Better to say, they are compared to good games priced at 10 to 15.
Let’s see, 70-100+(!) bucks for the (yawn) twentyseventh COD with a 4 hour campaign, or 20 for a game that is complete and lasts for dozens if not hundreds of hours?
Yeah, my choice is easily made.
factorio has mods that last thousands of hours. they’re free additions, and the full game with its dlc is only like 60USD. is ridiculous.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW
it kinda feels like the more expensive a game is, the less value it seem to have.
The most expensive game I own is Baldurs Gate 3 (@ $70 CAD) and it’s the only game that was worth full price in my 12 years of activity on steam and over 250 games purchased. My next most expensive game was $30 CAD and I only bought a few games that high.
That’s exactly it, was looking for this comment.
I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver
The price has crept up with the paid expansions, but holy shit do NOT sleep on the Castlevania one. It doubles the base game content, and fits in great.
I’m burnt out on it at this point. In the whole bullet haven gameplay loop.
Don’t forget that Fallout New Vegas regularly drops below 15$ with all the DLC
Megabonk, my beloved…
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Thing is, anything under 20 gets purchased, anything above that will be pirated (quite easily)
“gAmeS aRe tOo ExpEnsiVe tHesE Days!” paid $70 for a major release in 1999, also paid $70 for a major release in 2025
Games were released as complete games in 1999.
The difference is back then, I didn’t have to wait 2 years (give or take) for games to go on a proper sale to enjoy it. I’d just wait until a month or two has passed and ask around, go into Gamestop/EB Games, rent it at Blockbuster, find used games at yard sales, etc. and buy them for cheap (or potentially barter for them or be lent the copy).
We pay $70 to not play at release due to server issues and critical bugs. We do QA for most major gaming companies - while paying for the privilege to do so. We pay full-price for incomplete experiences that we are misled into believing are complete experiences, as well.
Most games I purchase at release (or pre-order) are just in limbo on my account while I wait for a playable product. By the time it’s playable, there is usually $70 worth of DLCs for me to buy.
paid $70 for a major release in 1999,
Aha
Maybe you did, I bought used games for 10.
And compared to the 10 year old titles on sale that actually work well and look great on 5 year old mid-range HW…
That’s another problem, even if we disregard optimizations, AAA games from 2015. look better than modern upscaled stuff, Unreal Engine seems to be easy enough to use nowadays that big vertically-integrated slop publishers replaced seasoned developers with the cheapest of zoomers.
I had to drop my “under 5 bucks” rule because games don’t drop that low anymore. 10-15 is where it’s at now, for better and for worse
I’m still holding to it, but I agree, it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff on sale for less than $5. Especially if you’ve been on Steam for a long time and have a large library already.
SUICIDE SQUAD FOR $3.50 GAMERS REJOICE
~/s, obviously~
Yeah the subtext of the article is the more interesting point, that good quality indy games are perhaps a bit more expensive.
Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I’ve paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I’m on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I’ve gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
I was considering buying Risk of Rain 2 on sale yesterday for 9€ but buying all the DLCs costs 45€.
As the other commenter said, only one person needs the dlc to play the (non-character) DLC content. It also frequently goes on pretty big sales, though right now it’s probably full price since the newest (and imo, best) DLC just dropped. Each DLC is a significant content expansion to the game, and is absolutely worth the asking price (except maybe seekers, which fell a bit flat for me on release. It’s since been rebalanced).
If you wanted to weigh which DLC to consider getting, I would recommend Void if you like the idea of modified items that do cool shit, an alternate ending to the game, and some cool new mechanics. It comes with a dope sniper survivor and a void survivor that trades health for damage or vice versa.
Seekers comes with an alternate path of stages leading to an alternate (very challenging) boss. I find that the seekers boss is a severe difficulty check compared to the ease of reaching the boss, compared to the void boss which you only fight late in a run or after a different boss. Two of the survivors feel lackluster to me, but False Son is an absolute beast and the only melee character capable of truly tanking rather than using i-frames or mobility.
Alloyed Collective is the newest, and comes tons of new mechanics (free for everyone but expanded on in the DLC), a new path to follow, SEVERAL new super interesting boss fights, tons of new stages, and tons of new enemies. Overall, super worth it. The characters it adds are a drone controller (a previously unviable play style) and a loot gremlin that gets tons of really awesome interactions and A Cube.
My list would be Alloyed, Void, then Seekers. Alloyed and Void add the most to the base game, Seekers is mostly alternate stuff that won’t touch your runs, though the new shrines are pretty useful early game.
For what it’s worth, only one player needs the DLC for everybody in the session to use it, which is pretty cool of the devs to allow that in this day and age.
That is very interesting 🤔
Thanks!Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).
Yeah thats about what i expected.
This is one of my favorite games and I haven’t bought any DLC, my friend has and I mooch off of them when we play :)
Thing is, I can also NOT play games and spend my money on other hobbies.
i will continue buying the games and not playing them, tyvm
A person of culture, I see.
I have the time to play games. I own many games. Yet I am not playing them. Why? I used to love games. Why can I not get sucked in anymore?
I used to be like that. Had a huge backlog of games and didn’t play any of them. The the steam deck happened …
Depression and anxiety, probably.
I am anxious about nothing and feel the whole range of human emotions, hope for the future, enjoyment of other things. I feel quite happy most of the time actually.
i’v heard some people say this sort of thing is likely that your subconscious or whatever just isnt being “fulfilled” by that level of activity, that you got to try something a little “higher” like creating your own game/telling your own story
Not a bad idea. I’m 90% done my erotic Star Trek the next generation fan fiction. One more graphic sex scene and it’s done. I could finish that.
Yeah, especially since I know I likely wouldn’t play it much.
On the other hand, if it was free (also as in money) and open-source, and I liked it, I could donate. Although I don’t have much money, so probably just smaller amounts, better than the 0 I do right now by not gaming instead.
For example, I absolutely wouldn’t pay $9.60 for Binary Eye (barcode/2D code scanner app) if it cost that much, but as a donation that was fine.Well, I could make an exception for games on physical media. I like it, and it has resale value.
Yeah I’m a very patient gamer, I’m perfectly happy to just play games on my Steam Deck years after they come out. If there’s something I want, I’ll usually just wishlist it and let it sit there until it goes down to a price that seems reasonable. Much better to get it for $15-20 with all the DLC and bug fixes than paying $80+ for an unfinished buggy mess IMO.
That’s why they add gambling mechanics in games. That way many can not stop playing.
My rule is I’m only willing to pay a dollar for every expected hour of play, so you can imagine I buy few things at full price.
The last two games I paid full price for were Elden Ring and Mandragora. I am far more likely to pay full price for an indie title that I’m excited about than anything else, because as an artist myself, I fully understand the impact of a pre-purchase on an indie studio.
I would also generally consider £1/hour of gameplay to be pretty terrible value tbh. Truly good games are more like £0.10/hour or less
People spend like $20 to watch a 2 hour movie, $1/hr isn’t that unreasonable
Not to mention that not all gaming hours are equally fungible.
There can be shorter narrative games where a given hour is worth more (to me), so the higher per hour cost is justified.
Agree 100%. Played Dispatch last week and had a blast. Very short, but worth the money imo
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I don’t strictly adhere to it or anything, but I think it’s a good reminder sometimes when I balk at the price of a new game that I’m liable to spend hundreds of hours playing.
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To you perhaps. Cinema is less than half that cost here and even then I go less than once a year because I don’t really feel like most films that come out are worth bothering to see given the combined effort and cost.
If you only look at $/hr, there are some 70 hr games which milk your time and should have been shorter, like Assassin’s Creed, and then there are short, story rich games, like Outer Wilds, which are absolutely worth it even at more than a dollar an hour.
Prefer games like Factorio or Rimworld that you can get many 100s of hours from.
That’s fine. I don’t agree with you.
I’m totally ok paying $30 for a ten hr game, I appreciate shorter games. But if it’s boring or unfun for a whole hour in, I’m getting a refund.
I like some of the early access development styles used in things like Enshrouded and Satisfactory, so mostly ive been spending on games like that. I like the idea of collaborating with a player base to create a game together I think.
Oh definitely. I’ve enjoyed the experience of helping devs mold a title into something better in exchange for a lower price.
I like your dollar an hour rule though, I might use that in the future. Its funny though, my most played game was free and I have 2000+ hours in it!
Edit: I forgot rocket league was 30$ originally! Still a good deal!
Yeah, the games I’ve spent very little on I’ve put a ton of time into, like Vampire Survivors, Noita, and Dungeon Defenders.
It all depends on what you’re looking for. I’ve put hundreds of hours into games and gotten way less than $1/hr, and I’ve also had a great experience paying significantly more.
So I don’t see games in terms of $/hr, especially these days when I’m more limited by time than money. Instead, I look for unique experiences with cost being a much lower factor. Generally speaking, I spend much less than $1/hr since I buy a lot of older games, but I’ve spent far more ($5-10/hr) on particularly interesting games.
But yeah, generally speaking, I’m willing to pay more for indies than AAA titles because indie games are more likely to offer that unique experience.
That’s generally how I follow it also. Though I add the stipulation that they’re enjoyable hours, and it’s not hardline. I know not every game can be measured that way. If it’s a particular genre or series, l might take the dive anyway. For indies, it goes even further than that. Some I track for years before release, so I pre-order as soon as it becomes available, just to support as much as I can. So $/hr is a good baseline, but it’s deeper than that.
Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.
is there a way to tell what is indie and what is slop? i really think it’s getting like the ebay days of the 90’s. just … something feels off. repetitive. odd.
If it has the AI content flag, it’s most likely slop.
Indie and slop are not mutually exclusive. Something can be both.
The game must be a GOTY contender or I’m not gonna pick it up at full price. I have no issues paying up for a new, unique experience that sounds exciting. Games I know I like, but rehash an old formula land on the wishlist until they are 30% off. Games that look cool, are recommended, but I’m not sure I will like them land on the wishlist and need to be below $20 when I buy.
With these simple rules I still have too many unplayed and unfinished games in my library, so… yeah… you gonna have to take some risks to win big.
