• tal@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”

    I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.

    But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.

    You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.

    If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        Hmm. That’s a thought. I guess that that’d mesh with them also all being multiplayer.

          • tal@lemmy.today
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            1 day ago

            It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it’s very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.

            • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!

                • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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                  22 hours ago

                  NetHack takes me waaaay back. Blows my mind DevTeam are still working on it. I haven’t played in a few years. NetHack, Angband, C:DDA, etc are all games I play on long haul flights since they use the least battery and I’ve not been on a long haul since the pandemic.

                  • tal@lemmy.today
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                    21 hours ago

                    Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.

                    NetHack and Angband don’t do that.

              • tal@lemmy.today
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                1 day ago

                Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I’d say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is…kinda nuts. It’s not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is “go check the code”…

                There are also some military sims I’ve played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren’t, they’re probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don’t bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.

    • GoumLeChat@jlai.lu
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      1 day ago

      I’m old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.

      But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.

      • logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        24 hours ago

        3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

        • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
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          10 hours ago

          Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)

          • logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 hours ago

            CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had “early access” packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.

            • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
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              3 hours ago

              Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p

    • tetrachromacy@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It’s rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that’s 9 cents an hour, and I’m still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!