I'm a huge Mass Effect fan. I played Mass Effect: Andromeda for about 30h at launch. For a CAD$80 game, that wasn't a good investment.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
The parent was clearly talking about averages/the typical case. Sure, you can cherry pick cases where a single item under/over performs the average but it doesn't invalidate the above point.
If we're only talking averages, the average game isn't a very good value either - a whole lot of them suck bad and are, even at a discounted rate, a total waste of money. I'm still not really sold on this argument.
I appreciate that games might not be your thing, and I am sure many share that sentiment and thus spend their time and money elsewhere accordingly. I am not sure, however, how you can objectively reach the above conclusion. I would encourage you to browse through https://steamdb.info/graph/ which, among many other metrics, tracks average and median hours played for each title on Steam. If you hover popular titles like PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS or Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, you will find average total hours of 330.6 and 165.6, respectively. You can naturally also find niche titles with fewer hours; e.g. Broforce at 10.5 hours, or Blood Harvest at 7.0 hours, though niche titles tend to be cheaper (and shorter!) than mainstream triple-A games. It thus goes without saying that for those who do enjoy games, many find dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours of enjoyment in a single title.
Games definitely are my thing. It's actually why I feel confident in saying a whole lot of them are terrible.
Average play time doesn't mean much in terms of actual game quality and value for your money. I've played games just to go through them, get the story and play the sequel, the one that's actually good.
I appreciate that you have found enjoyment in some games despite categorising most of them as terrible. However, whilst the quality of any game is entirely subjective, I would very much argue that most people would not spend time playing a game they do not enjoy. I thus reckon a metric like average time played is a telling one in terms of whether people who purchased the game actually enjoy it. Mind you, most platforms offer refunds with no questions asked should a given game not meet your expectations.
I never said the whole lot is garbage. But a huge portion of them are at best passable or forgettable.
Average time played is not a good metric because people on both extremes will skew it heavily, like any average - people who bought the game but never played it, or people who play it way too much. It also depends a lot on the game. On an okay-ish game that has a +/-20h campaign will be pretty easy to munch through just to check it off, but one can easily abandon an okay-ish game with 5-10 minute matches after a handful of hours.
I apologise, I misread your initial message. I have edited accordingly. Thanks for the heads-up! I understand that you consider a huge portion of games as being at best passable or forgettable; but that is your inherently subjective opinion. It is not one which you can assume everyone shares, nor one you can use to draw objective conclusions. Indeed, the same can be said about music and movies. I only distinctively remember a subset of the movies I have watched, for instance.
I understand the point you are making in regards to average time played, but surely the people who, quote-unquote, play the game way too much, enjoy that specific game very much? Please note that you can also see the median playtime on the abovementioned website.
most platforms offer refunds with no questions asked should a given game not meet your expectations
Is that a common practice? I once accidentally bought a "standard" version of a game instead of the "ultimate" on my Xbox One and had to deal with a couple of support people to refund my original purchase in order to get the other.
That is my impression, yes. If a platform operates within the EU, consumers have the right to withdraw from a purchase within 14 days. Platforms like Origin and Steam have gone above and beyond to simplify the process even further. As for Xbox / Microsoft Store specifically, I believe, today, you can simply click 'Request a return' on the item in your order history.
We're not really talking about "the average game" either though, otherwise we'd have to include "the average movie" which must necessarily--like games--include amateur and very low budget projects.
We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Other people might have a different overall experience, but let's at least compare the right things.
> We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Fair enough. Really depends on the type of games you enjoy though. They really don't all have the same replay value. As you said, other people might have different experiences.
There are definitely great indie games out there - Binding of Isaac is excellent, Pillars of Eternity (I & II) are what a modern Baldur's Gate would feel like - yes, Obsidian was bought by Microsoft but that's after the release of these two, and they were still considered indie before then - and Into the Breach is easily in my top 3 for 2018 games.
You should have been alert to EA screwing up the Mass Effect franchise from all the garbage they pulled on Mass effect 3 (Weak ending, making Javik DLC when he was clearly a main character, etc.)
Waiting 30-60 days meant that the game was available for less than half that.
Why is dollar per hour a good metric of entertainment value? I don't think entertainment is a binary yes or no. Entertainment is a scale, and it's possible you get more total entertainment from something that you enjoy intensely for 30 min vs something you mildly enjoy for a hundred (or so) hours.
Dollar per hour is not necessarily a good metric, but it is a metric. And we need a metric like that to quantitatively compare different mediums.
What you say about the complexity of entertainment is absolutely true, but we somehow need to model it in a relatively easy way, and that means throwing out some details.
And from in naive guess, people don't enjoy themselves significantly more watching film than playing videogames. So dollar per hour is a good enough metric for our purposes.
Sure, but 2 hours of playing a video game isn't necessarily as compelling as e.g. seeing a 2-hour film.
One of the things I've been paying attention to as I get older is how many unique experiences a thing offers. Games that are hundreds of hours long, or otherwise provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, generally involve a lot of repetition. Repetition is intrinsically unmemorable.
The games keep you busy, and you might not describe yourself as bored while playing them, but it's not like you can remember all of the riveting times you fought a Zubat. And in that sense, was it an optimal use of time? Sometime I find it disturbing to think about. There are games where my total playtime adds up to literal months, but the number of unique memories I have of actually playing are depressingly few.
I wouldn't directly equate the quality of a product by how much time it kills for you. I've seen 90 minute films that enriched my life far more than games I've played for dozens of hours.
I think you want a score that's a function of (a) the time spent doing the thing, (b) the time spent reminiscing about and talking about the thing, and (c) the quality of the thing.
A trip to Disney for somebody might conceivably be something that they remember for the rest of their lives and that has value.
They specifically compared games to movies. If we're talking about theaters, then no individual purchase will ever provide hundreds of hours of entertainment. Even if we are talking about blu-ray/dvd/digital download, very few people are going to ever get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of any single movie.
> A good album can also provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for $10.
Passive/supplemental entertainment maybe. Outside of a very small percentage of serious audiophiles, I don't know anyone listening to 1 album for hundreds of hours other than as background noise.
A music streaming service provides me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for $120/yr, guaranteed.
If you include hardware costs I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on video games. The number of games I've spent more than 200 hours playing is in the single digits.
I don't think you should get down voted. I spent $60 and listened a little under 600 hours on Spotify in 2018.
I understand the reasoning, but time spent is not really a great measurement of value. I probably spent hundreds of hours on a couple of games back in middle/high school and I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret at least some of that.
>A music streaming service provides me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for $120/yr, guaranteed.
And that music streaming service probably comes close to maxing out the entertainment most people can get from purchasing music, so for most people, music isn't really competing against games in their entertainment budget.
If we're talking about concerts though, you're talking about a higher cost per hour than movies. Not comparable to $120 for hundreds of hours.
>market for music merchandise
I'm going to avoid merch because games have merch too, so it doesn't really seem worth comparing.
>and musical instruments
Musical instruments, for people who are interested, probably do provide a higher entertainment value per dollar than games, but they are definitely a much smaller niche market.
How do you define "entertainment value"? It's going to be different for different people. I enjoy video games, spend money on them, and have played some for a couple hundred hours I'm sure. But personally there's not a single one that I would take over my favorite albums, movies, or books.
So while there is a greater value per hour of use for games, that does not necessarily equate to a "better entertainment value" for all users.
That's much better entertainment value than a $20 movie.