Editor's note: As a gamer, Jon wants 'em shorter and cheaper. But he argues that the realities of game development suggest that long games at a premium price point aren't going anywhere. -Demian
“I am convinced that in the future we must change the price of video games -- they’re too expensive for the audience," said Olivier Comte, VP of Namco Bandai Partners, last week. His words resonated with me in a way lots of industry buzz has been doing recently.
To my mind, there's no question about it: Video games are far too expensive for anyone other than the hardcore enthusiast, and even those individuals are paying a premium price for content which many could happily go without.
Personally, it's a struggle for me to play a lengthy game to completion (and I know I'm not alone, considering John Davison's recent GamePro editorial Too Big and Too Hard.) Unless a game offers a massive amount of variety in its gameplay, holding my attention for longer than five hours is a rarity. Anything more than that feels like time wasted just to see the story wrap up.
Aside from this writer's own opinion, though, what reason does the industry have to change?
Economically, lower price points make sense. Games would be considered by most (though I'll go out on a limb here and guess this doesn't include many of Bitmob's readers) to be luxury goods. Usually consumers of luxury goods are very responsive to a change in price, and as such a drop in price is likely to result in an increase in total revenue. Put simply, the increase in game sales would theoretically make up for the reduction of the price of every unit sold.
The second-hand games market would also suffer a serious blow. How many people will trade in a $15 DVD to buy the latest release? The temptation is understandably there with a $60 game, but reduce the cost and people are less likely to pawn off their collections to keep up with this week's must-haves.
Piracy could also take a hit. A major excuse cited by pirates is that they'd buy games if they could afford them, but since they can't, their only option is to steal them. Morally ambiguous this argument may be, but if games were cheaper, then certainly more gamers could acquire them by legitimate means. That said, if a 'pay what you want' model for a DRM-free charity release isn't cheap enough for 25% of people that played the Humble Indie Bundle, then piracy may well persist no matter how inexpensive games get.
Despite all these very utopian ideas, games -- or at least the big-budget releases that make up the majority of sales -- won't get cheaper any time soon. The reason for this lies in a little economic theory you've probably heard of called economies of scale.
The theory of economies of scale states that as your total output increases, your long-run average costs will decrease (until diseconomies of scale set it, but that doesn't really apply here). For example, a large supermarket can sell vegetables at a much cheaper price than a small corner shop because they can bulk buy and pull all those other neat tricks to pass the savings on to you, the consumer.
What this means in terms of games is that as a game's hour count increases (in other words, its output) the cost of producing each successive hour of content decreases. Getting a five-minute demo up and running is a hugely expensive endeavor for a developer, but once the graphics engine is chugging away, a character's modelled/animated, and enemy A.I. is in place, it's comparatively much cheaper to craft another hour's worth of content.
And that's why games "want" to be long: As a developer/publisher you can double the length of your game and raise the perceived value (and therefore the price) from that of a downloadable title to a retail release, all without doubling your budget.
Downloadable and browser games have exploded lately, in part because they scratch the itch of time-strapped gamers everywhere. But for those hoping to see games such as Uncharted make their way to us in more bite-size chunks, it might be a long wait.
So over to you. Is it ridiculous complaining that games are too long at a time when games are shorter on average than they've ever been before? Do you find yourself lusting after more when you finish a game, or has your enthusiasm peaked well before the credits roll? Would you be willing to pay half the price for a game that's half as long? Do you have enough time to play games to completion in the first place?
