Dear Ben,

I believe the answer is pretty simple - "technical" weighting aside, you probably just aren't that much emotionally connected to your Call of Duty as your wife (or I would hope not ;) ). Now if she hadn't been firmly positioned in the picture (not that I'm suggesting anything...), you may consider spending that money on a deluxe edition game and eating an ordered pizza while playing it.
Now if I get into all that psychological mumbo-jumbo about humans as pack creatures and value of our emotional responses, I'll be in a world of hurt so I'll just stop there. But you know what I'm talking about; while one certainly can whisper vacation plans to a game in the still of the night, one has to be prepared it will fall on deaf ears... It should be more emotions > gameplay (though some hot coffee may still come out of it... :) ).

Cheers.

LOL, Pawel. All very true; CoD is slightly lower on the list. I suppose I shouldn't have mentioned the wife as it takes away from the point. That could be replaced with "friend(s)" as well; the point being pleasurable company.

There is something to be said about the whole "social creatures" thing, but at the same time I never picked up a Wii because of the over saturation of mostly party games and a lack of good 3rd party single player experiences. I know you can't compare real human interaction with a video game, but it is interesting to see how the same $ amount is worth differently when you are staring at one night out with friends vs. a full weekend of gameplay.

I think there is also some history here that is creating backlash for higher priced games.

You list the game has having 6-10 hours of gamesplay (I'm assuming 1 run through there). That wasn't the way it used to be.

We used to get much longer games for 10-20 $ lass (depending on year). Also, if we are keeping up with the Jonses, the cost is more like $75 for many people (for 1 day shipping).

In a lot of ways the general introduction of voice acting has severely limited our gameplay time (Betrayal at Krondor, which was one of the first games to do full voice, was a little more than $10 more expensive for the voiced version. It was also one of the last really long games that had voice, in my opinion).

There are 2 things that tend to justify the big prices to the people I play games with (we are all in our mid30s and mostly under/unemployed):

1.) Multiplayer - This is mostly for console games. Can we do multiplayer (especially co-op) for a long time)? This helps offset the abysmally short singleplayer times. Mind numbing boredom with CTF etc. also stresses new gametypes. We aren't a run n' gun crowd, so games like RB6 Vegas 2 Terrorist hunt work well for us. We also prefer DLC new maps (we are willing to pay reasonable prices for those on top of the game cost) to keep stuff fresh. CoD games have done this well (we never play zombies on it.. no real reward).

In a lot of ways multiplayer has become the crutch to prob up medium uninspired games with short singleplayer. Everything has multiplayer. Trouble is there are so many choices, that a lot of games get 2 weeks for people farming Achievents on XBL and then they become relative ghost towns (rental and resale helps cause this, because people don't have to stick with their $60 choice anymore, they can chain it into another new product). SO the lifetime of games is affected both by lower amounts of gameplay for more money, and a general rental mentality even for games that are bought.


2.) Hours hours hours for $. We almost always play at least 1 MMO. Value for price, these games are generally value at the extreme (as long as they aren't canceled (Tabula Rasa) or relegated to 4th string with no future of expansions (Vanguard:SoH). We stay away from micropayments and games that aren't fronted by big companies (fear of losing our characters to a shutdown).

Here are some titles we are definitely getting (majority of our group).

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 --(Character choice, co-op, re-playability, character leveling, )

Operation Flashpoint -- Dragon Rising ( Big open world, replayability, co-op, "play your way" sandboxy)

Dragon Age Origins -- (Looks to be a good amount of replayability in it, even though most of us tend to stick with a play style... good, evil etc. and have to force ourselves top play another way. With maybe 2 exceptions, if you had most of us finish a RPG, then have us replay it 6 months later... the end character and wold state would probably be 99% the same).

Rockband Beatles -- Though I don't play Rockband myself, a lot of my friends do. Apparently the Beatles strike a chord with people (ha ha ugh).

CoD MW2 -- We have played these games pretty much forever, because they are pretty consistent. We are playing WaW now. Generally wish there were more co-op / story missions.


There are others that people will buy (even ones I will buy that didn't make it).. but these are the ones that at least 75% of 30 people will buy (male and female).


Mostly it comes out hours per $.

Here is a list of modern (no Fallout 1 etc.) games all 30 or so of us own.

-Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1
-Rainbow 6 Vegas 1&2
- CoD 3 +
-Fallout 3 (plus all the DLC) Not all of us have Oblivion. FO universe + a change in the way they scale monsters with player level different than the Elder AScrolsl games sold this one to the rest of us (including me)
-Mass Effect (though many are skipping Pinnacle Station, we all have Bring Down the Sky)
-Bioshock (borderline short for most of us).
-Shadow Complex
-GTA 4 (but we pretty much all hate the multiplayer set-up outside of free-play)
-Two Worlds (we have mixed feelings on this one the good generally outweighs the bad and the cheesy TW2 could get 50-75% + of us depending on more info becoming available about it.)



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Everyone weighs stuff differently, but that is an example of a medium sized group of gamer friends, many of whom don't have a lot of money to spend. Only about 3 of us sell stuff back at all, most of us keep things forever. The 3 that do sell back tend to rotate games much faster (like rentals). Another 3 people do rent from online.

Sorry for the long post.

eh, not long ago I realised I was a super-consumer. If I want it, I will buy it, price completely aside, as long as it's feasible to do so. I also run for convenience, for instance I can't be fussed with the hassle of fuel dockets just to save $2 when I fill up the car. So basically I'll pay for something if I want it, and I'm willing to pay more if it's convenient. The one thing I'm not though, is someone who buys for the prestige of having a thing. For instance I drive a bunky car (though I could afford better), I'm often willing to buy the cheapest console that does what I want, if the date is agreeable, I'd rather do a cheap meal at a decent pizza plaza (I mean lets face it we can get really tasty quality food for far less than $80, plus you can often get an interesting experience to boot) and then join that up with some other cheap activity, a movie for instance. It's not that I'm cheap, I just pay for what I want and no more or less.

I mean ultimately there are cheaper experiences than video games, on a cost/time basis, board games, card games, book reading etc. But if I want to have it and play it, I'll pay for it, if games cost 200 bucks a pop, I'd still buy them, I'd just probably buy less of them, if the date *only* wanted expensive restaurants, then I can guarantee the cheap game will probably get far more face time than she will....

I took issue with the original comparison between fashion and games, but you raise another comparison I've been thinking about lately: food. I watch those chef-based reality shows (both american and british) as a vice I share with my wife. It compels me to think about food as a more relevant comparison to games, than say film/books/fashion/paintings, etc. So, I find it interesting that you touched on it as well, but I'd like to highlight that comparison for a second.

For simplicity: The chefs (the ones who create the dish or recipe) are like the designers, the cooks (the ones who prepare the food) are the rest of the development team, the waiters (PR, retail sales, etc.). You get the idea.

I see this as a strong comparison because chefs, like game designers, are concerned with audience experience. For the game designer, it's the player's gameplay experience, for the chef, it's the diner's taste experience. Both deal with the realities of technical difficulties (temperatures, chemistry, ingredient interaction, etc.) as well as purely aesthetic choices (texture, balance of sweet/salty/acidity, the look on the plate, plate elements in combination, etc.).

When I look hard at the player experience that is the game designer's focus, I keep seeing elements that remind me of the diner's experience. Or maybe I'm just hungry atm. Nice post, Benjamin!