The Idea: Do people who play a single game exclusively have the right, um, idea?
The Thinker: Chris Dahlen
The Source: GameSetWatch
The Quote: A $60 game purchase can either be the best
value for your entertainment dollar, or the worst. On the one hand, we
have games that are disposable entertainment - an experience that can
be consumed in 8-10 hours and set aside.
While bonus
achievements or a token multiplayer mode might extend the short lives
of Dark Sector or Condemned 2: Bloodshot, you're really supposed to
treat them like this week's Hollywood blockbuster: catch it on opening
night, forget about it by the next morning. As a critic, I see plenty
of these disposable games. Vampire Rain. Viking: Battle for Asgard.
Bullet Witch. In the crit biz, we call these "rentals."
But
let's look at the other extreme, where a new game isn't like a movie,
but a sport. You can obsess over Rock Band or Warcraft the same way
that a golfer keeps hitting the links. Yes, you're shelling out for the
sequels, the expansions, the online fees and other add-ons, but at
heart you could play the same game and stick with it for months - all
while finding new partners and competitors to challenge and fuel your
rise to dominance. Isn't that the mark of a great game?
And
what if the industry focused more on one-game players? Instead of
jumping on the next big thing and finding out it's Heavenly Sword, or
worshipping the graphics of an E3 demo only to find out you've been
drooling over Assassin's Creed, or wasting even an inch of copy on the
latest movie tie-in game--what if the biggest factor in how we judge a
game was its durability?
The Reaction: First, let's do the math.
$60 for 8-10 hours of gameplay equals $6.00-7.50 per hour. That's more
expensive on a per-hour basis than a two-hour movie (but cheaper than,
say, a Broadway show). Even worse, if you've spent $60 for the game,
gotten a couple of hours in and determined that it's not as good as
you'd hoped, your choices are to a) put it away and waste the money
you've spent; b) play on, grimly, in an effort to wring the full value
out of your expenditure (though as we've said previously, your playtime also has value);
or c) trade it in to GameStop for some fraction of what you paid for it
and use that store credit for something else. If, however, a game
provides you with 80-100 hours of entertainment, you're looking at 60
to 75 cents per hour. That's a great value by any medium's standards.
To read the rest of today's installment of "The Big Idea," click on the link below.
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