What dictates the value of a game, and at what point does a game slip from ‘great value’ to ‘bad value?’ Does a mediocre but padded-out open-world game that takes 100 hours to complete really represent better value than, say, a 17-hour game for the same price? By that token, even the greatest horror games would always have a value disadvantage against open-world games of the same quality:The Witcher 3will always be better ‘value’ than clearly brilliant horror gamesAlan Wake 2, orAlien: Isolation, and that seems like a flawed logic, doesn’t it?
What’s kicked up this discussion is the fact that Ninja Theoryannounced thatHellblade 2will cost $50 on launch, and take about eight hours to complete (giving it an hourly rate of about $6.25). But to figure out what that really means, I’ve decided to measure it up against other games that caused a stir over having short playtimes combined with high price tags. All the games below are generally regarded as good or very good games, giving them a pretty even playing field when it comes to quality, letting us really focus on those playtime-price ratios.
I’ve used the trustyHow Long to Beatto gauge the game’s lengths, using an average time between ‘Main game’ and ‘Main + Extras’ to establish its length. 100% Completion isn’t generally representative of how the average gamer plays their games, so doesn’t factor into the calculations.
Let’s begin.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
$30/8 hours: $3.75/hour
A good control for this experiment is the originalHellblade, not only because it puts the sequel’s value into perspective, but because it was praised for its reasonable price tag when it came out in 2017. At $30, Senua’s Sacrifice was welcomed as a high-value proposition, and Ninja Theory even commented on this at the time,telling PCGN in an interview:
“Hellblade has been all about trying to rejuvenate the space between ‘indie’ and triple-A, where games can be creatively rich but still boast triple-A quality. At around half the length of a similar triple-A game and half the price, we think Hellblade will give players a unique triple-A quality experience at a fair price.”
–Dominic Matthews, Product Development Manager at Ninja Theory
With that in mind, it seems like a significant shift to give the similarly short sequel a 66% price bump. But take a global recession and inflation into account ($30 in 2017 is worth $38 today), and in all probability a higher budget following the success of the original, and you can start to see where that extra cost is coming from. It’s not like the sequel’s length-price rate of $6.25 an hour is the biggest offender in recent years either…
Value: $$$$
$20/2 hours: $10/hour
Back in 2013, house-exploring indieGone Homecaused a bit of a stir when the super-short two-hour game launched for a relatively high $20 price tag. Thing is, chances are no one would be talking about it in the first place if it wasn’t a critically acclaimed and well-loved game: a super-poignant title where you uncover a family’s story through creeping around its empty house on a dark and stormy night.
It does bring up other considerations too. $20 isn’t a huge amount of total money to spend on a game, so there’s less overall expenditure to begrudge, but on the other hand it’s so narrative-led that it doesn’t lend itself well to replayability. A logical point of comparison is something like Return of the Obra Dinn, which cost the same amount ($20), is similarly geared towards a single playthrough, yet takes about eight hours to beat, giving itwayyyybetter value at $2.50 an hour. They’re different games of course, but Gone Home’s current $15 RRP seems a bit more sensible here.
Resident Evil 3 REmake
$60 (6 hours): $10/hour
Probably the most contentiously priced game in recent memory, let’s be clear thatResident Evil 3 Remakeis a fine piece of content for its short runtime, but that’s kind of the point: it feels like it could be a DLC rather than a game, and runs for at most half the length of every other RE game made in the last decade or so, yet with the same asking price. When a double pricing standard is evident in several games either side of it in the exact same franchise, it’s really not a good look for the game in question.
And again, total value is a big factor here. Resident Evil 3 Remake was, by most assessments, a good game, and actually comes off no worse than Gone Home in ‘value per hour.’ The problem is that $60 is a lot more money than $20, while four more hours of gameplay doesn’t feel like it levels that out. If anything, the more money you spend on a $10/hour game, the worse value it becomes (we all loveBaldur’s Gate 3here, but would we fork out $1500 for it? Hmm, don’t think so)
I’m certainly not complaining about RE3 Remake, I bought it for about $20 in a Halloween sale a year later, but as a Day One proposition it’s a prime example of a triple-A rip-off, offset a bit by the fact that it’s a polished and faithful remake of the original game.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
$50/10 hours: $5/hour
A bit like with Resident Evil 3, Miles Morales has been criticised for feeling like an expansion wrapped up in a full-game price. Again, great game, an arguably better story, some nice new mechanics, but also a sense of something that could’ve been a DLC or ‘expandalone’ for a significantly lower price. A logical comparison here could be Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider, a high-quality expandalone which ran at around eight hours and cost $30 ($3.75/hour).
With Miles Morales using the same worldspace as the base game, engine, and most of the mechanics of the original, it does seem abitcheeky to have priced it at $50, but it’s actually the least offensive game in this comparison (apart from our control game, Hellblade, which is generally regarded as ‘good value for money.’)
Value: $$$
Shadow Warrior 3
$50 (5.5 - 7 hours): $8.44/hour
Developer Flying Wild Hog made a few errors with the third entry in the well-liked Shadow Warrior shooter series. They committed the cardinal pricing sin of not only raising the price for a sequel, but shortening the length of the game (weirdly, each successive game in the trilogy was shorter than the last). Make no mistake: if you offer something bigger and better, then fans will appreciate that, and even be happy to pay a bit more due to both goodwill for the series and the promise of a significant improvement for the new entry.
But that didn’t quite happen here. Shadow Warrior 3 was a fine game, but reallywasn’ta significant evolution for the series. It had some excellent set-pieces and exciting mechanics, but was let down by some simplistic level design and of course that short campaign.
It felt like a diminishing returns in value, and the devs were probably right to freshen things up and move onto a new project altogether inEvil West, which came out in 2022.
Conclusion
And so we loop back to Hellblade 2. Of course, it first needs to come out and actually be a good game before we can gauge its value, but compared to some of the others listed above, it falls somewhere in the middle, coming in a little pricer than Spider-Man: Miles Morales, but not as offensively priced as the Resident Evil 3 Remake.
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