you invented a new word
By ‘playthrough’ time. Which means completion of core content without severe repetition happening.
Mind you… this is of importance for live-service games, not so much for SP-games as the value decisions there are significantly different and allows a vastly higher weighting towards stylistic presentation, story and so on.
The prime aspect for any live-service game is mechanical. Sure, Story helps, visuals help… but any concept which relies on keeping the lights on for ongoing costs needs to entice people to play long times… and that’s done through mechanics. A prime option for ARPGs as they’re highly mechanical games, much like MMORPGs are.
I stated regularly how ‘long’ the perceived playtime for a ‘one through’ is in the respective games of the genre. We can say Aberroth as the end-line for LE, for PoE 1 it’s Maven, she’s distinctly positioned like that after all. And for TL:I it’s obviously the boss - which name I forgot - after getting to the top of the end-game system, which happens relatively quickly.
So, in LE we can - at best - say that the play-time is 60 hours, and that’s taking it far already.
In PoE 1 it’s around 200 hours.
In TL:I it’s around 100 hours.
You see the issue here?
We got 2 games which are essentially ‘F2P’ competing with a shelf-price game. Sure, in PoE 1 we’ll need a supporter pack to have a comfortable time, right? So not really F2P. TL:I though is for that progression entirely.
Now we got 3 extremely similar games competing with each other, one offers 200 hours gameplay time for essentially 30€, then we got one which is free and offers half of that for nothing. And then we got one which demands paying 30€ up-front and offers nigh a quarter of the top-end of the line here content-wise.
Obviously the ‘value’ is out of whack.
And there the ‘short’ versus ‘long’ thing is happening, that’s the metric of value primarily… with the others following secondarily. Your game can be top-tier and not cut it if competitors offers better value for your time simply.
First? Nah, not really.
Second… obviously? I have ownership of my license, don’t I? 
I’m a customer. Dunno where you’re from but in my place this in itself gives me a reason to voice out my opinions.
I did not 
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But that’s not quite the same as arguing about it & telling other people that they’re wrong.
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“Playstation” is how, millions of potential new sales + expansion would net at least $50-$60 per sale, not including any MTX purchases.
Voicing an opinion commonly comes with someone arguing about it, which is fair play, absolutely so. If there’s a right or wrong is depending on the situation, but personal opinion is shaped from personal experiences and knowledge.
And yes, some things are easy to say ‘you’re wrong’. Like for example ‘EHG has fulfilled everything they promised’ which would be simply wrong, false statement. Same is ‘you have no right to do anything related to EHG’s plan’, which would also be wrong, legally in this case for example. If it’s acknowledged legally in the end is another topic.
So yes, if you voice a opinion you’ve also got to be ready to be told ‘you’re wrong’. Why? Because some statements simply are.
That’s just your opinion. I see it differently.
Even 60 hours wouldn’t be a short game in my book (that’s 20 hours or less with no real replayability).
But for me, replayability factors in. And different characters or skills that offer a different experience is novel mechanical content.
If the average player (who liked the game enough to even bother playing more than 10 hours, that is) plays more than those 60 hours, then that’s the reality we need to measure the game against. Replayability turns a ‘short’ game quickly into a long game.
And who beats Aberroth in 60 hours, or Maeven in 200, on their own merits? Reading walkthroughs to solve puzzle games is not playing the game 
People cheat themselves out of the real experience the game has to offer - learning how it works and solving the puzzle of how to beat it.
At least in my friend list on steam, LE has a retention of at least 156 hours - PoE has some people dropping out after 15 to 25 hours in that same friend list, though it tops out at a much higher play time. Not difficult, if we consider the life-span of the game.
The average perceived value of LE seems higher.
And TL:I? Not a single person on my friend list has touched this game. That’s zero perceived value in an AARPG (and rogue-like) affine friend list.
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Yeah, in a SP game I’m fully on your side with it, absolutely so! Heck… a good game can be 5 hours as well, if the price isn’t high.
But as mentioned, live-service game. And a live-service game can only survive if players invest substantial and usually unhealthy amounts of time into them. The servers and workers simply are too expensive to pay for otherwise.
So if you don’t provide a incentive to engage those unreasonable amounts of time into the product it fails, inherently.
Doesn’t matter. They got a playerbase, it’s around 20k big commonly. They don’t go beyond their means in infrastructure and employee count. Successful game hence.
Comparatively EHG went beyond their means. Hence a failure.
I dunno about that. Perhaps expanding to PS might delay the inevitable but LE is still LE at the end of the day - and I’d have no reason to think that the retention on platform X is going to be any different to the retention on platform Y. Only now they have to pay for platform X and whatever platform Y is charging for the privilege, too.
As for expansions, these work when the customers are hungry for them (or you have a mega IP like Diablo once had). Are they? Actually? If a significant portion of the playerbase wrote the entire product off as sub-par a year ago, it’s a hard sell to make them even care that there is an xpac. Lets face it, the 260k didn’t come back for the seasons in the past 18 months, it’s borderline wishful thinking that they will come back when they’d have to pay.
Given how bland the S3 mechanic was, from my armchair, I’d expect the currently dropping retention trend to continue into S4. This doesn’t even take into account the resistance they may face as a result of the whole “AI” thing - although that might be a minor consideration in the grand scheme of things because many customers won’t know/care about this.
There are too many unknowns to validate, but it seems that Krafton over-valued LE by some way, and the clock is ticking because how can they tolerate a hemorrhaging asset (why would EHG have sold were this not the case) forever? If the permanent playerbase is a few thousand (per platform), the numbers simply do not feel like they can possibly add up.
The point I discuss is value for the customer from the game itself.
And I don’t care about the genre, whether online or offline etc.
Only fun and time compared to the price paid. And 60 hours for a €35 game is already good value. At more than 1k hours, it’s great value.
LE can’t be that much of a commercial failure if Krafton was willing to buy EHG for almost $100 million. Struggling, maybe, but not a complete mess. If it were, Krafton would have gotten EHG cheaper.
And they have impressed me over and over with their actions, which is why it’s my favorite ARPG and I’ve supported them as well. Your impression of an action being negative is just your opinion. It is presumptuous of you to assume you speak for the majority’s opinion of EHG, they don’t have the negative reputation that you say they do.
Disney is fantastic and is the only streaming service I never turn off. I’m actually surprised Steam still exists as a platform considering how absolutely awful the experience was for the first few years. There’s a reason LE is one of my highest hours played on Steam despite me being a member since the beginning. Don’t make the mistake of thinking echo chambers online will tell you how the majority actually feel about any given company. Afterall, a convicted felon got elected to run the most powerful country on Earth.
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Well, what value has a product a customer buys for a specific reason if that reason stops existing?
In the case of a live-service game it’s the community-based aspect. If that fails then the value leans close to zero.
Given that this is the end-point for overstretching their means it’s kinda a value reducing aspect.
As for the direct value… this is also decided upon buying a product. If you buy a SP game you expect the systems related to a SP game, mostly singular playthrough, maybe ability for extra ones. A high focus on personal experience of the game which doesn’t hinder you heavily, grind likely being in at most the ‘middling’ area overall seen.
Comparatively if you go in a MMO-style game… or any other live-service you’ll expect it to be long-term. Hence large amounts of grinding, much to finish, likely by being small regular steps where some are easy to fulfill and just busywork while others will be distinct hefty challenges to overcome. Be it faction grinds like in WoW, jumping puzzles like in GW2 or long-term crafting tasks to achieve results like in PoE.
If that’s not provided in relation to the market position and hence expectation of a player the value definitely is less as well. With a SP game you pay for the ‘experience’ of it. Be it a stylistic approach which gives a ‘wow’ moment… a story which is thrilling, creative options to personalize either your character or the world… whatever might be the case. In a MMO comparatively you pay for the longevity of the grind, always has been the case, never changed. No fulfilling grinding experience and the value is low.
Krafton also was willing to offer a 250 mil bonus to the Subnautica 2 devs and we see how well they manage their acquisitions there. They were also willing to screw over their Pubg community with their wrongfully stated acquisition rates for skins.
Nobody said it’s a good decision, and just because they were lucky enough to stumble over success (because that’s what they did, one of the first battle royal creators) doesn’t mean they have any sort of system down to keep having success.
Which led them into becoming bancrupt. That’s indeed impressive with the playercount.
Disney is like Nestle, a disgusting piece of… you get the gist.
No competition. Trailblazers. They had the time to optimize. That’s why despite the early issues they didn’t fail.
In any sector if a company follows up after the trailblazers they got to have their methods down to the dot. No company has that to date. The only competition for Steam is GoG because of ownership over your payments permanently as it provides a offline version for every game. All others provided nothing new and only made a sub-par experience.
What value has a car that breaks down beyond repair after 300,000 km? Not much.
But what value got I out of it? Every km along the way.
You can’t play a game (while having fun with it) for 100+ hours and claim you got no value out of it.
Oh, ‘no value’ would be too extreme. But ‘very little value’ is another one.
If the premise for example is to play and get to a specific skill level for a full playthrough upon release then it’s absolutely a vastly reduced amount of value.
Also as was mentioned before, playtime doesn’t directly correlate with value itself. But it’s a important metric to have expected timeframe for a full playthrough to be included in your planning.
A good example could be Black Desert Online. For example you have a quite grand mechanic in the related to producing items via a node-network you need to unlock and improve, gradually becoming more varied and bigger as you explore the world. If you put in 50 hours of playtime into that only to find out ‘well… that stuff is providing per day what I can get with a single 5 second mob’ after investing that time and your goal was to have a feeling of success… then you’re out of luck.
Were those 50 hours ‘valuable’ then?
Same with a book. A bad ending can ruin the entire story completely. It might be great until the half-way mark and you’re enthralled… but a unfinished book leaves you unhappy with the state as you want to know how to concludes… and a bad ending which is simply awfully done has the same value and devalues for the content before as it’s hinging on the ending as well.
The same goes for a game. No matter the reason, any playtime which provides you with perceived value after a timeframe (whatever the goal is) and the goal doesn’t happen is a loss in value for the customer. Some cannot be avoided (wrong expectations despite proper positioning and advertising) but others absolutely can.
The majority of people playing live service games don’t care about the community based aspect. They play it just like a single player game. Which is easily seen by the fact that when LE offered an offline client, lots of people used that. And that half the playerbase doesn’t even want to trade.
If PoE or D4 offered one as well, we’d likely also see a sizeable portion of the playerbase using it.
So no, most people don’t actually care about the community-based aspect of live service models. They just have to live with it because until now they weren’t given an option.
Mind you, I’m talking about ARPGs, which are inherently a SP player game that can be played in a group, not inherently MP games like CS or WoW, which are designed around MP…
Regardless, if you play a game for 1k hours you can’t say you didn’t get your value out of it.
If you play a game for 1k hours and then it updates and turns into something you dislike, you already liked it for 1k hours. Even if the current product is something which you hate, you already enjoyed it for 1k hours.
Especially when you consider that most games cost more and you play for much less.
As I said before, even in 1.0, EHG could go belly up and shut down the servers and I would still keep playing LE for plenty of years to come, much like I still do with D2 or GD.
Mostly because I, like most people, don’t care about the community aspect and play it as a SP game.
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So only the last 5 mins/pages/etc has any value? That’s not particularly nuanced, feels a bit short sighted.
No. If you’ve enjoyed most of the game but didn’t enjoy the last small section, or didn’t get the item/whatever you wanted, that doesn’t mean the entire time you spent had no value or was a waste. You enjoyed the majority of it.
Edit: this feels like a very weird way to approach experiences in general. I was with my ex-wife for ~27 years, I wasn’t happy for the last few but I’d never deny that we had a lot of good years as well.
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Sure. Value for a game that is intended to entertain you can be considered the product of fun and time spent.
If you actually have fun and you play for many hours, then you cannot tell me that there is ‘very little value’.
That’s the metric by what I define value for an entertainment product. This isn’t a job, I don’t earn money with it. If I were a game streamer, I might probably value this differently - how much money can I squeeze out of the content the game provides.
We can talk about missed expectations etc and how they reduce the fun of a person and thus value. But as long as the fun is there, the value is there.
I’m playing that game on and off since release. Have you had actually fun during that 50 hours? Then yes, you got value. You try to argue that people didn’t have fun after the fact. Even if they feel disappointed later on, the value they got until then remains.
Same for books. Sure, a bad ending can spoil your future feelings, but it doesn’t invalidate the fun you had along the way. That’s value you actually got out of it, whether you deny it or not.
That’s recency bias and cognitive dissonance.
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You know, I think I see your point, but sometimes the end can impact the overall experience.
For example, something like Lost (the TV series): I have never seen it, but I have read that many episodes were great, yet the ending was so disappointing that it soured people to what had come before.
Or a book that’s written as a good mystery, but the last third is so nonsensical that it makes the beginning and middle not as enjoyable.
I think we take a bit of pleasure from the expectations we carry, and when those expectations are not met, the disappointment makes the memory of the previous experiences something not as good as they had actually been.
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Oh absolutely, but I think it’d probably be pretty rare that the last small section of a game/etc is so bad that it renders the entire X hundred/thousand/whatever hours bad. I was thinking about that but didn’t want to edit my pst again.
True, and I would agree with that, but Kulze was saying that if the ending wasn’t good then none of it was & there’s a big difference between what you’re saying & what he’s saying.
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That doesn’t change the fact that the people had many evenings when they had fun watching the show.
Someone’s present feelings don’t change how they felt when initially watching the good episodes - they lie to themselves if they say that had no value.
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