12 ms·

Video Game Pricing [video]

114 points by PascLeRasc 5y ago

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
I've always been curious about video game pricing. The car dealership comparison was perfect, really shows how wild the market is.
- gruez 5y ago
  >really shows how wild the market is. makes sense when the marginal cost is near-zero.
  - yifanl 5y ago
    Its weird, because the quality of the product has fairly low correlation to the production costs associated with the product (including even the marketing budgets!), whether it is distributed as a cartridge or 2 DLLs over Steam.
    - bspammer 5y ago
      Pretty much all my favorite games of all time are indie games. Video games as a medium seem to be really, really well suited to passion projects, and I can’t explain why. None of my favorite movies are indie movies. Very little of my favorite music is indie.
      - account42 5y ago
        > I can’t explain why. I think one reason might be that being interactive lets the player contribute to the enjoyment themselves, which lowers the bar for what the developer has to achieve. Give people blocks and ways to move them and some will have endless of fun building something creative whereas with a movie the author is responsible for making sure the blocks are arranged in an interesting fashion. For me though I think a large part is also simply that I am more into games than movies/music so have spent a lot more time looking into the indie scene there.
        bspammer 5y ago
        > I think one reason might be that being interactive lets the player contribute to the enjoyment themselves, which lowers the bar for what the developer has to achieve. I really disagree with this, I think it's underselling the quality of indie games. It explains Minecraft, maybe, but there are so many incredible indie games that look gorgeous and have tons of interesting content, that aren't just relying on the player to entertain themselves. Braid, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Limbo, Inside, Frostpunk, FTL, Outer Wilds, Spelunky 2, Rocket League, Darkest Dungeon, Disco Elysium, The Witness, Terraria, Return of the Obra Dinn, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons, Hotline Miami, Undertale, Firewatch, Dustforce. I could honestly double that list if I thought for long enough. > For me though I think a large part is also simply that I am more into games than movies/music Maybe. It still feels like indie games punch way above their weight compared to other forms of media, but it's true I could be biased there.
  - moonchild 5y ago
    The majority of consumer products are priced according to what people will pay, not what they cost.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The majority of consumer products are priced according to what people will pay That'd depend entirely on your purchasing habits. "what people will pay" is an upper bound on the price, and "what they cost" is an lower bound. For high end/luxury products (eg. iPhone 12 pro max 256GB), prices are indeed dictated by "what people will pay", but for low end/commodity products (eg. low to mid range android phone, or everyday staples like food) it's dictated by "what they cost" due to competition.
vlunkr 5y ago
This is entertaining and informative, but it needs some sort of thesis statement to be worth discussing.
- idle_zealot 5y ago
  It came sort-of in the middle, and a bit more at the end, but my reading is that the thesis of the video is that games are a rip-off; emulate the classics and you’ll have a better experience than chasing the newest wave of hype (and will save hundreds of dollars).
  - wsinks 5y ago
    Completely agree. Dunkey uses the tried and true method of SaaS selling in this video too. Start with the pain, then move to the solution that you definitely didn't start your pitch with.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I don't think that's right. He made it pretty clear he thinks Super Mario Odyssey is a game worth $60 or more. I enjoy retro games, but I wouldn't enjoy playing through an entire catalogue of old games before I wanted something that had a more modern design sense.
- sleibrock 5y ago
  There's a lot of ideas to too wild for one thesis to draw up, but I think there's a lot of good talking points. * Triple-A games are often-times yearly releases of a series priced at $60 (Battlefield, Call of Duty, FIFA), but are hardly ever new games with new technologies. Most times they last about a year before they're effectively EOL'd. * Indie games are much lower in comparison and receive more love from their developers * Nintendo are renowned for their titles and IPs, but their games are far from innovative at times, and their prices are not competitive in the slightest. * Pricing of modern video games makes players turn to free-to-play games which receive more updates on a regular basis. * The only way to play classic games reliably is emulation. Getting modern versions of old games from devs/pubs is very unreliable currently (Silent Hill collection, Super Mario 3D Allstars, etc)
esotericsean 5y ago
I love dunkey. He comes across as a dumb YouTuber making silly videos about video games, but this was really insightful just like the majority of his videos. As a game developer, it's a crazy world out there.
- wsinks 5y ago
  I saw the title of this, and as a dunkey subscriber, I was hoping this was the first time that I'd seen dunkey on HN. What a wild cross-over day!
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Dunkey makes visual essays only when he comes up with a good one. He doesn't force one out every week. The rest of the time he goofs around or makes a half-hearted review. But even during his goofing around he'll make a good point or slyly highlight out some shady practice. Take for example his review of the recent Ratchet and Clank on the PS5. He shows off these beautiful vistas while reading Sony's claims that this could only be made on the PS5 because of such-and-such technology. Then he pulls the rug and says all those beautiful vistas were actually from the previous Ratchet and Clank game on the PS4. It's not an explicit take-down of Sony, nor does it need to be, but it helps reenforce the idea that marketing claims should always be treated skeptically.
Leftium 5y ago
Related: https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8 https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8 This 6 min video explains from game dev perspective why (AAA) games have been pegged at $60 on release, even though they should be priced higher to be sustainable ($85-$90 in 2018). So game developers tried various ideas to make up for this gap: DLC, perpetual experiences (map packs & expansions), loot boxes, microtransactions...
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >So game developers tried various ideas to make up for this gap: DLC, perpetual experiences (map packs & expansions), loot boxes, microtransactions... There's also "ultimate" editions, which bridge the gap at sales time. Sure, you could buy Forza Horizon 5 for $60, but you could also buy the Deluxe Edition for $80 to get some extra cars or the Premium Edition for $100 to get the same extra cars + the DLC when it comes out and some extra goodies.
  - Leftium 5y ago
    Many players complain when DLC is released at the same as the main game because they feel it should just be part of the main game. Framing this DLC as an "ultimate" edition seems like a great idea!
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      To what extent does it backfire though? "Would you like the ripoff edition or the inferior edition?" Actually, I don't want to buy the game anymore.
      - Leftium 5y ago
        The difference a tiny change in framing can make is amazing: https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-of-warcrafts-rest-system/ https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-... > In World of Warcraft what they did when they first designed the game was they had an experience system that would, over time, lower the amount of experience you got because [Blizzard] wanted to encourage people to play for like two hours at a time instead of twelve hours at a time. So the longer you played you’d get this experience degradation and then it would bottom out and at that point it would be a fixed rate of experience. And people just hated it. > And so they went back and [Blizzard’s Rob Pardo] was like all right, basically what we did was we made everything in the game take twice as much experience to achieve as before and then we flipped it. So actually what happens is you start getting 200% experience and eventually it goes back down to 100%. So that effectively now how they spin it is that if you log out for a while you get this 200% boost when you log back in! And then over time it goes away and you just get regular 100% experience. It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like “Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!”
kevinlou 5y ago
Never thought I'd see my boy Dunkey on HN, but here we are
my_usernam3 5y ago
As a gamer who rarely finishes games, I love the DLC model. $60 back in the early 2000s was always too expensive for me, so I only ever had used games. If I were a kid today, $60 isn't too bad. And if love the game enough, $10 DLC packs is an easy pill to swallow. Wish dunkey did a little more focus on that, but theres tons of other videos that go more into the economy of DLC and micro-transactions.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I'm not sure how insightful this is. It's largely predicated on his personal beliefs of what games are good and what you're looking for in a game. I think Pikmin is a great game. I'm not sure I would call it close to being the best RTS game, or even worth $60. If anything I would say some of the takeaway should be reversed: * Games are significantly cheaper than ever before * Games are generally longer and have more content than ever before. A year of multiplayer life is pretty good for $60. * Free to play games aren't successful as an adverse reaction to monetized non-free games. Free to play games are more monetized than most. * Old games are great. Go play them. But don't expect a fungible experience with new games. There is no classic game equivalent for Resident Evil 8. I would say, there isn't even something particularly equivalent for Hollow Knight, which is a direct evolution off of old school metroidvania. But definitely try to look past marketing. We can of course agree on that.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  > Old games are great. Go play them. But don't expect a fungible experience with new games. There is no classic game equivalent for Resident Evil 8. Similarly, there is no modern equivalent to Katamari Damacy. Some games are just too perfect to be recreated.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Potentially unpopular opinion, but I think a large part of Katamari Damacy's appeal was it's oddball aesthetic, with a feeling it was kind of intentionally shitty, but executed really well. I think this hasn't aged as well as it deserved because so many indie games ham up the "low quality" aspect of their game now. Whereas KD did it artistically, indie games do it as an excuse for not being better. And for keeping that company, I find KD hasn't aged well. Good theme song though.
    - swivelmaster 5y ago
      Indie games often do it because they can't afford to do more.
supperburg 5y ago
This is absolutely unacceptable. When HN started allowing videos, I was weary because it was a step in the wrong direction. But obviously the majority of users didn’t care. Now we have this. A popular culture YouTuber featured on the front page… of hacker news. A YouTube video that is listed on trending on YouTube is also on the front page of hacker news. This is a blatant violation of the guidelines. This video, besides not even being the best quality in Dunks library or the most interesting, is vapid popular culture content and is in no way, by any stretch of the imagination, intellectually interesting. And that’s just the threshold for entry! It doesn’t even come close to being as intellectually stimulating as the long-time HN user has become accustomed to. This is the day that I know beyond any doubt that this is not a noob-illusion (a decade old noob), HN is allowing itself to degrade. For the love of god this is the only place left on the internet that I know of where a person can have an intelligent conversation. The last place where I can expect that the curation of links will please and surprise me. Please don’t let this special place die. Ban YouTube links and ban garbage like this from appearing here.
- dang 5y ago
  HN has always allowed videos: https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094837/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094837/http://ycombinato.... It has also always allowed Youtube: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com&next=25000 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com&next=2500.... No doubt occasionally a video appears here which is also popular on YouTube, but that's to be expected from randomness. Let's not overinterpret it!
yuy910616 5y ago
It reminds me of something I think someone from Netflix once said (paraphrasing): We're not competing with Hulu or Disney Plus, we're competing with sleep. These days games are not the only forms of addictive entertainment - there are games, social media, streaming service, youtube, tiktok, and so much more. Maybe games are cheaper (in real-term) because entertainment in general are getting cheaper.
MaXtreeM 5y ago
I never thought I would see videogamedunkey in top hot posts on HN but here we go. As others have already pointed out, he usually makes silly videos but has been consistent for many years if you like his kind of humour. From time to time he makes a video-essay which are usually great, I would recommend a "Game Critics"[0] and part two if you liked the first one. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI
- supperburg 5y ago
  I think that this kind of content doesn’t belong on HN and I think that it’s a violation of the guidelines. It saddens me deeply to see today for the first time ever a blatant Reddit post reach the front page of HN. I’ve been here a decade.
- supperburg 5y ago
  Once again, I don’t think pop culture videos belong on hacker news and I think it’s a violation of the guidelines.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    The guidelines are quite clear that "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is allowed.
    - supperburg 5y ago
      Yes and it is quite obvious that comedic, meme-packed, popular culture nostalgia driven YouTube videos do not gratify anyone’s intellectual curiosity, ever! It clearly gratifies something else! Is this not obvious?
      - MaXtreeM 5y ago
        > it is quite obvious that comedic, meme-packed ... I don't understand why comedy and memes should be a problem if the overall content is trying to communicate some thought. > ... popular culture nostalgia driven YouTube videos ... What you call nostalgia I see as a history reference for comparison to today. Your comments give me an impression that you have a problem with YouTube videos. There are blog posts filled with jokes, memes and "popular culture nostalgia" which get to the top of HN every day. As I said videogamedunkey's videos are mostly humorous but from time to time he makes an essay with suprisingly good observations about video game industry. You don't have to like his way of humour as a lot of people don't but at least he has been consistent and not afraid to call out some people for their bullshit.
OmarIsmail 5y ago
At this point I literally only play games on Xbox Game Pass and I'm playing more now than ever before. It's truly unreal how good of a value Game Pass is.
silisili 5y ago
RE: Game Pass... Not saying it is ethical...but one can buy a max length xbox live subscription(3 year), then 'upgrade to gamepass' which gives you 3 years of gamepass for a nominal fee.
- muststopmyths 5y ago
  It's not unethical. It's a deliberate choice by Microsoft to suck people into GamePass at a great price. If it was an actual loophole they would have closed it long ago. For those not in the know: There were offers of "upgrade to GamePass Ultimate for $1 for x months" which when applied to an existing XBox Live account extended GamePass for the length of your XBL subscription, for the same $1 (flat, not monthly). Sounds like those offers are still around.
ekianjo 5y ago
> Why play newer games instead of classic Because "new" trumps "great" every time. If that was not the case, we would stop watching any new movies for a long time since there's an abundance of great old movies that you could watch before even starting to watch anything new. But that's not how entertainment works. Humans crave for stuff that's new, and that's precisely why this business can exist.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
I'd love to just see a company price a game at $150 dollars without any of the micro-transaction fanfare. Be it an indie studio or an EA-like. I'd be fine with paying good money for something that was genuinely fun and didn't feel like it was nickel-and-diming me. You'll pay a few bucks for a movie that entertains you for maybe a couple of hours at best, but the idea that people are averse to paying $60 for something you get 1,000 fun hours out of really turns me off.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Do you know that you're going to get that fun though? Most of the time you don't, really, and then spending $150 on something unknown is way too much of a commitment. I would not mind at all in retrospect, for a game that I really liked, but I could not have predicted that when buying them. So the question turns into how to monetize that. And DLCs, microtransactions, and subscriptions seem to be an answer.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Demos.
nottorp 5y ago
Am I growing old or have AAA games (the ones not multiplayer focused) become too long? I recently finished Ghost of Tsushima. Brilliant, but if you ask me it would have been about as fun even at 1/3 of the length. How about instead of padding a game with more of the same just to add length you make it shorter and reduce development costs? Probably not linearly, but still significantly.
- lazypenguin 5y ago
  Several years ago I played The Witcher 3. I couldn’t finish it since it had so much content. After about 20 hours in, I think I only got halfway through. For many people that much content for the price is an amazing deal but for me it was too much! Putting in an hour a day sporadically playing the game during the week, I was playing for almost half a year. From my perspective that’s a big commitment compared to a movie or something but probably equivalent to a good book or television series. I guess it all depends on your commitment to games but I also enjoy shorter games.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Games are a bigger commitment than TV shows. They require a focus to get through. Even if I'm into a TV show there's a good chance I'm going to spend a lot of time only half paying attention. Can even do productive things like cleaning the house while watching a show. Books are probably a better comparison to video games... which is probably also why I hate when those are too long.
    - nottorp 5y ago
      > Books are probably a better comparison to video games... which is probably also why I hate when those are too long. Hmm books last 2-6 hours for me, depending on how bestseller-ish they're written. You're not talking about technical manuals are you? Series can get long, but those come out one "episode" every year to couple years. > Several years ago I played The Witcher 3. I couldn’t finish it since it had so much content. Welcome to the club :) I've made it to the Nordic themed island so far. By the time Cyberpunk 2077 is fully patched and PS5s or new gaming PCs become available and affordable again, I might finish it!

114 points by PascLeRasc 5y ago

I've always been curious about video game pricing. The car dealership comparison was perfect, really shows how wild the market is.

gruez 5y ago
>really shows how wild the market is. makes sense when the marginal cost is near-zero.
- yifanl 5y ago
  Its weird, because the quality of the product has fairly low correlation to the production costs associated with the product (including even the marketing budgets!), whether it is distributed as a cartridge or 2 DLLs over Steam.
  - bspammer 5y ago
    Pretty much all my favorite games of all time are indie games. Video games as a medium seem to be really, really well suited to passion projects, and I can’t explain why. None of my favorite movies are indie movies. Very little of my favorite music is indie.
    - account42 5y ago
      > I can’t explain why. I think one reason might be that being interactive lets the player contribute to the enjoyment themselves, which lowers the bar for what the developer has to achieve. Give people blocks and ways to move them and some will have endless of fun building something creative whereas with a movie the author is responsible for making sure the blocks are arranged in an interesting fashion. For me though I think a large part is also simply that I am more into games than movies/music so have spent a lot more time looking into the indie scene there.
      - bspammer 5y ago
        > I think one reason might be that being interactive lets the player contribute to the enjoyment themselves, which lowers the bar for what the developer has to achieve. I really disagree with this, I think it's underselling the quality of indie games. It explains Minecraft, maybe, but there are so many incredible indie games that look gorgeous and have tons of interesting content, that aren't just relying on the player to entertain themselves. Braid, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Limbo, Inside, Frostpunk, FTL, Outer Wilds, Spelunky 2, Rocket League, Darkest Dungeon, Disco Elysium, The Witness, Terraria, Return of the Obra Dinn, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons, Hotline Miami, Undertale, Firewatch, Dustforce. I could honestly double that list if I thought for long enough. > For me though I think a large part is also simply that I am more into games than movies/music Maybe. It still feels like indie games punch way above their weight compared to other forms of media, but it's true I could be biased there.
- moonchild 5y ago
  The majority of consumer products are priced according to what people will pay, not what they cost.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The majority of consumer products are priced according to what people will pay That'd depend entirely on your purchasing habits. "what people will pay" is an upper bound on the price, and "what they cost" is an lower bound. For high end/luxury products (eg. iPhone 12 pro max 256GB), prices are indeed dictated by "what people will pay", but for low end/commodity products (eg. low to mid range android phone, or everyday staples like food) it's dictated by "what they cost" due to competition.

vlunkr 5y ago

This is entertaining and informative, but it needs some sort of thesis statement to be worth discussing.

idle_zealot 5y ago
It came sort-of in the middle, and a bit more at the end, but my reading is that the thesis of the video is that games are a rip-off; emulate the classics and you’ll have a better experience than chasing the newest wave of hype (and will save hundreds of dollars).
- wsinks 5y ago
  Completely agree. Dunkey uses the tried and true method of SaaS selling in this video too. Start with the pain, then move to the solution that you definitely didn't start your pitch with.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I don't think that's right. He made it pretty clear he thinks Super Mario Odyssey is a game worth $60 or more. I enjoy retro games, but I wouldn't enjoy playing through an entire catalogue of old games before I wanted something that had a more modern design sense.
sleibrock 5y ago
There's a lot of ideas to too wild for one thesis to draw up, but I think there's a lot of good talking points. * Triple-A games are often-times yearly releases of a series priced at $60 (Battlefield, Call of Duty, FIFA), but are hardly ever new games with new technologies. Most times they last about a year before they're effectively EOL'd. * Indie games are much lower in comparison and receive more love from their developers * Nintendo are renowned for their titles and IPs, but their games are far from innovative at times, and their prices are not competitive in the slightest. * Pricing of modern video games makes players turn to free-to-play games which receive more updates on a regular basis. * The only way to play classic games reliably is emulation. Getting modern versions of old games from devs/pubs is very unreliable currently (Silent Hill collection, Super Mario 3D Allstars, etc)

esotericsean 5y ago

I love dunkey. He comes across as a dumb YouTuber making silly videos about video games, but this was really insightful just like the majority of his videos. As a game developer, it's a crazy world out there.

wsinks 5y ago
I saw the title of this, and as a dunkey subscriber, I was hoping this was the first time that I'd seen dunkey on HN. What a wild cross-over day!
lapetitejort 5y ago
Dunkey makes visual essays only when he comes up with a good one. He doesn't force one out every week. The rest of the time he goofs around or makes a half-hearted review. But even during his goofing around he'll make a good point or slyly highlight out some shady practice. Take for example his review of the recent Ratchet and Clank on the PS5. He shows off these beautiful vistas while reading Sony's claims that this could only be made on the PS5 because of such-and-such technology. Then he pulls the rug and says all those beautiful vistas were actually from the previous Ratchet and Clank game on the PS4. It's not an explicit take-down of Sony, nor does it need to be, but it helps reenforce the idea that marketing claims should always be treated skeptically.

Leftium 5y ago

Related: https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8 https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8 This 6 min video explains from game dev perspective why (AAA) games have been pegged at $60 on release, even though they should be priced higher to be sustainable ($85-$90 in 2018). So game developers tried various ideas to make up for this gap: DLC, perpetual experiences (map packs & expansions), loot boxes, microtransactions...

Hamuko 5y ago
>So game developers tried various ideas to make up for this gap: DLC, perpetual experiences (map packs & expansions), loot boxes, microtransactions... There's also "ultimate" editions, which bridge the gap at sales time. Sure, you could buy Forza Horizon 5 for $60, but you could also buy the Deluxe Edition for $80 to get some extra cars or the Premium Edition for $100 to get the same extra cars + the DLC when it comes out and some extra goodies.
- Leftium 5y ago
  Many players complain when DLC is released at the same as the main game because they feel it should just be part of the main game. Framing this DLC as an "ultimate" edition seems like a great idea!
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    To what extent does it backfire though? "Would you like the ripoff edition or the inferior edition?" Actually, I don't want to buy the game anymore.
    - Leftium 5y ago
      The difference a tiny change in framing can make is amazing: https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-of-warcrafts-rest-system/ https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-... > In World of Warcraft what they did when they first designed the game was they had an experience system that would, over time, lower the amount of experience you got because [Blizzard] wanted to encourage people to play for like two hours at a time instead of twelve hours at a time. So the longer you played you’d get this experience degradation and then it would bottom out and at that point it would be a fixed rate of experience. And people just hated it. > And so they went back and [Blizzard’s Rob Pardo] was like all right, basically what we did was we made everything in the game take twice as much experience to achieve as before and then we flipped it. So actually what happens is you start getting 200% experience and eventually it goes back down to 100%. So that effectively now how they spin it is that if you log out for a while you get this 200% boost when you log back in! And then over time it goes away and you just get regular 100% experience. It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like “Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!”

kevinlou 5y ago

Never thought I'd see my boy Dunkey on HN, but here we are

my_usernam3 5y ago

As a gamer who rarely finishes games, I love the DLC model. $60 back in the early 2000s was always too expensive for me, so I only ever had used games. If I were a kid today, $60 isn't too bad. And if love the game enough, $10 DLC packs is an easy pill to swallow. Wish dunkey did a little more focus on that, but theres tons of other videos that go more into the economy of DLC and micro-transactions.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I'm not sure how insightful this is. It's largely predicated on his personal beliefs of what games are good and what you're looking for in a game. I think Pikmin is a great game. I'm not sure I would call it close to being the best RTS game, or even worth $60. If anything I would say some of the takeaway should be reversed: * Games are significantly cheaper than ever before * Games are generally longer and have more content than ever before. A year of multiplayer life is pretty good for $60. * Free to play games aren't successful as an adverse reaction to monetized non-free games. Free to play games are more monetized than most. * Old games are great. Go play them. But don't expect a fungible experience with new games. There is no classic game equivalent for Resident Evil 8. I would say, there isn't even something particularly equivalent for Hollow Knight, which is a direct evolution off of old school metroidvania. But definitely try to look past marketing. We can of course agree on that.

lapetitejort 5y ago
> Old games are great. Go play them. But don't expect a fungible experience with new games. There is no classic game equivalent for Resident Evil 8. Similarly, there is no modern equivalent to Katamari Damacy. Some games are just too perfect to be recreated.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Potentially unpopular opinion, but I think a large part of Katamari Damacy's appeal was it's oddball aesthetic, with a feeling it was kind of intentionally shitty, but executed really well. I think this hasn't aged as well as it deserved because so many indie games ham up the "low quality" aspect of their game now. Whereas KD did it artistically, indie games do it as an excuse for not being better. And for keeping that company, I find KD hasn't aged well. Good theme song though.
  - swivelmaster 5y ago
    Indie games often do it because they can't afford to do more.

supperburg 5y ago

This is absolutely unacceptable. When HN started allowing videos, I was weary because it was a step in the wrong direction. But obviously the majority of users didn’t care. Now we have this. A popular culture YouTuber featured on the front page… of hacker news. A YouTube video that is listed on trending on YouTube is also on the front page of hacker news. This is a blatant violation of the guidelines. This video, besides not even being the best quality in Dunks library or the most interesting, is vapid popular culture content and is in no way, by any stretch of the imagination, intellectually interesting. And that’s just the threshold for entry! It doesn’t even come close to being as intellectually stimulating as the long-time HN user has become accustomed to. This is the day that I know beyond any doubt that this is not a noob-illusion (a decade old noob), HN is allowing itself to degrade. For the love of god this is the only place left on the internet that I know of where a person can have an intelligent conversation. The last place where I can expect that the curation of links will please and surprise me. Please don’t let this special place die. Ban YouTube links and ban garbage like this from appearing here.

dang 5y ago
HN has always allowed videos: https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094837/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094837/http://ycombinato.... It has also always allowed Youtube: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com&next=25000 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com&next=2500.... No doubt occasionally a video appears here which is also popular on YouTube, but that's to be expected from randomness. Let's not overinterpret it!

yuy910616 5y ago

It reminds me of something I think someone from Netflix once said (paraphrasing): We're not competing with Hulu or Disney Plus, we're competing with sleep. These days games are not the only forms of addictive entertainment - there are games, social media, streaming service, youtube, tiktok, and so much more. Maybe games are cheaper (in real-term) because entertainment in general are getting cheaper.

MaXtreeM 5y ago

I never thought I would see videogamedunkey in top hot posts on HN but here we go. As others have already pointed out, he usually makes silly videos but has been consistent for many years if you like his kind of humour. From time to time he makes a video-essay which are usually great, I would recommend a "Game Critics"[0] and part two if you liked the first one. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI

supperburg 5y ago
I think that this kind of content doesn’t belong on HN and I think that it’s a violation of the guidelines. It saddens me deeply to see today for the first time ever a blatant Reddit post reach the front page of HN. I’ve been here a decade.
supperburg 5y ago
Once again, I don’t think pop culture videos belong on hacker news and I think it’s a violation of the guidelines.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  The guidelines are quite clear that "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is allowed.
  - supperburg 5y ago
    Yes and it is quite obvious that comedic, meme-packed, popular culture nostalgia driven YouTube videos do not gratify anyone’s intellectual curiosity, ever! It clearly gratifies something else! Is this not obvious?
    - MaXtreeM 5y ago
      > it is quite obvious that comedic, meme-packed ... I don't understand why comedy and memes should be a problem if the overall content is trying to communicate some thought. > ... popular culture nostalgia driven YouTube videos ... What you call nostalgia I see as a history reference for comparison to today. Your comments give me an impression that you have a problem with YouTube videos. There are blog posts filled with jokes, memes and "popular culture nostalgia" which get to the top of HN every day. As I said videogamedunkey's videos are mostly humorous but from time to time he makes an essay with suprisingly good observations about video game industry. You don't have to like his way of humour as a lot of people don't but at least he has been consistent and not afraid to call out some people for their bullshit.

OmarIsmail 5y ago

At this point I literally only play games on Xbox Game Pass and I'm playing more now than ever before. It's truly unreal how good of a value Game Pass is.

silisili 5y ago

RE: Game Pass... Not saying it is ethical...but one can buy a max length xbox live subscription(3 year), then 'upgrade to gamepass' which gives you 3 years of gamepass for a nominal fee.

muststopmyths 5y ago
It's not unethical. It's a deliberate choice by Microsoft to suck people into GamePass at a great price. If it was an actual loophole they would have closed it long ago. For those not in the know: There were offers of "upgrade to GamePass Ultimate for $1 for x months" which when applied to an existing XBox Live account extended GamePass for the length of your XBL subscription, for the same $1 (flat, not monthly). Sounds like those offers are still around.

ekianjo 5y ago

> Why play newer games instead of classic Because "new" trumps "great" every time. If that was not the case, we would stop watching any new movies for a long time since there's an abundance of great old movies that you could watch before even starting to watch anything new. But that's not how entertainment works. Humans crave for stuff that's new, and that's precisely why this business can exist.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

I'd love to just see a company price a game at $150 dollars without any of the micro-transaction fanfare. Be it an indie studio or an EA-like. I'd be fine with paying good money for something that was genuinely fun and didn't feel like it was nickel-and-diming me. You'll pay a few bucks for a movie that entertains you for maybe a couple of hours at best, but the idea that people are averse to paying $60 for something you get 1,000 fun hours out of really turns me off.

npteljes 5y ago
Do you know that you're going to get that fun though? Most of the time you don't, really, and then spending $150 on something unknown is way too much of a commitment. I would not mind at all in retrospect, for a game that I really liked, but I could not have predicted that when buying them. So the question turns into how to monetize that. And DLCs, microtransactions, and subscriptions seem to be an answer.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Demos.

nottorp 5y ago

Am I growing old or have AAA games (the ones not multiplayer focused) become too long? I recently finished Ghost of Tsushima. Brilliant, but if you ask me it would have been about as fun even at 1/3 of the length. How about instead of padding a game with more of the same just to add length you make it shorter and reduce development costs? Probably not linearly, but still significantly.

lazypenguin 5y ago
Several years ago I played The Witcher 3. I couldn’t finish it since it had so much content. After about 20 hours in, I think I only got halfway through. For many people that much content for the price is an amazing deal but for me it was too much! Putting in an hour a day sporadically playing the game during the week, I was playing for almost half a year. From my perspective that’s a big commitment compared to a movie or something but probably equivalent to a good book or television series. I guess it all depends on your commitment to games but I also enjoy shorter games.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Games are a bigger commitment than TV shows. They require a focus to get through. Even if I'm into a TV show there's a good chance I'm going to spend a lot of time only half paying attention. Can even do productive things like cleaning the house while watching a show. Books are probably a better comparison to video games... which is probably also why I hate when those are too long.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    > Books are probably a better comparison to video games... which is probably also why I hate when those are too long. Hmm books last 2-6 hours for me, depending on how bestseller-ish they're written. You're not talking about technical manuals are you? Series can get long, but those come out one "episode" every year to couple years. > Several years ago I played The Witcher 3. I couldn’t finish it since it had so much content. Welcome to the club :) I've made it to the Nordic themed island so far. By the time Cyberpunk 2077 is fully patched and PS5s or new gaming PCs become available and affordable again, I might finish it!