Let me ask you a question: how much is a game worth?
How much should you pay to play something that excites you, that engages you; that takes you out of your gaming location of choice (or your daily commute) and transports you into a digital realm of new possibilities?
Back in my beloved uni and recent graduate days I was a minimum-wage warrior, bravely serving at the frontline of pizza-human relations as a waiter. I had a strange though very logical system of ‘valuing’ any game I had my eye on: would the game give back the same number of hours that it took to earn the cash that bought it? Or, as I liked to put it, would the juice be worth the squeeze?
Often I would in fact get far more hours of play from a game compared to the hours taken to earn it; any JRPG costing less than £20 was a stupendous bargain with my system, equating to something like 15 hours of game for every hour of work it took to afford it.
What got me on this train of thought was getting to grips with my first iPhone, racing to buy games I’d heard great things about and mentally bookmarking others that I’d be interested in if they were a bit cheaper (I’m looking at you Chaos Rings!). This, despite the already crazy-low prices of most games on the App Store, especially when compared to the cost of console games.
What baffles me, especially as someone who works in videogame development, is being asked to pay peanuts to sample the App Store’s delights. Angry Birds, for instance, costs a measly 59p and yet has provided hours of enjoyment. If I were to use my minimum-wage worth-scale to judge its ‘value’, the result would surely frazzle my mathematically-challenged mind into dogfood.
Also, I recently found myself pre-ordering a game which, other than when a new Street Fighter comes out, is something I never do.1 As I clicked my mouse to confirm the order I heard my lovely girlfriend screaming in joy at having conquered another level in Angry Birds, leading me to wonder if my anticipated £40 game would offer me a similar delight.
So, getting back to my question: how much is a game worth? At what point does the digital world stored within the game’s disc decrease in value, turning the content in a £40 game into a £20 game?2 Is a 59p game a ‘lesser’ game than a console release?
Clearly there isn’t a quick and clean answer to this. Measuring a game’s value will always be a subjective process; do you favour quality or quantity when it comes to the hours of enjoyment your prospective purchase offers?3 Obviously the ideal is to receive both, but if you had to choose one or the other, which would you opt for?
Comparing a £40 blockbuster retail release to a 59p download title is a bit like comparing a Formula 1 car to a BMX; although they share a core purpose (getting you from A to B), the inherent joys offered by each mode of transport are vastly different and utterly unique to the individual vehicles. To say that either is better than the other is missing the point of having the choice in the first place; you choose the one that offers the experience you seek, their worth dictated by both their inherent desirability and the expected disposable income of their respective target audiences.
The worth of a game, then, is decided solely by us consumers. We decide how badly we want to dive into the experience offered; whether we simply must own the experience from day one, opt to wait for the premium price to drop, or even just dip our toe in to the digital world on offer with a quick rental.
As to the worth of games as a whole… well, we’ll save that for another time.
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