How do *you* judge value?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

Just curious, when you consider how much a game is worth to you, and thus whether its price is “good value” or “a ripoff”, what is the main factor you consider?

  • Content: The amount of content, quality of content, whether the cutscenes are motion captured, the dialogue is voiced and not just text, whether the maps are hand-crafted or cut-pasted, etc.

  • Experience: The amount of time you spend on the game, and how enjoyable it was.

Eg. If we pretend that they don’t have multiplayer, then you could consider the single-player campaigns in games like Battlefield 3 to be high-content but low experience (well, whether they are fun or not is one thing, but they are generally very short.)

Similarly, something like Final Fantasy 13, which is high content, but arguably low-experience. (you get a fair amount of hours, but many didn’t really enjoy the game that much.)

As a contrast, you might consider something like Tetris, which is pretty low content, but some people have sunk many intense hours into it.

So, as a thought experiment, pick any big-budget game you’ve recently bought at full price, played once, and then put away. Let’s say you considered it worth the money.

And then let’s pretend you played something like Skullgirls, Geometry Wars or some mobile game, and it utterly sucked you in and you played it for years and years.

Let’s say the 2nd game was also charged at full price (and not the reduced price such games actually cost). Would you consider it to be a “ripoff”? Or well worth the $60 or whatever?

And let’s say there’s a third game. It’s a text adventure that takes 30mins to complete and has no replay value. But somehow it’s so profound that it changes your life for the better forever after.
Is it worth full price?

I just thought this was an interesting and relevant topic given that, on one side we have games like MvC3, SSF4 etc that can run to hundreds of dollars if you include DLC and multiple versions, and on the other side we have indy/poverty/doujin/re-released games like SG, the upcoming Guilty Gear re-release, etc, that are much cheaper but could potentially offer just as much (or more) enjoyable gameplay time.

2

Let’s say a game costs me $60. I can either spend a few hours at home playing the game random nights during the week, or I can go out partying with friends. An average night out costs me about $20 if I’m not doing anything too hectic. If I know I would have gone out on 4 random nights but instead stayed at home to play the game then it was a good buy. That has nothing to do with how I actually feel about the game, but it’s one way I justify spending $60 on games I don’t even like.

3

The fun I get out of it.

4

Its an odd situation. I remember once upon a time I bought a gundam game at full price. Beat it in 2 hours. Aside from story it only had like a local versus so I was quite pissed because the game had nothing else to do. Then you have Mirrors Edge. Bought at full price, beat it in about 6 hours I believe. Normally i would be pissed about that but how fun the gameplay was made it worth $60 to me. Its just a weird balance between quality/gameplay/content amount IMO

5

The Online is pretty much make or break for me

6

Some times I buy games because of the music.

7

The way we judge the value of a video game should be the same way we judge the value of everything else. On the margin.

How much enjoyment per dollar spent do I get out of my leisure purchases? If I get more total value received than the purchase price that’s good. If I pay 50 dollars for a game and I play it for 5 hours and I get 10 dollars worth of value then it’s a neutral experience. The best games therefore are the games that provide the most value usually via replay ability and very low diminishing rates of return. Hence Super Turbo which has been out for 15 years, which cost me 15 dollars on XBOX Live is amazing because I get more than 15 dollars of it per hour played still today even after putting over thousands of hours into it. That’s the sign of a great game.

Thank you for demonstrating so wonderfully the economic concept of expected marginal utility. Your gundam game was lets say 50 dollars and you received less than 25 dollars per hour worth of entertainment from the game so you were disappointed because it didn’t meet your expected utility gain (from the sounds of it you received MUCH less) and Mirror’s Edge was 60 dollars but you received more than 10 dollars worth of value per hour played so it met expectations and from the sound of it you got much more than 10 dollars / hour and hence you found it to be “worth it”.

8

It’s a tricky one for me, if netcode is good I’ll be a lot more forgiving about the content (or lack of it) because I know I’d be spending all the time I spent on the game when I don’t have someone to vs irl playing online anyway, hell still haven’t finished Blazblue CS’s story mode past what you needed to unlock Mu because of that, even though I liked it.

If the netcode is crap then the game better be packing some content to make up, don’t really have a local scene and I’m not going to travel for competition in a game I can’t practice regularly so singleplayer content becomes all that is there to me.

That said, I do know that **** like on disk dlc devalues the hell out of a game for me regardless of how much isn’t locked, doesn’t feel like a good use of money to buy a game which I can’t access everything on without chucking more money at it, especialy when the aformentioned money chucking won’t count for **** if I want to play it on a friend’s console.

That said I don’t mind legit downloadable content and disk based update versions/expansions, if a game has kept my interest for long enough for me to still be around for the next version, chances are the next version is going to be a worthwhile purchase too, I feel like the disk based versions still have more value over even legit DLC though since they are the most convenient expansions to deal with for playing on other consoles ect.

9

It’s tricky because 1 and 2 actually are directly linked.

More modes, better options, better production values… those things all improve the gameplay experience and extend a game’s playing life.

You really can’t treat them like they’re unrelated.

10

eh, all I need is vs mode and training mode

if by production values, you mean the graphics/sound/etc I can play a game with low end graphics with no problem… and as far as music, it has to be pretty god awful to turn me away.

so really, if the game is good, and there’s people to play it with, that’s about all I need.

11

The trick is they always add to the value. If you have two games that are equally solid, yer gonna go with the one that looks better (all other things being equal)… or the one that has the better training mode, so you can better practice.

12

that’s true.

looks better is in the eye of the beholder though, most game reviewers will tell you SF4 has better graphics than Guilty Gear, but, I find GG way more aesthetically appealing than any of the new, “2.5D” games.

13

games with out locked content on disc you have to pay for

14

man this is some real blowhard shit. I find it hard to believe anyone has some huge mental checklist in their head to assess the dollar value of games. why can’t it be as simple as “if I can afford a game I want, I buy it” ? If it wasn’t fun then it wasn’t worth the purchase.

15

well yeah, but people generally have a pretty good idea of what makes something fun :stuck_out_tongue:

16

Ofcourse you buy it with the premise of fun but after you have it you can asses “was it worth it?” MKvsDC looked “fun” but was it worth the same to me as SF4 or Blazblue? Fuck no.

17

I try to get about an hour of gameplay per dollar spent on my purchases. If it meets that, I view it as an OK value. Fighting games usually far, far exceed that for me.

18

I normally judge value from how many enjoyable hours a get from a game. It doesn’t matter to me in the slightest how much content a game has, as long as it makes me want to keep on playing. MVC2 on XBLA is a pretty good example for me. The 1200 MS point price is a steal considering I’m still playing almost on a daily basis (I’ll admit I’m not on it as often as I was these days) since 2009.

19

I doubt people would go into some detailed economic analysis of utility and value, but I’ll bet almost everyone will at least have some sort of “Damn, I can’t believe I paid $XX dollars for this shite!” or “The best $XX I ever spent!” feeling about some games.

20

I’d say it all depends on the experience and what that experience is worth to the player. One of the games I play the most is Castlevania Rondo Of Blood/Dracula X Chronicles. I’ve been playing Rondo for probably 3-4 years and it still never gets old. Each level is like an experience in and of itself and while DXC has Boss Rush and stuff like that, even the bare bones PCCD version is more than enough for me. It’s truly a game I would spend boatloads of money on because to me, it’s worth whatever I would pay for it.

Fighting games are the ultimate bargain though if you’re really into them and they have a good online mode.