So he is using Corpo speak to say like a $ per hour for a game length.

I use it myself a bit. When I buy a $20 game I usually judge on weather I will get at least 20 hours of entertainment out of it as a baseline to commit to a purchase.

He means to say to price a game higher on metrics they pull out of market research‘s ass prior to a games release. For example people like me with 1,400 hours into Hearts of Iron 4. he purposes a way to predict people like me playing a game that much and finding a way to monetise it.

I like this Idea! I think all products should be based on per use. How about a Ferrari I'll just park it outside on my driveway I wont have to use it, it sure will look nice. Hmm on second thought my toilet has gotten alot of mileage on it, I'd probably be in debt trying to pay that off by now.

Hey man, you just never know what might happen in the future that we currently take for granted.

Take Counter Strike skins for example. They sell for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There was a time when CS skins were simply created out of fun and put online for all to download by the fans for the fans.

Now look at what it has become. If someone just got into CS GO (2), they would think I'm talking malarkey. It has been completely normalized to pay for skins or unlock crates to get them.

Perhaps in 50 years, when you're putting in a different credit card# because you maxed out your current and still need 15 more hours to complete the game, you wouldn't even think twice to pull out that second card, lol.

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 16:32:

Prez wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 15:40:
I re-read it because of the many comments that the headline isn't what he said. Originally, my understanding was that the article was saying that in a previous earnings call Strauss Zelnick stated this, and the current article was getting clarification on this. The earnings call is linked to but I couldn't read the whole thing. But yes, as far as I can tell, the headline is not accurate.

...that 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 actually owned...

I think he is saying that compared to his pretty nonsensical idea of what a fair price would be, they are undercharging. Anyone who can clarify? Regardless, the headline is inaccurate.

There's a CEO Bullshit Translator you can download from the app store. Maybe that will help

LOL - that actually would be helpful. Though if it existed it would probably be made by one of the companies whose CEO's I would need the translator for. Not sure it would be trustworthy. It might tell me that Strauss is saying that he loves puppies and kitties and that his sweet old grandma needs $42 million a year in life-saving meds.

Prez wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 15:40:
I re-read it because of the many comments that the headline isn't what he said. Originally, my understanding was that the article was saying that in a previous earnings call Strauss Zelnick stated this, and the current article was getting clarification on this. The earnings call is linked to but I couldn't read the whole thing. But yes, as far as I can tell, the headline is not accurate.

...that 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 actually owned...

I think he is saying that compared to his pretty nonsensical idea of what a fair price would be, they are undercharging. Anyone who can clarify? Regardless, the headline is inaccurate.

There's a CEO Bullshit Translator you can download from the app store. Maybe that will help

I think what this bozo misses is the basic laws of supply and demand. I have more games now in my collection, and let's be Frank here, that's what it is, a collection as a hobby, of games that I would have to live to be 200 years old to finish playing and that's if the collecting stopped. Which, it probably won't.

The supply is above and beyond the demand. So comparing your prices to how many hours I play a game isn't living in the real world.

I don't agree with Barrack Obama on hardly anything but this one comment he made. "At some point, you have enough". And 42 million dollars (if that's accurate) is damn well enough. I think games should be priced according to net worth of those producing them. In other words, if you're a developer on the GTA VI payroll then once you have 42 million dollars in your bank account, you should be producing games for us working peasants for free. What else are you going to do for planet Earth?

I re-read it because of the many comments that the headline isn't what he said. Originally, my understanding was that the article was saying that in a previous earnings call Strauss Zelnick stated this, and the current article was getting clarification on this. The earnings call is linked to but I couldn't read the whole thing. But yes, as far as I can tell, the headline is not accurate.

...that 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 actually owned...

I think he is saying that compared to his pretty nonsensical idea of what a fair price would be, they are undercharging. Anyone who can clarify? Regardless, the headline is inaccurate.

He's just plan dumb!

Everyone knows the best way to price games is by how much the jpeg of the internet space ship, punches above it's weight!

Just ask Chris Roberts.


(Yes, I know, this is a total clickbait title and not at all what was in the article - of which I believe the guy was right about the value of video games)

He can believe in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up faster.

Ben Hur not impressed.

Does this mean if I get some AAA game that I don't like and only put 20 minutes into it, it'll only cost me 5 bucks or so? It's gotta work BOTH ways.

Yup , misrepresented in the headline. Nevertheless, I'm pretty much done with $80 AAA titles and the companies behind these games anyway. Even if R* has delivered the goods with basically every gta so far, the falling height becomes ever higher as they try to best their previous title. And when your current game is basically a money-printer, greed is never far away to come ruin everything.

Yeah, I'm not sure Blue should spread the clickbait on this one. That's not even close to what he says in the interview

Quboid wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 12:31:

PHJF wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 12:22:
The article does not quote him as saying that. It quotes him as saying that per hour relative to other entertainment games are very cheap.

This! The headline is completely unrepresentative of the actual quotes.

Slightly. It is true that he doesn't come right out and say that plainly, but if you re-read the quote posted by jacobvandy from the perspective of a corporate CEO, you're naive if you don't believe he's implying that that's how he thinks game media should be priced as well.

It's time.

PHJF wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 12:22:
The article does not quote him as saying that. It quotes him as saying that per hour relative to other entertainment games are very cheap.

This! The headline is completely unrepresentative of the actual quotes.

In my lifetime, the software moguls I have known (blessedly few) are without a doubt the chintziest, cheapest, the greediest people I've ever known. They take greed-ignited paranoia to great heights of stupidity, where $$$ is king and nothing else matters at all. Working for these often humorless people was never any fun, and the voraciousness of the greed is something you have to experience before you'd believe it. Ebeneezer Scrooge was a paragon of virtue, a real Boy Scout, compared with some of these guys, who often made the Clinton Foundation look like Saints by comparison! Many of them have trouble defining the difference between a ram chip and mouse, and regardless of how good a suggestion might be in terms of substantive improvement to an ongoing application development, the idea generally is that if it costs additional money then the suggestion itself is irrelevant. Once, I made the suggestion of approaching a given UI issue from the standpoint of the customer--as I always had one foot in the customer realm and the other in the developer realm--and it was as if I had come out of the closet as an Alien from Area 51--no joke...;) Cue to Serling's Twilight Zone intro track! Fortunately, all publishers/devs are not alike and there are some great people around, no question. If only there were a lot more...

I've heard the "We should charge by the hour" pitches, before, and it's nothing new, unfortunately. For those of you who remember SUN, oh, man, Scott McNealy had it all figured out with his doomed "Network Computer" schemes in which nobody had local control of his computing resources or programs, experiencing the "joy" of owning nothing, and people paid for their computing time like we pay for our electric utilities! Under McNealy's notions, whether a game or an application, we would all own only a dumb terminal, and everything else we would rent from the owners of the network (SUN, of course) by the hour! It was madness, and at the time I opposed it wholeheartedly in every forum possible for me to weigh in on. Scott McNealy was one of those ultra-greedy nitwits! His own greed destroyed his company, imo. SUN will not be the last such company to do itself in through mismanagement at the top. McNealy had it bad--the greed bug chowed down on him until there was nothing much left except the smelly residue of bad ideas. There's never enough money to satisfy these unimaginative creeple.

They always fail to apprehend that if not for the rare gem of a computer game emerging every now and then, a game that keeps customers and players enthralled for dozens if not hundreds of hours, the computer-game industry in the US would be a shadow of what it has become. Fortunately, the market selected for itself in every particular. As long as the industry is successful in making the miscreants pay for their greed, the computer gaming market will continue to grow--it has an amazing potential! Think about the last time you spent just 10 hours watching a single movie--regardless of quality or production budget. It's difficult enough to sit through a three-hour movie--the mind chafes against so much time spent passively absorbing a movie. But computer gaming is interactive--and therein lies the major difference. A game that involves the player and revolves around his choices and actions can easily keep a mind enthralled for hundreds of hours, etc. Computer games already cost far more than a movie ticket, and that's the way it should be because the game provides a lot more entertainment! But try and "charge by the hour" and watch how fast the game industry dries up and blows away. We don't pay by the hour for moves or books! So of course, it's an equally boneheaded idea for games, motivated by nothing apart from greed, imo, certainly.

Clickbait of the week award winner here... It's like this random dope couldn't even comprehend what was being said at all, but picked out one little term and ran with it for an article.

Q: You've seen a lot of media inflation and increases in subscription prices broadly in the media landscape. How do you think about striking the balance between pricing and attracting a wider array of audience when you think about the content pipeline you're going to bring to market over the next couple of years to capture the right mix between those two dynamics?

A: Yeah. I mean, you don't want to generalize our business too much from what's going on in linear entertainment because the increase in subscription pricing and linear entertainment is really a reflection of the fact that too many streaming services were underpricing to acquire customers, and then they realize those customers were not durable, and the LTVs were upside down. So they were basically adjusting their pricing to make sure that the LTVs are potentially positive, and I think there's still more pain to come for some of those services. And I can wax eloquent if you want.

Although, it has nothing to do with our business. In terms of pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say that 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 actually owned, not, say, rented or subscribed to. And you'll see that that bears out in every kind of entertainment vehicle. By that standard, our frontline 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. That doesn't necessarily mean that the industry has pricing power or wants to have pricing power. However, there is a great deal of value offered.

And look, it's our strategy here to deliver much more value than what we charge consumers. It's always been our strategy here. We want to make sure the experience is first class, and the nature of the experience is not just the quality of what we offer, it's also what you pay for. Everyone knows that anecdotally.

So that's how we look at it. There have been precious few price increases in the business. The price increase, for example, the $70 for certain frontline products was the first price increase in many years after many generations. So again, I think we offer a terrific value to consumers.

The article does not quote him as saying that. It quotes him as saying that per hour relative to other entertainment games are very cheap.

VaranDragon wrote on Nov 15, 2023, 11:25:
Per hour eh? Nice.....lets do that. Fucking greedy fucks.

No, it clearly says "Per Hur"

My answer to that is go right ahead and try it. I would love it if you did. I sincerely hope you try to make that a thing.

(Note to Blue to fix the spelling)