Wait, what? So a game worth $10 should keep you entertained for 100 hours? You must not be satisfied often.

You set your standard based on Morrowind? That's pretty rare. Morrowind is something of an exception in my opinion.

My benchmark has always, always been the first video games I played:
Legend of Dragoon
Zelda: Ocarina
Final Fantasy 7

I paid anywhere from $35 to $50, and I got a couple hundred hours out of each one. Aaaand I still play them to this day. Sadly, the only games since that have met my personal "I think this game was truly worth it" standard were few:

Perfect Dark
Morrowind/Oblivion
Majora's Mask
Assassin's Creed/2/Brotherhood
Kessen 2 (it was very cheap)
Suikoden 4
Till the End of Time
Armored Core 2 (not any of the ones since)
Shattered Skies
Rome/Medieval 2/Empire: Total War
Civilization 4
Call of Duty UO and CoD 2 (not the new ones)

And that's about it. Sadly, I have dozens upon dozens of other games in various shelves around the place, none of those games stack up. Still though, I think using Morrowind as a benchmark is really high. You can play that game for years and still have fun with it. Expecting every $60 game to have 600 hours of game-play is going to result in very few games being worth it.

Games that are worth it for me are games that have me entertained for 3+ hours per €. I payed 50€ for Dark Souls and I've already played it over 180 hours. Worth it

Not V? :blink:

i don't just buy games because they are a sequel or made by a developer that made games i like before. i do a bit of research, as to find out if the game is just some 10-15 hour game play trash. i usually wait until the game has been out and lately i watch other people play with LP's on youtube before i buy to see if the game is misrepresenting what it actually is... like da:o.

so i usually only buy games that i like, and the 10 hours per $ is mainly just a goal, not every game i really like makes it to that but usually lasts me for several hundred hours. what i really look for are games that will stand the test of time.




yeah, but after morrowind i just feel constrained by games (particularly rpgs) that are not open worlds that let me play how and any way i want. you don't go back to eating [censored] after eating ice cream, also you can't always have ice cream, so i choose to not eat very often until either i can afford to eat ice cream or a good flavor shows up.

the last games that i bought that i felt were worth it since morrowind were:

oblivion
sim city 4 (just bought cities xl 2012 the other day and so far its pretty nice, enough to distract me from a certain game for a few hours already)
FO3
minecraft (which i play religiously every day pretty much when i am not working)
civ2 (still giving civ 5 a chance although kinda preoccupied with other games atm)

Well, there's a big difference between not wanting to play 10-15 hour gameplay trash and expecting to have 100 hours of play value for an $10 game (that's 500 hours for a $50 game, for the viewers at home). A more realistical outlook would be, say, 2 hours per $. I tend to be only satisfied when a game gives me at least 70 hours of gameplay, no matter what it cost.

And how was DA:O misrepresenting itself?


Several hundred hours? But games aren't meant to last several hundred hours! Not even Atlus or Nippon Ichi games are actually meant to do that. So what's the point in eking several hundred hours out of a game if you have to do it by playing it over and over and over?

I think a good anology to video game revenue would be federal income taxes in the US. It's akin to political suicide to raise income taxes, so state governments rely on property tax, sales tax, cigarette tax... basically anything but income taxes. The game industry is similar in that the retail pricing has stayed mostly the same, while costs have soared. In order to make up the difference, developers charge slightly inflated rates for DLC to make up the difference.

As for the hours per dollar argument, I find myself with less and less time to dedicate to gaming; I'm fine paying $50 for 10-15 hours of awesome (as long as there's some multiplayer).

thats just my preference, obviously i some times buy games that don't meet that standard, quite often actually. and there are some games that i own that have not accrued that amount of game time (yet) which often is due to a game that i am anticipating coming out and distracting me from them.

kinda like RDR and GTA4 i really like those and will probably continue to pick them up and play when i feel like it several years down the road.



never mind that, lets just leave it at the fact that i was very unsatisfied, it was my mistake for baiting like that.




i rarely play games that are meant to be played once through or don't offer now additional content or some kind of free roaming aspect, any thing like that pretty much is excluded from my list thus is a large reason why i did not like da:o

I complain about it so much because, in the glorious past, I could buy an expansion pack on a disk, for not much more money than that while getting much more content. I have yet to see a DLC that offers as much as The Frozen Throne, Barbarian Invasion, Kingdoms, Bloodmoon, Rise of the Witch King or Dark Crusade. By today's standards, those would have been released as new games for full price, rather than as an expansion pack that costs only about half as much as the original game. But, since developers have found out that they can make much more money by charging absurd amounts of money for only a few hours of content and in one stroke also kill the second hand market by only releasing it as downloads, I fear that the Expansion Pack is as good as dead.



That is even more depressing than it already sounds because I can really see that happening.

It is, and for the same reason everything else gets dropped by the wayside: it doesn't bring back enough revenue. Don't expect to see expansion packs like Throne of Bhaal or Mask of the Betrayer ever again.



It's not just me saying that. Look at http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-most-ominous-trends-in-video-games/.

unless its from an indie developers, personally i am watching indie games that come out. so far most are arcade like but i expect that some will explode like mc

Here's my issue with DLC: it preys on those with mental disorders. You and I can see that a bunch of new virtual outfits aren't worth the five bucks, but there are people who, due to an accident of their birth, cannot resist the urge. They have to have "the complete game." I feel like a whole lot of DLC is made for this market, and it's just rotten.

Otherwise, I mostly play RPGs and strategy games. I've gotten hundreds of hours of entertainment from Civ 5, Oblivion, et cetera. How much does a two-hour movie cost? Multiply that by fifty, and its a whole lot less than games cost. We're getting a good deal.

I try to choose games so I get roughly alt least half an hour in game to every pound I spend. DLC? I've only ever bouhgt it for one game; Oblivion.

Ah yes I've read that. Games turning into a 'service model', combined with stupid drm, is almost enough to make me stop gaming altogether. Luckily I can still enjoy my copy of VtM: Redemption, free of licensing [censored] and with the patch still available for free. I feel old now.

Oh man, I should reinstall that game!