Video game costs have become an increasingly common topic of conversation, with publishers always chasing the happiness of their shareholders we’ve seen ever more egregious profit increasing strategies. Expansions turned into smaller DLCs which turned into lootboxes which got supplemented by battle passes and when the additional monetisation ways became insufficient, the price of new games was simply racked up to 70€ from 60, and when that wasn’t enough, ownership of games could be relinquished for the low price of 10 to 20€ a month for Microsoft’s Game Pass.

Adding to this the explosion of the indie scene saturating the market, the early access model being omnipresent, and many 1.0 releases being bugged to no end, the decision of whether to buy a game has become a lot more complicated than it used to be. However, even if you figure out which games are broken, which games are held down by predatory microtransactions, and which games reached a stage of development where you’ll be happy with the content offered, there is still the issue of pricing.

The AAA industry has its own standard of 70€ now but when looking at indie games or games launching as multiplayer exclusives, the needle moves around quite a bit. Multiplayer only games come with the expectation of additional monetisation nowadays and so their price tends to hover between 20 and 45€ when they’re not free-to-play but these games aren’t necessarily the subject here. The question of price and value becomes a lot more interesting when we look at single-player experiences.

For 30€ you could pick up Factorio an automation game you’ll easily spend at least 40 hours to complete one playthrough but assuming the game clicks for you, you’ll be spending hundreds of hours trying alternative builds and mods. For 30€ also you could pick up Amnesia Rebirth, an at a stretch 11 hour narrative focused horror experience which you’re unlikely to even replay due to its linear nature. Looking purely at the numbers Factorio would easily seem like the better value offering in terms of money spent per minute of gameplay and its a point many critics on Steam or Reddit love to embrace.

In a void “Wait for sale” is not a stupid point to make, after all, there is no reason to pay full price for something you don’t immediately need nor want if you’ve got the patience to wait for a cheaper price. It’s the same reason someone might look for a second hand phone, if your needs don’t require the latest Samsung Galaxy then you’d be remiss to not buy the Samsung Galaxy of last year second hand for half off. The problem is that people perceive the value of games quite weirdly, shorter games are often plagued by “wait for sale” reviews as in the eyes of many gamers 20 to 30€ for a 2 to 5 hour gameplay experience is vastly overpriced. I mean come on, you could get Factorio for the same price and enjoy hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Therein lies my first issue with the “wait for sale” comment, 20 to 30€ is not an egregious amount of money, the average person and, let’s be honest, average gamer especially will pay that amount for pizza delivery that will last them less than a full evening without even thinking about it. However, when it comes to the game they’ll play whilst eating that pizza they’re suddenly calculating exactly how many cents per second they are spending on it. Obviously, this criticism doesn’t apply when it comes to large publisher games, when a game comes out for 70€ and the players are expected to buy the DLC, the lootboxes and subscribe to the monthly battle pass, waiting for a sale is the obvious smart budgetary decision to make but these are not the types of games you see the “wait for sale” comment on and instead you’ll find it on indie games whose developers rely on the game selling for their salary instead of some large publisher footing the bill. The “wait for sale” comment is not only disingenuous when compared to day to day spending, it also usually is directed at people who do deserve the full price of the game they made.

This is however the lesser problem of the “wait for sale” movement, the introduction of the Game Pass subscription by Microsoft has morphed the nature of the game value conversation in a more questionable way as now I see all too often “it’s not great but if you have Game Pass it’s ok”. This approach determines the value and often quality of a game to be too low to be worth purchasing but since it’s part of the Game Pass they’re already subscribed to, they don’t mind playing it “for free”. Whilst I think it is disingenuous to refuse to buy a game because it’s too short for the price it demands (even at 30€, a 2 hour game is still no more expensive than going to the movies or the equivalent to 3 Starbucks coffees), I can at least see the argument from a purely “get the most bang for buck” viewpoint. I am however flabbergasted by this logic being applied to game quality as the argument seems to ignore the value of our own currency: time.

Value of one’s time is obviously subjective, I know I had a lot of free time as a child and was quite happy to sit through any mediocre games I could get access to, but I also didn’t have the money for a subscription as a kid so Game Pass is squarely targetted at a more adult audience. Adults however have a limited amount of free time and that amount they’ll want to spend doing something they enjoy. This makes me question this critique of “it’s not great but if you have Game Pass it’s ok” because it clearly implies that the game isn’t good enough to pay for it. In a world where video games are finite this could still make sense, if there’s nothing else available on the market then you must be happy with what you have but with the over-saturation of every genre by the indie scene, why bother wasting your precious time on a game that isn’t even good enough to purchase when you could go buy something that actually is worth it or just play any other games of the already over-saturated Game Pass offering. There’s simply too many games to play these “wait for sale” or “it’s not great but if you have Game Pass it’s ok”, if it’s not worth the money then it’s not worth your time.