Green Man Gaming (GMG), a digital storefront for video games, publishes various stats and facts about its games, including the average cost for each hour of play. And No More Robots founder Mike Rose isn’t happy, tweeting that GMG is “helping to perpetuate the massively dangerous idea that the price of a game should be based around how many hours you get out of it.”
“It’s super gross,” Rose said. “It’s something a lot of devs have been fighting for a long time—this horrible nothing that a game is only valuable if it gives you X number of hours of gameplay.”
He also pointed out that other media forms don’t have the same problem. “Do you see moviegoers saying, ‘I’ll only see the Avengers movie if it’s longer than the last one?’” He said. “Of course you don’t, so why do we have it in video games?”
And Rose believes that this kind of thinking hurts developers.
“If anything it leads to worse games,” he said. “Developers end up feeling like they have to bloat their games with crap to make them more appealing to gamers—stick another two hours of cutscenes or grinding into your game to make it feel more valuable. It’s just an awful way to view the medium, and we desperately need to move away from it.”
At this point, it’s not clear how GMG gets the stat. “A previous employee there told me that those stats are extremely loose,” Rose said. “When people connect their Steam profile to GMG, GMG then pulls their hours in each game they buy, and then averages them all out. Clearly, this is absolute rubbish for a ton of reasons.”
Nobody wants to pay money for a game that leaves them with less of an experience than they expected. But is this kind of focus on value for money a dangerous trend?