PC Gamer: Valuing Games By Their Cost Is Bull

PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/valuing-games-by-their-cost-per-hour-is-bullshit/

This topic might be of interest to indie devs because it informs one of how some of the public considers purchasing a game, and thus what kind of price one should go for.

Opinions on the topic? I've already said this before, but I disagree. A claim is made: "As a measurement, Average Cost Per Hour is detrimental because it perpetuates the idea that games are products we consume, rather than experiences we have. It enforces the idea that a game's value is derived from how many hours it lasts rather than how meaningful those hours are, and it invites us to unfairly compare games based on how cost effective they are."

This is incredibly goofy thinking, because it implies that something can't be consumed and an "experience" at the same time. This person has apparently never gone out to a restaurant before, because that's the whole basis for their business model, and price vs. experience vs. amount of food as a metric is used by practically everyone whenever they decide where to eat.

A claim is also made that padding dilutes the meaning of the "length vs. price" argument, and with that I agree, and I'm pretty sure anyone who argues for this metric agrees with it as well. No one's saying an infinite clicker game is "better" than a finite experience like Witcher 3. Saying that padding makes the metric meaningless is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The writer makes the claim that one wouldn't measure a book's worth by how many words it has, but a) the analogy isn't correct, it should instead be how long it takes one to read the book (very few people price a game by its file size), and b) were the analogy correct, he'd be wrong, because I for one grew up buying books from Half Price Books for $1 or $2, certainly never paying $25 dollars for something that takes me 5 hours or less to read. And music is much the same way. Consider this: if one buys a 3 minute song for $0.99, as songs are typically priced these days, they'd have to listen to it twenty times to reach that "$1 per hour" value. And heck, I've sometimes listened to a song twenty times in a single day, much less the entire time I own it.

I mentioned $1 per hour. That's generally my target. I do agree that it's not always that simple, that a higher quality experience can be worth more. Cruelly, however, in my experience "higher quality experience" typically means "AAA." If I buy a Ubisoft game that's had three story trailers and hours of gameplay footage posted, I know I'm getting a solid experience. If I gamble on an indie game by an unknown developer and few reviews, it's far more likely I'll get a miss, and far more likely that the experience will be worse, even if it's not a miss.

Back to $1 per hour. That's generally my baseline. I just saw an article mentioning that a sequal to Subsurface Circular, called Quarentine Circular, is out now (https://gematsu.com/2018/05/bithell-games-releases-experimental-short-quarantine-circular-for-pc). The first game is on my list of games to buy, but according to HowLongToBeat it takes 2 hours to beat, and costs $6. No, that's not a lot of money, but that's $3 per hour. The last couple of AAA games I remember buying were nowhere near that expensive. One was ME Andromeda, at $40 for 80 hours or $0.50 per hour. The other was AC Origins at ~45 hours for $60, or ~$1.33 per hour.

Now, just writing that I thought of Rise of the Tomb Raider, which might be a better target because it's not an RPG. I don't remember how long the game took me, but i'm going to estimate 20 hours based on HowLongToBeat's 13 hours main story and the fact that I went through all the optional tombs, and explored locations after completing the plot missions in them. So 20 hours for $60...thats $3 per hour. But amusingly, we can now turn back to that "quality of the experience" metric. ROTR is an immersive experience telling a grand story through extremely high quality cutscenes, combined with enjoyable gameplay. I can agree that the experience I get from Subsurface Circular is not 100% mappable to ROTR. But I do feel that one can make broad comparison, and I don't know that reading a bunch of text is going to be as significant an experience as engaging with a character like one does in a 3D action game (and one as intimate as ROTR). That's conjecture of course, but it's enough to give me pause.


How do you guys feel about this? Do you think the dollars per hour metric is total garbage? In my experience here most do. But without that, how is a user supposed to judge whether a game is "too much" for them or not? What other metric would you suggest?

 

It is rubbish yeah, I'd rather have 20 hours of interesting over a 100 hours of boring any day.. I can earn another $20.00 I can't get a 100 hours of my life back.

 

Here's a good metric to go by:
"is it fun?"

 

In most cases, cost per hour gets so low as to be irrelevant. I'm not sure I have anything that sits high enough on a cost per hour basis to stop me playing it.

Its really only relevant to cash poor demographics, like kids and teenagers.

 

I think the issue with this metric just boils down to it having an implicit value judgment.

For example lets say you have two good games. The first takes 60 hours to beat but has 20 hours of padding the second game takes 50 hours to beat but just has 10 hours of padding. As a result if people go by this metric it would mean that the first game would probably sell better and unlike the example with some obvious clicker game you can´t tell from the outside which of the two has better quality hours since both are good games.

If such a metric does take off it will just incentvice developer to pad their games more and for example a game like braid which activly avoided to waste the players time could hurt its own sales in such a theoratical marketplace.

And all of this can be partly avoided by just showing the average completion&replayability time instead of average cost per hour. If something is cheaper it inherintly implies being a better price but on the flip side for game length people have their own preferences and can make their own judgment call on which is better.

Just to pick up your food analogy - it would be equally absurd if a food critic just weighed the food and put up a price per gram regardless of whats on the plate instead of just telling us how much there is of what.

 

I wouldn’t say it is total garbage. Like most any metric it’s value isn’t absolute or without context. It can be useful in similarly structured games, or provide useful insight at the high and low end of the curve.

Generally, I agree with others, quality and enjoyment is a much, much more important factor. Not all hours spent are equal. Some of my all time favorite games are short games that tend to be on the more expensive side. I’m happy to pay for a great experience.

 

That's a terrible metric too because it's completely subjective.

 

Just like timeToBeat. I can't get through, for example, Bioshock in 20 hours. I usually need at least 8 hours of "where's the next f-ing door?!" and "Was I here before?", so my time to beat the game will drastically differ from a reviewers.

 

Which is why "is it fun?" wouldn't be any better. Nothing about that says fun to me.

 

I do... sort of? The games that I barely play easily have the highest effective cost per hour.

Nailed it.

I commonly find out how long a game is in advance and usually avoid buying or starting ones with too long a play time. I love a long experience, but what's more important is that I get a complete experience, and I can get more complete short experiences than long ones. I'd much rather finish (or equivalent) a few games a year than get to the long middle section and have stuff peter out, or spend dozens of additional hours of something that could have wrapped up and given me time to experience something else.

The exception to that is those experiences that only work if they're long and involve patience and development over time. That's usually RPGs, and as much as I love them I'm pretty choosy about which ones I even start since they might take me years to finish.

 

How many of them were bought during a sale on Steam?

 

That's your opinion, And therefore a **** metric.

 

I did get a bunch that way, but pretty quickly realised that it was cheaper to just buy what I wanted to play when I have time to play it. Most of the time these days it's when I want to like something but just don't get into it.

 

Sorry but comparing word count in a book to play length in a game is dumb.

Play length is a huge metric for gamers because it's one of the most descriptive stats about the experience in a game. Gamers are smart enough to understand that different genres of game have different expected play length.

• Good reviews with under 10 hours of playtime? That's an interactive movie with a strong story.
• Good reviews with over 100 hours of playtime? That's a strategy game with replayability or an open world RPG.
• Bad reviews with over 100 hours of playtime? That's too much grinding and addiction driven design.

When reading steam reviews, you can usually tell if the review will be positive or negative based on the hours played.

 

Example: https://steamcommunity.com/app/268500/reviews/?browsefilter=toprated&snr=1_5_reviews_

That's user reviews for XCOM 2 - in the first 20 reviews you have multiple 1,000+ hour reviews, a few 100-300 hour reviews, and a sprinkle of 15-30 hour reviews.

That says a huge amount about the game. More so than almost any subjective review could.

 

Price per hour, for what it's worth (which isn't much) should be a reverse S-curve. There are capital costs for short games. $1/hour is ridiculous except if the game is a long one. Also, what about replayability?

All this focus these days on how long the game goes implies that the value of games has more to do with a negation of something else, rather than what it actually gives you. Which probably should be more surprising than it is.

 

Weight is a faulty metric. That's like judging a game by its file size as I already mentioned, and nobody realistically does that.

A better comparison would be judging food by how many calories it contains (aka how much energy it provides--the difference is slight (more significant for games, where the "weight" of the content is more divorced from how much the consumer gets out of it) but it's meaningful), and people absolutely do that. Deciding not to get the $35.99 Rib eye steak when you can get just as much or more food with the $20.00 chicken wrap is literally that situation, and people do that type of thing all the time.

Strongly disagree. I like to play racing games, and I've wanted a driving wheel for years. But the main one I've seen, a Thrustmaster something or other, is $300 or $400 dollars, even online. I have the money to buy this. I could have bought one 5 years ago. But I don't think it's worth the money.

As someone who thinks a lot about "value theory" and things like that, and occasionally goes out of their way to buy things for full price rather than on sale because I want to pay based on value and not market forces, this is incredibly important.

Crap, reading that I sound like a millennial.

 

HORI wheel with pedals for $100. Works with PlayStation 3/4 and PC.
https://www.amazon.com/HORI-Racing-Wheel-Apex-PlayStation-4/dp/B01LZ3AEFP/

Thrustmaster wheel with pedals for $80. Only works with PlayStation 3/4.
https://www.amazon.com/Thrustmaster-Officially-Licensed-Racing-playstation-4/dp/B00JDYMQ9C/

 

I think it is interesting to consider, but isn't the end all of value. What you're doing in the game is far more important than how much time you spend.

For example, I've got less than 20 or so hours in Doom 2016, and I see that as money well spent because the game is action packed, really fun, and does what it tries to do very well. The game is really all about the single player campaign, and once you have gone through it doesn't have a whole lot of replayability, but is still good for what it is.

To compare to movies, think of an M. Night Shyamalan movie like the Sixth Sense or The Village. Both good movies, and were worth the ticket price, but once you know the twist ending they aren't as entertaining the next time you watch. You may want to watch them one more time to see if you missed any dropped clues the first time, but after that you probably won't watch them again. Does that mean the movie has poor value? Just because you won't watch it 20+ times like The Empire Strikes Back, doesn't mean you aren't getting a good movie.

On the other end I've got thousands of hours into Eve Online, but a lot of that is me sitting for hours on a gate while I play another game just waiting for a scout to call out another ship about to jump through. A lot more hours played, but I don't see those hours as equal to games where you're actually doing something the whole time.

 

It’s not subjective to me!

 

I take it back, it was a G29, and I think it was $300 last I checked. I want force feedback, which it doesn't look like that first one has (edit: maybe it does? I'll look into it more closely). I appreciate the effort though

*independent from the above*

I'd imagine one could form a metric based on price, play time, and some other factor I'll call "engagement." Hard to quantify, but as implied by Joe-Censored many hours in Eve are nowhere near as engaging as a few hours in something like Doom.

One thing we haven't yet discussed is the developer effort. I've argued myself that that shouldn't necessarily play into the price. But I think it can be significant, especially when one gets into these systemic games which can be played for 100s of hours but don't necessarily have 100s of hours of unique content. I may have ~220 hours in Oxygen Not Included and 20 hours in Rise of the Tomb Raider, but did 11 times as much effort go into ONI? Of course not, and I wouldn't be surprised if technically less effort (in terms of total man-hours) went into ONI compared to ROTR. No one spent weeks building a single character with a face detailed enough to show skin pores.

I suppose that's something to consider more on the dev side of things. What did the work to make this game mainly consist of? Was I building moderately straightforward systems and tweaking them for balance, or was I authoring lots of content?

Part of the reason The Witcher 3 is so highly regarded, especially in comparison to Dragon Age Inquisition, is not because it's long (both are long), but because there's so much authored content.

 

Funny you mention that, because for me that's why length only contributes to value up to a certain point.

A full meal for $10 is a better deal than a small appetizer for $10. But what about a huge serving, enough to feed three people? Is that a better deal? Well it depends. If you're logistically able to transport the leftovers home, and feel like eating those leftovers for your next two meals, it's a better deal. If not, then no, the extra food does you no good.

Obviously the ideal length will vary from person to person. But for me personally, 20 hours of gameplay is already a lot. A game that had 80+ hours in the main sequence? I might not even finish it. It's not worth 4x the value of the 20 hour game (all else being equal). On the low end, it does matter - I'd hesitate to pay much for a game that had less than an hour of content, for example. But even then, it's only one factor - if that one hour of content was extremely high quality, I'd call that a better deal than 10 hours of "meh" content.

 

I don't understand this viewpoint, because it's not like you can only consume a game in one sitting. You have the rest of your life to play it.

You may get bored of a game over a certain length, but that's not a problem with the game.

Just for clarification, I'm not talking about situations with boatloads of padding, but where there's genuinely good content.

 

gameReleaseRate * pctGamesInterestedIn > gamingTimePerDay / gameLength
New games I'm interested in are coming out faster than I can play them. Time is a bigger limiting factor than money for playing all the games I want to, especially considering how much free / cheap stuff there is available.

 

Average Length of Game is a completely valid metric... it informs how much 'content' you can expect to get for your money, and how much personal time you might need to invest. Not everyone wants to play long games. Not everyone wants to play short games.

However attaching some kind of arbitrary value metric to the time metric is completely subjective and does more harm than good imho. Why not just state avg. length and let people decide for themselves from there?

 

The price of the game should be priced on the cost of production.

 

Sure, but there's a finite number of hours in a life, and we all need to choose how to spend them.

This.

Duration is an important consideration. It is a part of what determines a game's value. But it's just one consideration, and others are just as important. Would you prefer a long terrible game, or a short decent one? The assumption that "longer = better" doesn't make sense. I love The Witcher 3 in part because of its length but if, say, BioShock was the same length then I would get bored of the filler only a small fraction into the game.

On that note, I'm sure that many of us here could make a game of infinite length in only a day or two (heck, less), but that clearly doesn't give it infinite value, and there are clearly games of non-infinite length which might (basically) objectively be considered superior.

 

It's the same for me. I have a backlog of 100 games. Doesn't stop me from buying new ones at appropriate prices, or buying long games. I don't understand why it would.

Though to be fair I consider myself something of a patron and am willing to buy games even if I don't know when I'll get to it.

I mean, if one is choosing to spend those hours "playing games" either way, I don't see how this is relevant. What is worse about 60 really fun hours of one game vs. 20 really fun hours in three games (20 * 3)? One might argue that the three games can give a more unique experience than just the one game, but I haven't really seen this vocalized in these kinds of discussions.

The implicit assumption on all of this is that length necessitates padding, but that isn't necessarily true, as the Witcher 3 exemplifies so well. No one is arguing that time on "filler" content is equivalent to time genuinely engaged in an experience.

I'd say what I just said--that the assumption that longer = padding doesn't make sense. I'd also argue that longer = better is a reductive take on the "dollars per hour" metric (not for GOG's version mentioned in the article, which sounds terrible, but the metric as it's actually used by people). It's longer (at the same quality as shorter) = better.

 

I guess that's true. I'm not assuming pointless filler, but I am assuming that "novelty" plays some part in the quality of a gaming experience, and that 60 hours of the same game is going to have less of that than 10 hours of six different games, quality being otherwise equal. If an 80 hour game legitimately delivered as much "experience per hour" as an equal number of shorter games, then sure, it could be worth correspondingly more.

 

That's exactly what I vocalised, though.

But more to the point, "the rest of your life" is still finite. You probably don't get to play all of the games. You have to be choosy, and I'm going to pick the ones that choose not to waste my time with filler and/or activities I don't enjoy for their own sake.

 

Then you have the period of time that is "computers and operating systems have advanced and are no longer able to run that game now". Emulators and virtual machines help but there are some odd periods that I enjoyed games that I can no longer easily play them (mostly games that existed on Windows 3.x).

 

Hardly anyone if even anyone judges food by a literal "price per calorine"-metric which would be the accurate analogy for this instance. Just like with game length people have different preferences how much calorine they want in their food so the total calorine value is displayed - not some random "price per calorine".

Maybe I didn´t make myself clear - I agree that game length is an important metric to know about a game in addition to other factors but a "price per hour" metric on the other hand just gives the wrong impression by implying cheaper hours are a better deal even though plenty people would rather play a 20 hour game rather than a 200 hour game.

 

I must have missed it. The only thing I saw was your statement on "complete" experiences, which is not the same at all. "complete" =/= "unique" Years ago I read like 200 "complete" Hardy Boys books, but they were most definitely not all that "unique" in any meaningful sense And the indie swath of indistinguishable RPGMaker, 2D platformer, and "survival sim" games without any personality are complete but may not be unique in any meaningful sense (this is something people love to level at Ubisoft games too--"generic" is the term).

Again, you're making the implicit assumption. Mass Effect 2 is action-packed from start to finish, with each mission contributing to ones understanding of the plot, certain characters, or simply the world around you. Outside of mineral mining, which can be safely ignored, you're not spending any time just grinding. All of it is engaging. I enjoyed every minute of it, and I enjoyed every minute equally as much as the time I spent in Tomb Raider.

In such a situation, absent concerns such as forgetting the story because one can't play that often or the aforementioned "unique" experiences thing or genre preferences (again, none of which I see brought up much, if at all), I don't see why one can't apply the dollar per hour metric to two equally enjoyable experiences.

People may not do the division operation but they're getting at the same exact information. And as I mentioned before it definitely is not all of the information--one should probably apply some kind of "enjoyment" or "engagement" metric to it as well. Those three combined - price, length, and "average engagement" or whatever - might provide a standalone metric with value. Of course "engagement" or "enjoyment" is relative, so...

 

Actually, that's a pretty good example of my point. Assuming you read "just" the original 58 books, you read 58 books and clearly, for at least 57 of them, they were good enough that you felt like doing it again. On the other hand, if they were just one long story that was 11,500 pages long, would you have read the whole thing?

As for how unique things are going to be, if I'm "completing" something and moving on then the amount of uniqueness is totally in my control. Sure, I could spend my time playing through a bunch of near-identical things, but if my desire is for a variety of complete experiences then that's hardly the choice I'm going to make, is it?

But furthermore... even if someone does make that choice, then all likelihood is that they're an enthusiast or connosieur of whatever they're focusing on, and differences that I might not notice might be pretty significant to them. To some people, coffee is coffee. To others, dark roast vs. light roast is a significant factor. Others have preference for fruity, woody or chocolatey undertones...

No I'm not. I specifically pointed out RPGs as an example of the type of experience that needs to be long, and this is exactly why.

Using Tomb Raider as an example, though, the games in that franchise that I've played felt about the right length - maybe 10 to 15 hours depending on play style? No part of the game goes on long enough to feel repetitive, but you still get a chance to have a good play around with all of the ideas or mechanics they introduce. Now imagine that they just added an extra five platforming sections and five waves of enemies and ten things I'm forced to collect and copy pasted some corridors and climbing sections in every area. Now the game takes a lot longer to complete without adding anything new of interest. That would be what I refer to as "padding".

I would agree, if there were some meaningful and practical way to define "equally enjoyable experiences". Even as a person who also enjoys both long RPGs and short action titles, both offer me different things. Sometimes I feel like one, sometimes I feel like the other, and I don't have a clear preference between them overall.

For the sake of argument, I'll demonstrate the uselessness of such value metrics by using them for two games I really enjoyed.

I paid ~$60 for The Witcher 3 (with expansions) and have played ~200 hours of it. So that's $0.30 per hour cost. Or, assuming equal enjoyment per hour, I get 3.3 Relative Value Units per dollar.

I paid $15 for Wolfenstein: New World Order and would guess I got ~15 hours out of it. So that's $1 per hour. Or, assuming equal enjoyment per hour, I get 1 Relative Value Unit per dollar.

Now I've got some really clear numbers. If we're going to be completely rational, obviously all I should ever spend money on for video games are high-quality RPG titles, because they represent more than three times better value for money if we strip it down to numbers like that.

In reality, though, I keep buying short action games. The two different types of products do not offer comparable experiences, and when I want one it doesn't really make sense to compare pricing to the other since that won't satisfy what I'm after at the time.

That, fundamentally, is why those numbers are useless.

 

I wasn't trying to use the Hardy Boys as an example of "one is better than many," but an example of "complete doesn't mean unique." If the book (one 11500 pages long) managed to be as enjoyable as the Hardy Boys books (hence, not assuming padding here), I see no reason not to read it. But no one's been speaking in such extreme terms--we've been speaking of 3 or 4 games compared to one. On that scale I'd certainly say that three or four Hardy Boys books don't have very much "unique-ness" compared to one larger book. In fact, I'll go a step further: is Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (337,000 words) a more unique experience that an equivalent number of Hardy Boys "Casefiles?" I say yes. The originals less so, they're better books.

The part I was quoting was you literally talking about games with "filler" and "activities you don't enjoy for their own sake." If that's not you talking about padding, then I must not understand the definition of padding.

I definitely am not trying to say Tomb Raider in and of itself "needs" to be longer. I agree that the games feel meaty enough. But if they DID add something new and justified another 4 hours of playtime, would that be a negative somehow?

Fair enough. I can understand considering different experiences incompatible. I personally don't do that. Everything goes through the same criteria--$1 per hour for things I'm unsure of or neutral about, $2 or $3 for experiences I'm confident I'll enjoy or that are from companies I want to support (like any Ubisoft game in a genre I'm interested in, or anything Bioware before 2017, RIP, or anybody's game on these forums). That already provides me with plenty of content in any genre I'm interested in.

 

Objectivly speaking yes but sadly the world runs more on impressions rather than what is objectivly there.

Just take CPUs as an example - the flag ship metric is always displayed in GHz and cores even though it is an open "secret" that this alone doesn´t really tell you how good the CPU is. Now usually one can just look up other stats like bitrate - so you can get the exact same information but in the end many people still just buy CPUs based on higher GHz and core numbers.

Point being that while a "price per hour" wouldn´t make other game metrics disappear it still would give the wrong impression and therefor favour more padded games than it may have been by just displaying the game length.

 

In the context of what I was talking about the two are pretty much interchangable. The whole reason I'd want to complete something and move onto something else is to change things up. I want Lara to finish saving the world so I don't miss out, but I don't want her to take 50 hours doing it if I could have done some complete other things in that same time as well.

Things don't have to be radically different to one another to be unique enough for this. Each episode of MacGuyver is both "complete" and "unique". Yes, every episode hits all of the same beats and fits the same narrative framework, just with the details swapped out each time. But swapping out the details is enough.

Maybe there's some miscommunication here? Yes, that's what you quoted, but then your example was Mass Effect 2, and the stuff you described doesn't at all sound like padding to me. So I was giving an example of something I would call padding.

Well if it was "justified" then of course not. Jests aside, if they maintained the pacing and timing that's an important part of those games then making them a bit longer could work well, sure.

But there's a limit to that. If the next Tomb Raider game is going to require many dozens or hundreds of hours for me to "complete" then it'll also have to have some pretty fundamental changes to keep me interested. Changes that would probably stop it from looking or feeling like what we currently expect from the franchise.

That's relevant, too. Dollars aren't much of a limiting factor in me playing stuff, but time is very much a limiting factor.

Which also reflects in the type of long games I'm interested in - if a game is going to be much more than maybe twenty hours long then it needs to be the kind of thing that's suited to being played in pieces over many months, with breaks to play other stuff. (RPGs commonly suit that because they're neatly broken down into short term stuff, quests, and long term stuff with the overall story arc.)

 

Well, I could reply to each section one-by-one, but my response to all of them is "I can't argue with that."

 

I don't think merely providing the metric would cause that effect. Even if it exists, the individual still has to say, "this metric tells me all I need to know" or "I can use this metric along with how much fun people had playing the game to determine if it's worth it." And given some information we know such as most players not even finishing games, I don't think they're going to care that much about a raw number without some idea of the gameplay (aka some idea of the "engagement" or "enjoyment").

Read an article where game dev X says their game is 500 hours long, and the comments will almost universally be "but what are you doing in those hours? Is it all padding?" Players aren't as dumb as we like to think sometimes. Maybe not interested in knowing all the details, but that doesn't make them a bunch of brainless sheep.

 

Indeed.

Plus, we can look at I think literally any market - not just games - and see that price-per-quantity is irrelevant to a huge number of buyers. If that were all that mattered then every product would compete on price alone. In reality I can't think of a single market that doesn't have premium goods of some kind aimed at consumers who are driven by something other than price.

 

Judging a game by it's cost/length ration is like judging a music track by it's cost/length ratio. When you listen to music you almost don't care about it's length. Length matters ONLY when you are thoroughly happy with your experience by the minute. The problem is, many games suck when played for 30 minutes or less. They are simply not enjoyable almost at all. It's also possible to make a game with TONS of filler activities and various addiction mechanics which are designed to keep you playing very long and pay as you go. Most F2P games are like that. Cost/length ratio is almost completely meaningless in gaming, because games are not commodities. Another issue is that some people have very little time and more money, while others have lots of free time and little money. This difference completely changes your preferences. For somebody who has tons of free time a grind-based game might be good. For somebody who has little time and lots of money some kind of AAA 5-hour cinematic story (CoD) might be much better.

 

...like some kind of meta score would never work in gaming.
Sorry for taking you somewhat out of context but I just couldn´t resist with the way you phrased this. ;>

Suffice to say you have a more optimistc outlook on how things work in the industry than I do.

Sorry but comments really aren´t representative of the wider audience - anyone who comments is already someone more engaged in the topic than the silent majority who actually shifts the majority of copies. Not saying that comments can´t mirror the wider sentiment but someone who does comment naturally already cares more about the topic and therefore the details.

Also this has nothing to do with intelligence at all. Just as an aside but when it comes to market discussions like this people seem to miss the bigger picture that a person only has so much bloody time and energy to go around.
Of course the idea of their being a savy and informed consumer base sounds great but the reality is that everyone has enough S*** to get done in their own life that they won´t care to get informed and invested in the hundreds of different products they consume.
Therefore if something convenient is offered naturally they will go for it because why wouldn´t one?

Heck, if I buy some chocolate based on price&weight I really couldn´t care less if there was actually a better chocolate just two rows up. And if any chocolate enthusiast tried to lecture me on why this is a stupid way to pick my chocolate I would probably just roll my eyes since I really don´t care that much about chocolate.

 

If we start putting a price on games based on the hours it gets played, then the marketers are going to start charging per hour rather than per title. It would end up costing you a $1.00 per hour to play your game. This is an old idea that the game marketers tried to implement before the indie game market boomed.

 

Metacritic is absolutely not a "raw number without some idea of the gameplay." It's a number based on the quality of the game (reviews), rather than some impersonal value like hours of playtime. So it's not an example of what you're trying to argue.

It's possible I'm out of touch with how people encounter games, but I don't think your analogy is accurate because one's level of "interaction" with chocolates is to come up to the candy aisle and look at a few of them. You're not looking at what ingredients each one has, or how they were made. You aren't even told anything about its quality. Meanwhile games are announced years ahead of time with trailers that get millions of views and previews in news sites. How many people just happen to walk by "the game aisle" and randomly pick one based on the price alone? Maybe parents buying their kids games as presents, but they're hardly the backbone of the market, and even then those kids are typically looking for something specific.

The way I encounter games is by reading about them on news sites, seeing trailers during E3, or discovering them through Steam. All of these methods require me to engage, on some superficial level, with the quality of a game. So it's not a situation where somebody is trying to tell me another game is better.

Additionally, going with your chocolate example...if a game is enjoyable enough that people want to keep buying it, even if it has padding...I see no problem with that. People on the internet love to whine and complain about padding and useless activities in Ubisoft's open worlds, but people clearly like them well enough, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.