This was called “director’s cut”, “extended edition”, “after dark cut”, etc in the days of television.
That’s not value, that’s a “cost per sale” which is used to retrospectively analyze products or to analyze sales of periods of consistent tangibles. It doesn’t work with an upcoming product because despite what people with marketing degrees tell you - nobody knows how much a thing will sell until it goes on sale.
Furthermore with intangibles like video game licenses, its a reverse system. A game with a high cost-per-unit-sold is a failure and a game with a tiny cost-per-unit-sold is a runaway success (like say, Fall Guys or Angry Birds).
Referring to it as “true value” is like referring to urine as a “true beverage” because it has already been drank and completed the process without being regurgitated.
There are a wide range of systems that companies are employing as each is trying to find a model they are comfortable with, works for their particular type of game and does not get the attention of YouTubers who make their living off screaming that everyone else is not contributing value.
That is literally how mass marketing works across all industries and mediums. People find value in your product, they covet your product, they offer you money for the product because they perceive it has value.
I have read this five times and it makes less sense every time.
There is no “single skin” on sale for 33% of a the price of a AAA game.
There is a series of DLC including a skin, custom items, unique escalations, etc available for 33% of the price of an indie game each - or there is a pack of 7 of them available.
Hyperbole nonsense does nothing but confuse what you think the basis of what you’re saying is.
The burger comparison is also nonsense and doesn’t fit with anything. The situation is much more akin to a movie theatre. See initially movie theatres used to make all their money off ticket sales, people would come in and watch the news reels, movies, etc and the theatre would make quite a bit of money.
As movies got to be a bigger business, they became more expensive to make and major studios started to get control over the really good, high quality ones people would really come to see - so they would charge more. At the same time, movie theatres found that people who went to see the movies would buy things at convenience prices like they would in clubs. Cigarettes, candies, matches, etc.
Now currently movie theatres themselves make almost no money on the screening of movies - the margins are so tight and audiences fluctuate so much per movie they can’t reliably make enough money to justify it as a venture off tickets. So what started as a side hussle is now a critical part of their revenue, they live and die by people buying snacks, stupid novelty cups, etc and by companies paying to put their stupid promotions in the front hall, or have their ad show before the movie.
Likewise, it used to be pretty easy to make money off a high end game. But as standards of hardware kept going up, expectations of quality did too but prices people were willing to pay for a game plateaued and - as a few key studios made it big, competition increased fiercely. Now its almost impossible to release a AAA game and make a profit off regular sales - you need a monster marketing budget (Cyberpunk 2077 spent more on marketing than IO Interactive spent on any game including development and marketing), sponsorship (whether its to be a loss leader on a console, or to promote VR, or to have exclusive content on that console) and/or you need to post-sale purchases.
The latter is the one lots of people are struggling with since sadly, we live in a world where its popular to throw shit at people who are popular, and various platforms like YouTube have essentially rewarded people for screaming nonsense about how everyone is bad - including game developers who are just trying to make a living.
The approach IO Interactive is using is very straight forward and fits standard commerce ethics very well. They are offering to sell people who already bought the game some additional content, they are showing people what the content is and are asking a price.
Juxtapose that with:
- Blizzard, who for the same price will give you three tiny chances to potentially unlock the content that you want or earn in game currency toward buying that item. A process which is increasingly being seen as a form of unlicensed gambling. Particularly they often do limited availability runs so people get worn down trying to grind out the items then spending big due to sunk cost fallacy.
- Epic Games, who will offer you the opportunity to earn the item in a challenge (which probably requires you to pay a subscription) or buy it but only at particular times (thus creating the pressure to buy) and built their whole game to create FOMO.
- Bethesda who will sell you lootbox items that only work in a single instance of your game, at 60% of the rates of those in games where you get permanent benefits across all instances - oh they also sell mods where you pay like the same price for a skin that has… no basis in anything.
- Mortal Kombat having content you could “unlock” but that they wanted you to get frustrated grinding for and pay for instead.
- Electronic Arts who have gone for the full sampler pack and incorporated every shady process into just about every one of their products
- CowClicker, which was supposed to be a parody game making fun of those “but tokens” Facebook games but actually had people start spending money on premium cows etc.
It hence fundamentally absurd to:
- Claim there is a singular model or system
- Claim that offering to sell DLC to people who are interested in it at a price that offers far higher value than the standard AAA rate is part of this exploitative “system”
Doing some just dilutes the conversation around genuinely deceptive or manipulative practices listed above and lumping them all together both advantages dishonest publishers (since people never develop the tools or vocabulary to understand how they’re being preyed upon) and honest publishers (who get attacked because they’re more accessible and easier to impact than a mega corporation like Blizzard).
Well let’s see… there’s seven items, each would be $7 NZ to buy separately… 7 x 7 is… $49
So yes, you are getting the standard 10% discount for buying in bulk and yes New Zealand is still getting screwed on currency exchanges.
Also if I try to buy 7 McDonald’s double cheeseburgers on Ubereats it comes to roughly the same price before delivery… and also if I try to buy 7 legham sandwiches from Subway via Ubereats it would come to $52.50 before delivery.
It turns out buying 7 of something usually multiplies the price by 7 and that can make small cost items seem more substantial in cost. It can also apply with other numbers, for example, four times ten.
Plus I mean, it’s still pretty good value if compared to DLC heavy products…
Or even DLC light type games to be honest, Control’s two pieces of DLC come to $30 NZ or $23 NZ for the season pass.
Red Dead Online is $33 dollars and then it wants you to spend money in game to unlock stuff while you get hacked because they never put decent protocols up in place (I got mine on sale, but clearly its apparently worth it to enough people to keep this price up)
HITMAN (2016) has a suit, a duck and a gun for sale at $6.50 NZ… so roughly the price of GREED if you buy it in the pack.
And if you want the three “Game of the Year” outfits thats… counts on fingers roughly the same price.
And if you bought all the DLC on Metal Gear V: The Phantom Pain (which includes coins to buy the stuff in game that you have to use the in game multiplayer currency for) that comes to roughly $40 NZ too.
I’m starting to think these prices are actually pretty normal and its just a matter of personal preference as to if you find suitable value in it. It seems that creating games might involve a lot of time and expense, so even minor things sold to small audiences need to have some substance to their pricing.