Y’know, all this cross blogging stuff that a load of fellow developers did yesterday got me thinking. What do I look for in a game when I’m weighing up the cost?

Sadly, the soul searching didn’t take too long. “Have I got enough money in the bank right now to afford it?” is more often than not what it all boils down to.

I live on a stupidly tight budget, when I purchase a game, I’m often having to sacrifice getting something else in order to buy that game. I value my time greatly. I don’t have much spare time, I have to.

Yet not once have I sat there and looked at the length of the game and thought “hmm, that’s a bit short for that amount of money”. I might think that I don’t want the game that much right now, I might raise an eyebrow or two if the price is far out of my price range, I might think that perhaps it isn’t my kind of game or no matter how intrigued I am by it, not entirely convinced I’ll enjoy what it has to offer and so will wait for a special offer but never, not once, have I thought about length vs the price of the game.

I simply don’t care. I buy things to entertain myself with, I don’t have a barometer on how long they have to entertain me for. They just have to entertain me in some way. Maybe I’m the careless sort, anyone who knew me in my teens would no doubt agree with that. I’ve never been very good at holding onto money for long. Not when there’s things I can buy that will amuse me. Or food. I kinda like to be able to eat, it’s the sort of thing that comes in handy. Or in my formative non being a parent years, vast quantities of fine Scotch and JD.

Despite all that, I’m kinda glad I didn’t get asked to be roped into the games are long/short/tall/medium/XXL debate and blog about it. Because, really, if someone wants to value a game on an entirely different metric to me, I’m cool with that.

On a forum I read pretty regular there’s a chap who constantly interrupts the discussions on games with his hours to price metric inanity. It’s only three hours, that’s a rental. It’s annoying. It’s not annoying because he values games in a different way to me, it’s annoying because he interrupts discussions to declare this as if anyone gives a toss.

He’s also one guy. One guy out of a forum full of people who don’t value things by length and price.

I might want him to shut up in no uncertain terms occasionally but I’ve little desire to change the way he lives his life. I could argue that maybe, just maybe, he’s missing out on some of the enjoyment I get from the way I value games but that’d be projecting. I’m not comfortable with that.

If he wants to weight purchases according to the amount of hours he can plunge into them, that’s his call. If anyone wants to weight their purchases that way, it’s their call.

I’m not cool with dishonesty or disingenuous arguments.

VVVVVV-gate made me incredibly uncomfortable reading some of the comments. I said around the time that if someone doesn’t want to pay $15 for something then that’s cool. It was the attempts at moral blackmail and browbeating that ground me down there. When something becomes so nasty and personal as did many of the comments surrounding VVVVVV, then yeah, I’ll wear my frowny head over it.

That’s an entirely different kettle of fish.

The price tag thing became a weapon, something to be deployed to use against Terry and any other developers who dared to write something people might want but charge for it also. For every genuine person who, like the chap I mentioned earlier, genuinely weighted hours of entertainment to price tag, there were six who’d utter “it’s a flash game, flash games should be free” as if their logic was irrefutable fact.

That’s just bollocks and all manner of icky control stuff.

But it’s bollocks that shouldn’t be confused with the length debate. Angry internet man will always be angry. People who indulge in a time per quid fetish aren’t angry people. They’re not really bad people either. They just don’t think like me. Obviously, there’s going to be some overlap, not everyone is a nice person, that’s bloody humans for you though. Always being pesky and awkward.

Maybe there is a harmful knock on effect from their ramblings, perhaps they’re the reason why we get so much padding in games. Got to make up the hours quota, George. No-one will buy it if it’s less than 36 hours play, George. Yet who’s to blame for catering to them?

Perhaps this goes deeper. Perhaps the games industry, over time, helped create that mindset. Not just with their bigger, better, harder, faster, more attitude but also by selling shit at obscene prices.

Perhaps we as indies are paying the price for our predecessors sins and the years of insane prices, the years of treating customers like criminals to protect the bottom line, the years of hype over substance.

Or maybe this whole argument is lending a louder voice to a minority than they actually have. Maybe there’s just 1 in largeamountofpeople who do this game/money malarkey but because it doesn’t fit with the way we view the world, they stick out more. Or maybe it’s internet-posting-syndrome and like certain comment sections I could mention, it’s the same people shouting over and over again making their voices drown out the others until it’s all we see.

I don’t know. I do know that changing the world is never quite as simple as writing a blog post or suggesting your simplez idea is the solution to the problem you see and that people should go off and follow its advice right this very moment.

So, I don’t really have a solution. But then, I’m not entirely convinced there’s a problem either.