“Gamers Aren’t Overcharged; They’re Undercharged,” Says Wall Street Analyst

Most games are bug ridden garbage and are worth shit. It costs about the same to make a movie as it does a game and yet I can buy the movie for ten bucks. Fuck off with the BS bean counter.
 
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Imagine that EA was your ISP. You pay $60 dollars for "internet access" however they then start charging additional fees to access amazon, another fee to access google, another fee to access other favorite websites.

That would be called XBOX Gold. :)
 
Oh really? Howsa bouts raising wages? Asshole. In a time when everything is going up except what we are paid to work......fuck the man with a greedy hand. I got something he can hold. Wait...um...lol?
 
"$3 per hour for a movie watched in a theater." --- I took my 3 boys to see Thor a few days ago.... It was $48 for 4 tickets, and then another $50 in popcorn and drinks. I don't think that works out to $3 an hour.
 
Buy a 99 cent song on eyetunes, listen 10 times, 10 cents a play...

Also what adult has 2.5 hours of free time per day, for gaming, let alone a few hours, period.


Ummm, I game about 5+ hours every evening, and I squeeze in an hour in the morning before work.

At 57 I am told, I'm an adult. But this is just what happens when you bust your ass for decades, the kids move out, and the wife is more interested in your paycheck then your presence. If she could still keep all the money she would replace me with one of these;

41OVhjictKL._AC_UL320_SR184,320_.jpg


She might even have multiple uses for it that I wouldn't ever dream of :oops:
 
It's extraordinarily rare to have a game that provides over 900 hours of content...

Yes indeed, but some flight simulations do, the one I use for years is even FREE with 2 airplanes included, tho additional aircraft cost anywhere between 40-65$ right now, also maps.

You need at least 50h in aircraft of high complexity, maybe 5h in lesser complex modules. The A-10C will likely take 200h to give you some insight.

So yes, I have far more than 900h in DCS, far far more and the number will likely go up every week for years to come.


That indeed is seldom, but possible.
 
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I will most certainly be in the minority on this, but technically speaking he is correct, not that I want to pay more. If you lok back to the early days of consoles, after the crash, starting with the Nintendo Entertainment System games have traditionally cost anywhere between $40 and $70 a game, usually right around the $60 price point. That price point has stayed more or less the same for over 30 years. And that was around $60 for garbage games and outstanding classics of the various generations. Sometimes the prices went up for certain games, if I remember ChronoTrigger was $75 when it came out. If you add in inflation to the picture, a normal game today should be around the $90 to $100 price range, again that's for garbage games and things like GTA V. I don't line micro transactions and paid DLC anymore than the next person, but on the other hand price wise we have to admit, even if we REALLY don't want to, that games are pretty cheap all things considered. There are VERY few items that have held to the same price for a 30 year span. I am obviously excluding computers since that is a whole different thing.


I disagree, but it's because you and I have a fundamental difference of opinion about what constitutes the selling price of a product. You think that a product's value should be relative to something like, it's historical value, or the value of competing products like movies.

It does not. The value of an item has to do with one thing only, what people will pay for it. If you can get people to pay enough, you'll make a profit, if you can get them to pay more, then you'll make more profit. If they won't buy your product at the price you set, you'll loose your ass. It is no more difficult than that. It has nothing to do with what you deserve for your product, only what people are willing to pay for it. That is the bottom line. The guy that wrote this article is wrong.
 
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It's extraordinarily rare to have a game that provides over 900 hours of content...

Yeah,

Back in my college days I easily got thousands of hours out of the original Counter-Strike mod. Over the years I've also dumped thousands of hours into various Sid Meier's Civilization games.

If I recall, I also hit about 1200 hours in Red Orchestra II over the years.

All of these where back when I had more time for games though, and these are th eonly ones that I've ever gotten even close to that many hours in.

I'm not that familiar with the Battlefront games, but just based on what I've seen, I can't imagine you'd get more than 50 hours out of one of those. Even that seems a bit generous.
 
So 1000 hours of play on a multiplayer game is equivalent to watching 1000 hours of similar quality television?
Pretty sure 1000 hours of TV and movie content costs more to develop than a game you can play for 1000 hours.

Should we start charging people based on the amount of hours they get out of a hockey stick or football? Or based on development costs and marketplace demands?
 
Ummm, I game about 5+ hours every evening, and I squeeze in an hour in the morning before work.

At 57 I am told, I'm an adult. But this is just what happens when you bust your ass for decades, the kids move out, and the wife is more interested in your paycheck then your presence. If she could still keep all the money she would replace me with one of these;

41OVhjictKL._AC_UL320_SR184,320_.jpg


She might even have multiple uses for it that I wouldn't ever dream of :oops:

That's kinda sad man, you should reconnect with your wife.

Also, what the hell is that thing?
 
The guy is only doing his job. His job is to look for potential areas of growth for investors. The point of this analysis is that games are underpriced relative to other entertainment. Essentially he is saying that within a given person's hourly entertainment budget, that person could choose to spend less on something else and more on games for equal money. This means that in theory, there is room for increased profit in the gaming industry and that a "floor" has probably been set on downward pressure.
 
That's kinda sad man, you should reconnect with your wife.

Also, what the hell is that thing?

I get up at 5, game till 6, bring her coffee and she wakes up while I make my breakfast and eat before showering and dressing for work, (1 hour). I get off at 4:30, she works till 7:00 (so that's 2.5 hours+1 hour). We eat dinner, she does her thing I do mine, (that's another 2.5 hours+ the previous 3.5 is 7 hours a day). It's really not every night. Some nights we go to Walmart, or we go to dinner together, Tuesdays are Taco Night.

That thing is a pole used to change light-bulbs without needing a ladder. It was intended as a joke, you know, the guys bonding by bitching about their wives kind of joke.

Anyone ever accuse you of being to literal ? :sneaky::D:ROFLMAO:
 
Well then. Wall Street and their corporations aren't overtaxed, they're undertaxed. Let's use their logic against them, and start fixing this nation with the money they've been stealing (Paradise Papers, Panama leaks, etc).
 
I get up at 5, game till 6, bring her coffee and she wakes up while I make my breakfast and eat before showering and dressing for work, (1 hour). I get off at 4:30, she works till 7:00 (so that's 2.5 hours+1 hour). We eat dinner, she does her thing I do mine, (that's another 2.5 hours+ the previous 3.5 is 7 hours a day). It's really not every night. Some nights we go to Walmart, or we go to dinner together, Tuesdays are Taco Night.

That thing is a pole used to change light-bulbs without needing a ladder. It was intended as a joke, you know, the guys bonding by bitching about their wives kind of joke.

Anyone ever accuse you of being to literal ? :sneaky::D:ROFLMAO:

Gotcha...Cool device, never seen one before. Hard to tell tone over text, as well. ;)

And I've probably been accused of being too liberal... :p
 
The guy is only doing his job. His job is to look for potential areas of growth for investors. The point of this analysis is that games are underpriced relative to other entertainment. Essentially he is saying that within a given person's hourly entertainment budget, that person could choose to spend less on something else and more on games for equal money. This means that in theory, there is room for increased profit in the gaming industry and that a "floor" has probably been set on downward pressure.


Well what he needs to do is look at the sale figures on the latest COD release, it's like $95 on Steam with a Season Pass. Then look at the figures for previous record breaking releases that sold for typical $60 prices. I think he would find a difference and that it's just possible that many people are unwilling to pay that kind of money on a game. Some will, but the question is, how many wont.

HINT: I didn''t buy it, and I won't until it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

But I will pay $100+ for a year of premium game time for World of Tanks. It's like paying up front on a subscription service to get a discount. After 6 years I know I'll be paying for the time one way or another, get it out of the way and save some cash.
 
Gotcha...Cool device, never seen one before. Hard to tell tone over text, as well. ;)

And I've probably been accused of being too liberal... :p

Well thank god we don't all have to live up to our accusers'.

I'd have to open a Gulag for Teenagers and Nuns featuring Torquemada's and Pol Pot's best torturers to meet some people's expectations of what they think of me.
 
What he doesnt seem to get is that the video game market is made up of mostly millenials, and millenials dont have any money and think they are entitled to free music, movies and games. Game publishers are walking a fine line with their prices right now. The future is to abstract the cost of games away through services and regular dlc.
 
Gaming requires an upfront investment into your hardware, OS, and peripherals like sound, display, and controller. Gamers aren't getting a super cheap deal here. I'll pay EA prices when they pay for my PC, console, electric bill, self IT support, ISP, etc..
 
Gaming requires an upfront investment into your hardware, OS, and peripherals like sound, display, and controller. Gamers aren't getting a super cheap deal here. I'll pay EA prices when they pay for my PC, console, electric bill, self IT support, ISP, etc..

True, but you need to buy a TV to watch TV as well :p
 
Excuse me for not reading all the comments if this has been repeated already, but back in the 80s all games were shipped and physical box. Expensive distribution and sales and marketing. Today? The vast majority of all the major PC games are digital distrubution. So before we talk about value then vs. value now and increase of game production costs, distribution costs have plummeted. Publisher costs in many cases are now either drastically reduced or in comparison nonexistent if the game is sold through the company's own platform software.
 
Makes me wonder if they are factoring in the cost of the console, PC, peripherals, etc... all of that costs and is required.

It's not like I go out and spend $50 on Duke Nukem just to look at the box (although, in retrospect, I wish I had)
 
So 1000 hours of play on a multiplayer game is equivalent to watching 1000 hours of similar quality television?
Pretty sure 1000 hours of TV and movie content costs more to develop than a game you can play for 1000 hours.

Should we start charging people based on the amount of hours they get out of a hockey stick or football? Or based on development costs and marketplace demands?
Yeah, I'm curious what the value proposition per hour comes out to for a football or baseball. Better crunch the numbers on that one.
 
So because other forms of entertainment are more expensive videos games should be more expensive too. Yeah that makes perfect sense.

Who knew?!? Quantifying entertainment could yield profits. Oh well, suddenly all those jokes comparing prostitution to legal representation make even more sense!
 
Except season passes were more like $50, and with the smattering of content released over the course of a year with the community split, at least with most of the EA/DICE games from the past decade, they've been a waste of time. It still happens in battlefield 1 and it's not even that old. New content comes out, two weeks later you're lucky if you can find more than a couple servers actually running the content because the rest sit empty since half the community never bought the content and the moment a server switches to a map from one of the DLC packs the server gets emptied. It was the same in hardline, battlefield 4, and battlefield 3.

It certainly wasn't the case in BF3/4. Towards the release of BF4 some of the BF3 DLC maps were a bit less populated but it was still easy to find most of them. BF4 it was only recently (after the 3rd year) when the DLC maps became a ghost town. But that is after two subsequent BF releases (Hardline and 1). Even after they gave the DLC away (and I think it is still free) it isn't played much, but that is how it is for most games. Towards the end only a few maps stay in rotation and the rest wither away. It was the same with CS:S which had no paid maps, RO which had around 15-18 free maps, and others can name more. With BF3/4 it was certainly worth it.

Can't comment on BF1, but they seem to have scuttled that game due to is console style gameplay (thanks everyone who asked for BC2 back!) and their poor server management.
 
Excuse me for not reading all the comments if this has been repeated already, but back in the 80s all games were shipped and physical box. Expensive distribution and sales and marketing. Today? The vast majority of all the major PC games are digital distrubution. So before we talk about value then vs. value now and increase of game production costs, distribution costs have plummeted. Publisher costs in many cases are now either drastically reduced or in comparison nonexistent if the game is sold through the company's own platform software.

That's why Steam and Humble have a huge catalog of $5 games. Before digital distribution it was impossible to sell games so cheaply, and in such variety.
 
It's extraordinarily rare to have a game that provides over 900 hours of content...


There is a basic premise here that needs to be addressed. I see this term alot and frankly I don't think it always applies. 900 hours of content?

So Diablo2 certainly didn't have 900 hours of content, because a person could buy the game with both expansions and start a level one character and experience all of the "content" completing the game's story in about 20 hours of game time. Then you could grind levels for a week and start the next difficulty level and do it all over again, and then do it all again one more time.

But people played Diablo2 for years and years, and many only stopped because the hardware and software advanced so far, that the game was left behind and unplayable.

How many played the same twenty maps in COD over and over again. What does "hours of content" even have to do with many games?

Age of Empires absorbed people time and many people continued to pull it out and replay it until ..... Age of Empires II, and again until III, (Which burned down and fell into the swamp), so what I am saying is that I don't think your comment really has any bearing on anything. I've been playing World of Tanks for over six years and when I say playing, I mean I burn an average of, well let's do the match. The single match is 15 minutes max but some end fast, let's average it much lower, say 10 minutes. I had over 54,000 games on my first account, sold the account, gave up the game, a friend started playing and I suckered myself back into it and I just cleared 7,500 games. So, 61,500 games x 10 minutes is 610,500 minutes, divided by 60 minutes to get those hours = 10,175 hours. That is a full time job for 4.89 years.

OK, I just fucked my head all up, someone tell me if my math is wrong cause I'm going to go find a corner in the server room and cry for awhile :cry:
 
There is a basic premise here that needs to be addressed. I see this term alot and frankly I don't think it always applies. 900 hours of content?

So Diablo2 certainly didn't have 900 hours of content, because a person could buy the game with both expansions and start a level one character and experience all of the "content" completing the game's story in about 20 hours of game time. Then you could grind levels for a week and start the next difficulty level and do it all over again, and then do it all again one more time.

But people played Diablo2 for years and years, and many only stopped because the hardware and software advanced so far, that the game was left behind and unplayable.

How many played the same twenty maps in COD over and over again. What does "hours of content" even have to do with many games?

Age of Empires absorbed people time and many people continued to pull it out and replay it until ..... Age of Empires II, and again until III, (Which burned down and fell into the swamp), so what I am saying is that I don't think your comment really has any bearing on anything. I've been playing World of Tanks for over six years and when I say playing, I mean I burn an average of, well let's do the match. The single match is 15 minutes max but some end fast, let's average it much lower, say 10 minutes. I had over 54,000 games on my first account, sold the account, gave up the game, a friend started playing and I suckered myself back into it and I just cleared 7,500 games. So, 61,500 games x 10 minutes is 610,500 minutes, divided by 60 minutes to get those hours = 10,175 hours. That is a full time job for 4.89 years.

OK, I just fucked my head all up, someone tell me if my math is wrong cause I'm going to go find a corner in the server room and cry for awhile :cry:

Like I said, the games that will provide that kind of play time are rare. Out of the hundreds/thousands of games released every year there are only a very few. And lets be fair, most of those are mmo's and strategy/4x games.
 
Microsoft should raise the price of it's OS and tools used by analysts since that gets a lot of usage.

But oh, just entertainment? I think the price of a ball (football, basketball, .. take your pick) should go up because that gets to much use.
 
What he doesn't seem to get is that the video game market is made up of mostly millenials, and millenials dont have any money and think they are entitled to free music, movies and games. Game publishers are walking a fine line with their prices right now. The future is to abstract the cost of games away through services and regular dlc.

I don't think this is all that accurate. don't think millennials make up even half of the market. I'd give them 40% maybe.
 
Also what adult has 2.5 hours of free time per day, for gaming, let alone a few hours, period.

Ummm, I game about 5+ hours every evening, and I squeeze in an hour in the morning before work.

At 57 I am told, I'm an adult. But this is just what happens when you bust your ass for decades, the kids move out, and the wife is more interested in your paycheck then your presence.

Everyone's situation is different.

My typical workday has me busting my ass all morning and day, and because I have a long commute, I'm usually not home before at least 7pm.

Once I get home, fiance has usually made dinner. We eat, and then spend the next hour or so debating and arguing with my stepson to finish his food.

After this there is an hour of twisting the stepsons arm to finish the homework he should have finished before I got home. Sometimes there is about 30minutes of time for some fun family time before his bedtime, sometimes not.

Next, I spend 30min to an hour cleaning up the kitchen, clearing the table and doing the dishes. Fiance cooked, I clean. Only fair.

So, now it's 10pm. I can choose to spend an hour or two unwinding watching something on TV with my Fiance or Gaming. Usually I spend time with th efiance, because I don't want to be anti-social and retreat to the office and game alone leaving her there alone.

Occasionally she will go to bed early, and I'll stay up a couple of hours and play a game, but it is becoming more and more rare.

I never sleep enough during the week, so on weekends I sleep in. I probably roll out of bed at about noon most days. Take my sweet ass time getting showered and dressed and walking to Dunkin for a coffee and a bagel. About now it's usually time for yard work. Lawn and hedge in the spring and summer, leaves in the fall, snow and ice removal in the winter.

There is also time spent tinkering on various other projects, (servers, VM's upgrades, repairs, etc.) On weekends when my stepson is with us, we try to fit in some family time. (I chased him 7 miles on his bike a couple of weeks ago while I was on foot. Just a little walk :p ) On weekends he isn't with us there are often social commitments or dinner out with the fiance, and maybe a movie. Again, I usually feel guilty retreating to games on the computer when she is around.

So, my gaming time is usually restricted to when she goes to bed before me, or when she gets a call to work on nights or weekends (which happens, as she is an on-call medical interpreter)

Based on this, I's say I average about 2-3 hours every other week or so in games, MUCH less than I once did when I was young and single. Sometimes I miss having more alone/game time and time with my old friends, but I'm fine with it. Family comes first!
 
Government getting involved in the video game business causes my inner libertarian to scream bloody murder.
 
Government getting involved in the video game business causes my inner libertarian to scream bloody murder.

Did you post this in the right thread?

I thought this was a thread about some wall street analyst suggesting that games are too cheap, not something to do with government :p
 
Did you post this in the right thread?

I thought this was a thread about some wall street analyst suggesting that games are too cheap, not something to do with government :p
Ah yeah, I had that other thread about gambling open in another tab at the same time. Got my wires crossed. haha
 
Also what adult has 2.5 hours of free time per day, for gaming, let alone a few hours, period.

Who doesn't and why? Every person I know, even those with kids, could easily get away with 2 hours or so of gaming a day.

Not having time and not wanting to do something aren't the same thing. So tired of everyone saying "I never have time!" when we ALL have time...some of us that don't "have time" for video games seem to have a lot of time for Netflix or surfing the web...
 
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