should be priced by how much I enjoy it. Make a great game, get paid bookoo bucks! Make a shitty game, you get what you deserve.
- Wouldn't that be covered by the proposal? Make a shitty game and I'll barely play it.
  
  There are holes in my comment but just trust me.

He didn't say it but he wants you to RENT software not OWN it. Make no mistake, this would be BAD for consumers.
- thats what mmos are. its been done.
  
  That's not software. That's a service. If you can't pay, you can't expect them to be maintaining servers.

Can I counteract that with "then maybe you should release finished products at the initial public release date"?

€200 for Vampire Survivors?
- not enough tbh

If that cost goes above $1/hr I’ll probably just not buy. That’s my base cost I’ll accept for paying for a game. If I’ve gotten $1/hr I find that I’ve gotten my moneys worth
- So I should have paid about $5000 to Tencent because I played League of Legends?
  Absolute dogshit. Nobody owns rights to the output of my attention span. Nobody gets to tap my wallet like it's a tree.
  
  Who the fuck is saying otherwise?
  
  Tap. Tap. It's not working.
  
  Just because someone has some criteria that they use to judge value for money doesn't mean that you have to follow it...
  
  Way to completely miss the point.
  Nobody is saying that you should be paying minimum $1/hr, I’m saying that if I’m getting less playtime than equates to $1/hr I haven’t gotten my moneys worth and I don’t find that the game would be worth buying.

Dollars per hour divided by total copies sold. Eventually, it's free.

Sure thing! GTA 5 average game time was 52h (main+extras), so its price is then about $1 per hour at launch. Looking at my Steam library, I'd probably have saved hundreds if not thousands over the last 20 years if all the games were billed like this...
Have fun implementing the payment system that reliably measures and bills this with zero downtime, internationally! And even more fun when nobody mysteriously chooses to subscribe to this shit.
- Yeah, but dollars per hour is stupid. I care more about enjoyment per hour. Just maximizing play time is what has cause open world games to be boring as hell. I'd rather spend less time with a game that's more enjoyable over a shorter period than more time doing the same few activities over and over and getting nothing out of it.
  
  To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you'd stop playing.
- The fun in gta starts after the story is done though. Thats when you can spend thousands of more hours in it

Please insert Shark Card to continue.

That's a terrible idea. You'd pay more than an entire paycheck just to play a typical JRPG which typically have 40+ hours of gameplay. I'm not paying $600 to play one game.
This is developers incrementally conditioning you to accept an even worse state of things for games. And if they follow through, I'll pirate their shit and never give them a dime of my money again.

So we are renting the game instead of buying it. Great /s

Did John 'charge for ammo' Riccitello end up at take two this quickly!?

I've put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let's use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I've played each of them for about 2,000 hours...that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let's be generous! Let's count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that's at 10% off. I've bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let's try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That's about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I'll take it!
Granted, since most games don't hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren't going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I'm willing to occasionally pay these days.
I'm all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!

Take two dollars for every hour you play

This only works if you spin this with a product leadership strategy:
Shovelware games that don't offer a solid chunk of hours or any kind of replayability should be priced lower, and proper games should be priced normally.
The thing is, this is not at all how pricing works if you're building a business model. Prices are always heavily influenced by what the consumer is willing to pay, or in this case what they've been used to for years. For as long as I can remember "full price" has always been $50 or $60.
Special editions with marginal bonus content, $10 price increases on the base game and shitty DLC (horse armor comes to mind) are all examples of corporate shit tests, designed to see how far they can take it.
History has proven though, that changing consumer expectations is among the more difficult things to do in a market where alternatives are rampant. Though the whole franchise loyalty thing kinda ruins that, but I'll be damned if I have to pay $200 for a game. That will promt me to just play something else instead.
- No. This is absolutely wrong. If a game is short but does something unique and engaging it's worth more than the next open world game that wastes your time. The amount of time a game takes to complete has next to nothing to do with the value a consumer gets from the game.
  A "proper game" isn't one that takes 60+ hours to complete. A proper game is one that takes an idea and does something interesting with it, or at least tries to create the most enjoyable experience for a player as possible.
  I don't want to trudge through an open world collecting bullshit they put in just to make me spend more time. I want an interesting experience that maximizes my enjoyment per hour. If it's low enjoyment per hour there's a million other things I could be doing instead.
  
  Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states "product leadership".
  I agree, we don't need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.
  The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I'm still having fun I'd be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant "collect all these flags" middle finger for 100% completion.
  Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.

There's a concept that should be familiar to a business owner called value based pricing where you charge based upon a (usually service) product's perceived value rather than the cost of producing it. Make a game worth giving time and money to then you'll have success. Fill it with pointless content to pad out the hours and it is neither worth the time nor the money

You want us to subsidize all of the microtransactions and equivalent online bullshit to turn on your money machine. Strip all that horseshit away, give us good single player ONLY and you'll be doing just fine.
"CROSSING GUARD, WEARING SOLID GOLD HEAD-TO-TOE ARMOR, SAYS CROSSING GUARDS AGENT BEING PAID ENOUGH TO DO THEIR CRITICAL WORK!"

Take 2 is playing a dangerous game betting the farm on a single property and then trying to come up with new ways to milk it. When it falls out of favor it is going to sink them.
- It's worked fine for blizzard and wow for the past 10+ years even though is a hollow shell of what it used to be.

Man, did any of you read the article?
"Zelnick is admitting that even though maybe this should be the case, that because of the nature of the market, there simply cannot be a pricing model like that, and the move to $70 recently is sort of the maximum they can hope for."
- There absolutely can be a market like that. We're in a digital utopia where we don't actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn't charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just "own" it.
  But I suspect most of his stats show that there's a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn't even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn't want to say goodbye to that money.
  I don't want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?
- there simply cannot be a pricing model like that
  Microtransactions? Battle passes? Episodic releases? Is the guy purposefully playing dumb?
  
  Goes further back than that. In the late 90s early 2000s basically all 3 of the MMOs on the market were subscription models (Ultima, Everquest, and Warcraft are the ones that spring to my mind). Essentially a pay per time scheme where if you were playing the game you paid for it monthly.
  This guy is just so far down the modern game industry rabbit hole he forgot that it wasn't as profitable as the soul sucking microtransaction/whaling hellscape that's become the norm.
- I'm still not going to buy games at $70. I don't care enough about their BS to pay that much.
  Plenty of great games in the $20 to $30 market all day long. I've put a few hundred hours into a handful of games that were that cheap over the last few months and have bought zero $50+ games. [EDIT: I did buy Zelda TOTK for $50, correction]
  For example, I would like to buy Armored Core 6 but I'm not going to pay the "discounted" price of $53 that it's available at now. I can wait until it's further discounted, while I play lots of other games that I already have.
  
  I bought the new Zelda game for $70, and while fun, didn’t feel worth $70. I won't be paying $70 anymore. Most games just can't put out the value required unless they actually build the game from the ground up with a phenomenal story, good replayability and (optional) co-op.
  You guys are competing against Deep Rock Galactic, Baldur's Gate 3, Subnautica, Battlefield 1, Risk Of Rain 2 / Risk of Rain Returns, and many other total gems. If you aren't beating those high standards, you can't charge $70.
- This is Lemmy, nobody reads the article. They just react to the headline they know is cherry picked and find a way to work it into whatever circlejerk suits their fancy.

Coming from a franchise who rakes in mountains of cash from GTA Online… The problem with pricing per hour is that there’s no measure of quality. You can create a junk game that took 200 million to develop and has hundreds of hours of gameplay. I also thought the point about movies was a good one. An excellent movie with big actors and a gigantic budget is usually priced the same