Is $69.99 too much to pay for a video game these days? For Take-Two, the answer to that would probably be a hard “no.”
Speaking to investors in an earnings call last week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explained that GTA, one of the publisher’s most successful franchises, actually represents one of the best values on today’s games market, and not only that, if the executive had his way, he’d probably charge gamers even more, having alluded to the idea that game prices should be based on how much entertainment they provide per hour.
Here’s what Zelnick, who seemingly made $42.1 million in FY2023, had to share about what would apparently be more of an ideal pricing model for games:
In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.
By that standard our prices are still very, very low, because we offer many hours of engagement, the value of the engagement is very high. So I think the industry as a whole offers a terrific price to value opportunity for consumers.
Zelnick’s comments came on the heels of an announcement from Rockstar Games about how the first trailer for GTA VI would finally surface next month as part of the company’s 25th anniversary:
…Rockstar Games was founded on the idea that video games could come to be as essential to culture as any other form of entertainment, and we hope that we have created games you love in our efforts to be part of that evolution.
We are very excited to let you know that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto.
Rockstar Games was founded in 1998, around a year after the release of the original GTA game from DMA Design, published by BMG Interactive.
There’s no indication of how much entertainment value GTA VI will ultimately provide yet, but if it’s anything like the previous game, players can expect over 80 hours of enjoyment.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →Interesting ... same answer as mine when asked to buy it.
Yea I don't know about that. 1 buck an hour... I look for a better return.. I'll pay a buck for hour for a game as soon as it comes with the fucking PC and internet connection to support/install it.
Yeah yeah sure. 10 bucks, that would be a complete success, they should do it.
With 1 dollar we will find out how many millions of people play 1 to 5 hours and just drop things.
My answer is also a hard no. Imagine how grindy and tedious games would be if you had to pay for them by the hour?
Anyone who talks about engagement knows nothing about gaming. A 15 hour game can be far more enjoyable and lasting experience than a tedious grindy mmo that you "engaged" with for 50 hours.
Yeah this dynamic would cause game makers to make all kinds of un-fun decisions because of more $$$.
We already know people are willing to pay more for cosmetics, isnt that enough money?
I mean FFS how much did GTA5 make?
GTA5 made a boat load and lasted so long due to all of the community modding and FiveM. From what I've heard they are integrating something similar to FiveM in to GTA6. Which kind of leads me to believe they moving away from the community modding aspect. If that's true the GTA6 will be DOA for a lot of people. Especially all the RP'ers. FiveM is pretty well ran, mostly because TakeTwo/Rockstar have nothing to do with it.
Sure but only if the players can be equally reimbursed for troubleshooting the often buggy state most games launch in these days. It often takes around 60-90 days before enough patches have been rolled out to address a majority of issues and I can only imagine how much time players have put in by then trying to work around them.
Yeah, but this isn't the only thing they are thinking about when it comes to more cash flow. This story broke over the weekend.
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RIP RP. I'm sure they'll be charging the end users to access the feature, charging the servers to host a server, who will then charge the players to play on said servers.
I doubt that strategy would work, players would just abandon those games. no fun= no play
If... IF any of this were to be accepted in any way... I have some caveats.
1. The game should be charged by actual PLOT hours and time. I don't care if there are 4000 hours of unique dialog in a game, all voice acted. If my actual engagement with the store is 40 hours of actual content... and 60 hours of moving through terrain to go from Y to X to get N and deliver to B. The ACTUAL engagement time is that 40 hours. Not everything in between.
Zelnick wants GTA6 on the phone sex pricing model.
I was ok with subscriptions in my MMOs - they were live service (using the actual technical definition of the word, not the new colloquialism) and I understood that my subscription fee was to keep the lights on in a virtual world that required some amount of housekeeping and upkeep. No problem with that.
Game services like Xbox Game Pass are not far off from that - flat monthly rate gets you access to whatever.
That's about as close to "pay per hour" as I want to get. I never played games at the arcade because a quarter per life adds up really really fast, and this feels an awful lot like trying to turn your gaming experience into an arcade machine.
That's what it reminds me of too.