Optimal Game Price vs. Length Part 2: Downloadable Content

Downloadable content is becoming more and more common. Almost all games these days have downloadable content. While some of it is released as free downloads, most of it is paid for. This means we can use a similar Price vs. Length discussion for DLC. I hold DLC up to the same scrutiny as a full game. You should get as much hours of gameplay as you pay in dollars. A $10 DLC should give 10 hours of gameplay. A few examples:

Oblivion Knights of the Nine – This was the biggest DLC released for Oblivion. (I consider Shivering Isles an expansion pack.) It cost $10 but the length depends quite a bit on the player. Without doing any fast travel, it would probably take 10 hours to finish all the quests. With fast travel it could probably be finished in just a couple hours. An average of 5 hours is pretty good for our purposes though. Since 5 hours does not pass the test, I would not consider this DLC worth it. Some players will get their money’s worth; most will not.

Call of Duty Black Ops First Strike – This was the first DLC for Black Ops. It was priced at $15 and included 5 multiplayer maps. Four of the maps were for normal competitive multiplayer and the fifth map was a special Zombie survival mode. That is $3 per map, so each map would need about 3 hours of play time.

Much like Knights of the Nine, the value of this DLC depends on the player. If you were the the kind of player that played Black Ops every night after work, you would probably eventually get 3 hours out of each map. If you were more of a casual player just jumping in a few multiplayer matches every once in a while, you would need many weeks to get your money’s worth. The bad thing is that the new maps are usually the most played (the old maps can be abandoned), so casual players sometimes have to buy them just to play their occasional multiplayer.

Civilization 5 Denmark/The Vikings – This is one of the civilizations you can pay to add to your game. It is $5 and includes the civilization for use in normal games (single and multiplayer) as well as a scenario. Scenarios are basically scripted maps. You get to play as the title civilization with special objectives. The scenario for the Denmark DLC is one of the better ones as you can play as 3 different civilizations.

The scenario itself probably gives you about 3 hours if you try all three factions. You do get to play as Denmark in normal games, but it doesn’t change the gameplay enough to really add that up towards the 5 hours we are testing for. I would say it’s not really worth $5 unless you absolutely love Denmark and plan to play lots and lots of games with that civilization. The average player will not get their money’s worth.

The conclusion is that DLC is almost never worth the full price. On sale or in bundles it can definitely be worth it, and that requires some patience not to buy when everyone is hyping it up. I usually wait to buy DLC on sale or not at all. Some of the DLC prices rival the cost of an indie game.

If I have a choice between buying a DLC or buying a full indie game, I almost always will choose the indie game. For the same cost you can get fresh and new gameplay or the same old gameplay just with a few tweaks. It’s a no-brainer to me.

I can see sometimes you have that one game you love to play and DLC is the answer to your craving of more content, but it is rare that a game holds me so much I am desperate for content and willing to overpay for it. Wait for a sale or buy an indie game. Your money will go a lot further.

Optimal Game Price vs Length is a three part series in which I explain how I compare a game’s cost with its length. In the last article, I wrote how to do this with a full game purchase ($50 or $60 for mainstream games). In the next part, I explain how I do this with free to play games.

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Optimal Game Price vs. Length Part 1: Full Games

I wrote about Cost vs. Length (price is a better word) in The Gaming Trinity but did not go into detail about what I think is optimal. A game that offers more length for the same price as another game is usually better, but I follow a more concrete rule of thumb. It is very simple: Price (in dollars) = Length (in hours). That is, a$60 game should have about 60 hours of gameplay. I include all gameplay in this: single player, replay value, and multiplayer. However, I also look at the type of gameplay. Some types of gameplay I just do not get into much and cannot count on any gameplay  hours from them. Here are just a few recent examples:

Modern Warfare 3 – I have never gotten into first-person shooter (FPS) competitive multiplayer, so I only look at the single player and co-op length. The single player campaign and spec ops is about 20 hours long. If we add in getting all the achievements, it is maybe 30-40 hours. That is not worth $60. However, someone who gets into the competitive multiplayer would definitely get their money’s worth.

Portal 2 – The single player + co-op is about 20 hours in total. Getting all the achievements increases that to 30 hours. Not worth $50. With the free DLC I think it would be worth $50, but by then the price had already gone down to $30.

Skyrim – The content is overwhelming with over a hundred hours of gameplay to do all quests and explore every map location, and that is just with one character. There are at least three unique “classes” you can play: the three role-playing game (RPG) archetypes of Fighter, Thief, and Mage. The main quest would probably only take 20 hours just going straight through it, so this game is only worth it if you like to explore a lot.

Dragon Age: Origins – Similar to Skyrim it has the three archetypes of Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. A single playthrough takes about 50 hours to do everything, so it is already worth the $50. Playing through again with a new class and choosing different dialogue choices makes it even better value. Not as long as Skyrim but still well worth the money, and these days it is available for $20-30.

Starcraft 2 – The single player campaign takes about 30 hours to complete with all achievements. Multiplayer is offered in three types: competitive, cooperative, and custom maps. Competitive and cooperative use the same basic game rules, just one is against human players and the other against computer players. Custom maps are opened ended with the rules whatever the map creator wants. I only got into cooperative and custom maps, but easily pushed my hours played to 100 hours. Worth the money, but only because I did some multiplayer.

Civilization 5 – There is a multiplayer mode, but it is buggy and not very popular, so I cannot count it. The single player is open-ended due to a lot of randomness of the terrain and your possible opponents. There are also advanced settings you can change to tweak the game rules. The standard game speed takes about 4 hours to complete, but you are encouraged to play multiple games to get better as well as try out all the various settings and different civilizations. You need 13 playthroughs to equal the $50 price, which I easily passed while trying out everything the game offered

Star Wars: The Old Republic – You have to pay $60 in advance plus a $15 monthly fee. The game definitely has 60 hours of gameplay even getting just one character to the level cap. However, we have to worry about that monthly fee. Putting 60 hours in the first month is too much for many players (average 2 hours per day), but if you play for enough months you can get your money’s worth.

Assuming a year of playing, you pay $60 + 11 * $15 for a total of $225 for the first year. If we split that number up over 12 months, you had to pay about $19 per month. So in the long run you only need to spend about 19 hours per month on the game. That is easy enough for most players. The fewer months you play, the more you have to play per month, though. Only two months you pay $75 requiring 38 hours of play per month. This is why I generally wait to play MMORPGs until the upfront retail price is down to $30 or $40.

Remember that this is all subjective. These are my opinions. I think an hour of gameplay per dollar spent is worth it. Others may think they should get 2 hours per dollar. It is up to everyone to decide their own preferences on this. Now, usually I do not break it down like I have here. I usually just think in my head. I read about how long a game is, the replay value, the price. Then I decide whether it passes this Price vs. Length test. If it does, I can buy the game right away. Otherwise, I wait until the price goes down or free patches add content (length) to the game.

Optimal Game Price vs. Length is a three part series in which I explain how I compare a game’s cost with its length. In the next part, I discuss how I do this with DLC.

An Investment for the Future

One of things I see a lot when a new game is released are bugs and promised features missing. Usually there is a small crowd of players that defend everything about the game in this fashion:

Your purchase is just an investment for the future. Once the devs get a few patches out, the game will be good. Even if they don’t, the mod community will fix everything. Just be patient.

This always bugs me. When you pay full price for a game on launch day, it should be relatively bug free with all the promised features. I am willing to give the developer a few weeks or even a month to release patches, but they cannot expect anyone to wait around for months to get the game they paid for. If a game needs work, it should not be released. I realize that not all bugs can be fixed and deadlines may creep up, but that does not excuse a very buggy or even broken game.

They are charging us everything upfront; the game should be ready to go. Now if they are making the game into an actual service, then the pricing should be changed appropriately. Split that $60 over a whole year with players paying $5 per month. If players stop halfway, they lose access to the game. If they stick around for the full year, they finally own the full game and do not have to worry about losing it.

This would at least hold developers accountable. You do not get your full pay unless your game is complete. Unfortunately, this will never happen unless there was a consumer protection law or industry organization demanding it. Disposable income for entertainment is just that: disposable. It does not matter in the grand scheme of things if people make a bad purchase on a game.

Still, we should be able to expect a certain amount of quality from new games. That means realizing that most games are not investments but single products. Sure, there are MMOs and free to play games with patching for many years, but those developers are upfront that it is a service. Most games are single products, though. You pay one time and play as much as you want.

• Fact: You paid full price for the game.
• Fact: The game should be complete.
• Fact: No one should be defending these developers.

Of course there are exceptions if you buy the game after launch. You cannot demand much if you only paid half price. Likewise, you cannot demand much if you are buying the game many years after release. A quick Google search will tell you all about a game’s possible lasting bugs or missing features. It is only a problem at release when developers (PR and marketing mostly) do not give the complete picture to the public.

The Gaming Trinity

In Designing Games to be Replaced, I wrote about my idea that all games boil down to the same basic parts. These are the Artistic aspect, the Technical aspect, and the Consumerism aspect. Since I like to give names to these sorts of things, I call this the Gaming Trinity. The best games are the ones that excel in all three aspects.

If you look at a game just by itself, it is really only made up of the Technical and Artistic parts. As the game industry grows I feel there is an increasing need to look at the Consumerism part. Anyone who buys games is a consumer of games, and you should always be watching out for yourself. You do not want to get ripped off with buggy, unfinished or short games.

Note: This list is just what I thought of over a few week’s time. I may think of other important factors and add them to the list over time.

The Artistic Aspect

This is the real creative part of the game. Games would have no soul without this. They would be all the same, and we would have long become bored of them. Note that the art style of a game does not have to be realistic. The value of art is in the eye of the beholder. Art can be very realistic, but it can also be very simple like a few colored blobs. Everyone has their own opinion on what art is good and what is not. The art can be just as good either way. For game art, we have to look at the overall style of the game and whether the various objects in the game fit into that style well. Everything else is subjective and up to each person to decide.

Game Design – This might not seem like art, but it really is. Companies hire artists called Game Designers to come up with the whole vision for the game. The biggest task is designing the core gameplay. Every game has core gameplay, which is what the player spends the most time doing in the game. The fun of a game is all based on this core gameplay. The rules have to be simple, yet complex; familiar, yet fresh. Players want to be challenged to get better, but not too much that they get frustrated. This may be the most important part of the game.