Hopefully this was sarcastic as no one paid that much. I did buy the full DLC at launch for the 30 bucks it was offered for and didn’t regret that at all. I enjoyed the DLC quite a bit. I don’t mind “reskins” as much as most it seems.
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Escalations have been free addition excluding a part of a package, up until 7DS.
From £0 to £30 is technically infinity but 1p to £30 is like 299900%.
7 of them (if we valued them at 1p each). Would be like 42000% increase? (Correct me if wrong)
Peoples opinion on the content is all subjective. To me, don’t think a 30,000 - 42,000 percent increase on the value is worth it IMO for the content delivered.
I am interested on how many people did pay this though.
Patient Zero had them, H3 deluxe pack had them.
You probably mean one of these as “part of a package”, but by just excluding the examples you are wrong at make the statement not much better. It actually becomes more obvious that it only works this way.
It is technically undefined.
Why should we value escalations with 1p? There are things in the game that don’t come with a separate price tag. I love contract mode. But contract mode was never sold separately. Should I value it with 0€ now? No, I value it with 95% of the money I spent on H3 because that is the relative amount of total hours I spent in that mode.
You exclude examples where you are wrong and make up numbers so your math game makes sense to you. And on top of that you claim this is more objective than the people’s opinion on the content. 
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The point is that Escalations haven’t even been the “Meat” of the product but complimentary to a set of content which I would say are a lot bigger than escalations. Always had included a set of content in addition. 7DS is the first time escalations are sold on the basis of itself rather than in addition or “a part of a package”.
I have never been asked to pay for escalations solely prior to 7DS.
Because before that, escalation were given free as events or roadmaps for the past 5 years. And that is the closest to free I can put? A percentage of zero is well zero and and percentage increase from zero is infinite. The only way to create a viable percentage is to draw to the closest number, being 1p.
The Contracts mode is part of the initial cost of the game at launch.
Where? Do the math yourself if you don’t I haven’t calculated it correctly.
The fact is like I said months ago. For an extra tenner, all things balanced, I could have been given 2 brand new maps, 2 sniper maps and a few reskinned maps at the cost of 5 escalations in current environments.
So the question is
Would you pay £10 more to get:
- 2 new maps, 2 Sniper maps, 4 reskinned maps, and lose 5 escalations.
You’re making the mistake of seeing all escalations as equivalent and then saying that since we got free escalations in the past, all escalations are therefore worth nothing.
This has been discussed at great length on this forum already.
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That is correct, my stance is that these from what I’ve watched look like freebies although I obviously haven’t played them. IO deemed them free, so I shall too. Could you eloborate in core differences between the free escalations and 7DS on why they are a lot more.
And why they are only £10 cheaper to the efforts of creating 2 brand new maps.
The escalations from Hitman and Hitman 2 were largely on the order of “do this thing, then do it again, then do it again”. The only difference between levels (usually) was the addition of some basic complication like “don’t get spotted” or “kill one extra guy”. Players who did the first level SASO had a pretty good chance of just being required to play the same mission 3 (or 5) times.
In the deluxe edition escalations and the 7 Deadly Sins escalations, IOI actually spent a lot more time enhancing the escalation formula with new mechanics, changes to the core maps, and other additions. The Lust escalation provided a somewhat randomized mystery mechanic with clues and changing targets. Envy introduced a rival NPC that was trying to perform the same assassinations you were. Satu Mare introduced a story-driven escalation where the endpoint of level one was the beginning of level two.
The additional items that were available were more than just reskinned items. They introduced new functionality into the game as previously mentioned. The snail, crossbow, and others were more than just different colors for the same old item.
IOI genuinely experimented with new things in these escalations that (for some players) did make them worth more than the same old “do the same thing more than once” mechanic of the originals.
You may not think they are worth anything but clearly a lot of players did.
New maps are great and a lot of players want them, but it’s disingenuous to say that just because we got two maps for Hitman 2 that anything “less” than that should be free. If anything the two maps that were provided in Hitman 2 were dramatically Underpriced for what they were, not the other way around.
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Yes. This fact does not make it bad though. It also does not mean the escalations of these packs had zero value. They are part of the money you paid for it.
So is every “free” post launch content. It is not actually free. It is paid by sales. This is why escalations are not zero value. This is why nothing is really free that comes as an addition to something you paid for. That is why your 1p example is not working too, because 0p did not make sense the first place.
If this is true…
a / b = c
…then this must be true too:
c * b = a
If you say the increase from £0 to £30 is infinite, then infinite multiplied with zero would be 30.
Does this make sense to you? To me it does not. That is why it is not infinite, it is undefined.
You mean to say escalations are worth 0. When you notice that you can’t argue with 0, then your solution should not be “okay I make it 1p”, it should be “okay maybe it makes no sense in this context”.
To point out the issue, let’s take a look at Indonesia:
Wow, look at that! I can’t divide by zero, but let’s see how many % it is compared to 1 Indonesian Rupiah:
173000%
Wow! You should be lucky you live in the UK because IO is only charging you 30000%.
So which number is correct now? Yours or mine? Why are they different? Is your math maybe not objective in the end?
I would pay a tenner for new maps. Which is why I did not buy 7DS. And I managed to do that without making up math or claim my subjective answer to this question as objective.
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Perhaps you should have done this basic research before commenting or deciding you’ve concluded what actual values are. Real basic research.
Escalations have been part of overall packages making their actual value incalculable - they haven’t been free, you can’t play them unless you guy the game and there is no rational way to assign value to particular game elements (which escalations are, since they’re unique concept in Hitman games).
In rare occurrences where it is necessary to assign a value to singular item in a complex package, people with advanced degrees in business and accounting do hours of work and come up with multiple opinions, leaving the final interpretation up to an authority.
So once again, you half-arsed attempts at pretending you can assign a meaningful value to things based on what’s convenient for your complaining are not a contribution to this thread.
Well you have no reasonable basis to think you can discover this by positing nonsense in a thread about discussing the economics of the games - the only people who are going to have the final figures are people with access to sales data at IO Interactive who are not going to release it.
That and a better question might be, what proportion of people bought this pack relative to the expense involved in making it compared to previous packs - versus what was the overall value to the studio in terms of workflow, keeping staff on, getting added value out of partially developed features etc.
So there is really no reason for you to have posted on the topic in the first place.
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@schatenjager Thank you for your detailed reply. Some of the mechanics you described were already in the game, only applied to escalations this time. Target changing being a prime example. And I’m sure people may find uses for some of the unlocks to create new and wacky paths. The bubblegum seems quite useful IMO, glad to see it finally added to the game years after its existence.
And that is totally fine, I’m not disputing people’s personal preference or own concept of value as that is widely subjective.
That was not my stance, I’m not saying anything should be necessarily free; I’m only using the basis of IO’s own value to the consumer in relation to the product we have received. By IO’s own standards, these “premium” escalations are the efforts of just a tenner less than 2 full environments. Saying the maps were under-priced is just a guess as no business would be daft enough to make a loss with a sale, with a few exceptions to huge long term investments ie. Xbox and Consoles sales. IO are not in the business of either.
These escalations cost 60% of the full game at launch. I cannot see the balance in the content received versus the price of sale. Even given 60% of Hitman 3, out classes 7DS by miles.
Yes. It is paid by sales, a part of the product from its initial sale. If the current business scheme is similar to some of the popular ones within the industry (group buying pays for free content to everyone) then yes, those escalations are of some hidden value. However for a user to gain access to them, they do not need to pay anymore on top for access to the escalations. They are added as a “free” update for all, whether or not it was funded from another income source.
The 7DS escalations are whether or not of value, paywalled. The 1p exists to resemble the lowest value of buy in wall for the consumer, since all other single escalations were free to access at 0p. Not the value of it but the cost of access as dictated by IO.
A percentage increase from zero is infinite. Not the hard number lol, so you need a number greater than 0. And the closest value to 0 (free) is 1p no?
About that…
The prices are set by IO. What is made up?
And asking the community isn’t a viable way to get an accurate answer?
IO priced them, not me. A tenner difference.
That is also a good question. Which is the discussion we all had when this was announced. “HOw many people bought into the scheme”.
Why? Back in (March?) this was announced. This is a set of at the time of writing in March, a set of loot box packs with unknown value and contents priced up at a total of £10 less than something we did know. The community guesstimated and assumed but we couldn’t really continue the topic until we knew the full contents. It’s fully out and lo and behold, it was 7 escalations and unlocks. Now we can actually make comparisons to the content versus the price. Why do you want to shut down conversation?
So basically the value and cost efforts of the work made for the Season Pass on H2 is just a tenner more than the efforts of 7DS according to IO. So the, Season pass was “underpriced” as @schatenjager believes; or the 7DS is following current trends in the industry and over pricing content.
Either way, for me the tenner would be my choice for the contents of a H2 season pass and I cannot see the value in 7DS versus the Season Pass.
Fingers crossed for the Year 2 content.
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“The community” you refer to is a percent of a percent of a percent of the people who own and play Hitman 3. So no, it is not a viable way to get an accurate answer any more than it would be to randomly top three people on the street and ask them.
For me to shut down a conversation, there would have to be one. There isn’t. Where there is is you bringing your complaining about loot boxes in other games to this forum for reasons unknown. As mentioned, you didn’t even do the basic research such as:
- What are you talking about?
- How many people will actually see/read your question about how many people bought it?
- What did they actually buy?
As covered above, by many people - that’s not how pricing works. Again, if you wanted to have a conversation you’d be picking up what people put down instead of simply repeating this nonsense that doesn’t make any sense to anyone but yourself.
Given that you have specifically gone out of your way to try to avoid seeing value in it, that is not at all surprising. You haven’t really made any discussion over, for example:
- The alternative play modes presented in the some of the DS packs
- The added value to particular maps that are already present by these escalations
- The relative added value of particular suits given their originality/potential impact for use in other levels
All you’ve discussed is you trying to reduce value down to a specific set of inventory items, which is baffling since any discussion of video games should cover how the value comes from the experience of playing them. Otherwise we’d all be “playing” PUBG and TF2 where the inventory items have real world dollar market values in actual markets.
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The base game has in most of the cases in most of all games a better playtime/buck ratio than it’s DLCs. That is normal. That is related to the estimation how many will buy a DLC vs how many buy only the base game. Arguments about that are written in this thread often enough so I am not bothering to expand it here to you again.
Thats why you decided to just ignore that it might be not a zero-valued thing? Because it did not cost you something? And every escalation pack in the future should be free because of this? Despite the income from the initial sales might be used for other things?
You keep repeating that and no, it is not. It is undefined. Look up division by zero on Wikipedia. If you don’t see why this is a division, then better don’t even bring up % to this topic anymore.
Again, if you need to fix the zero to something else to make your argument work, you have only proven it is bad in the first place.
The relevance of your 1p number game.
The cost effort is not what they charge you, it is what they think they need to charge to at least n people. It is not a tenner, it is a whole lot more. And if n is small, the price has to go up.
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I just wanted to step in and hopefully clarify a small point (@schatenjager please correct me if I’m wrong) but I’m fairly certain that what they meant by “underpriced” wasn’t that they were selling them at a loss, but rather selling them at a price below what the market would/should in theory be willing to pay for them while still making a profit on each individual sale.
Yes, that’s what I meant. There have been multiple discussions on this forum regarding the pricing of the 7DS DLC and the deluxe edition of Hitman 3 in comparison to the Gold Edition pass for Hitman 2 and the GOTY edition of Hitman (2016). The general consensus seems to be that since the GOTY and Gold editions cost x, and contained an entire campaign (Patient Zero) or two entire maps (Haven and New York), there is some equation that says that a map is worth some set amount.
When you then look at the content of the DLC for Hitman 3 and see that it’s “just” escalations, the argument then becomes “IOI is charging way too much for escalations because they charged less for an entire new map or an entire campaign”.
I can’t say what price IOI should or could have charged for the GOTY and Gold editions. I can say that they essentially created a situation where any future content is now compared to what came before. IOI may well be seeing the effort required to create content like the 7DS as equivalent to the effort required to create the New York or Haven maps. Maybe not.
The players don’t see the effort required to create content. They do see the play-ability though. Players can see that there is more content in a new map (with challenges, unlocks, starting points, etc.) compared to an escalation which is commonly seen as a one-and-done play experience. They extrapolate that to the idea that the cost of a replayable new map should be more than the cost of a nonreplayable escalation mission.
If you see the cost of a new map as being 5 or 10 bucks, then the logical conclusion should be that an escalation should be something less than that. IOI could have charged twice the amount for the new maps and players would likely have still paid.
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Here’s my two cents on the 7 Deadly Sins, to hopefully swing this thread back into an actual discussion. Adding up my total playtime I’ve probably gotten about 10 or so hours out of the sin escalations. Besides the ones I’ve played once, I’ve played Pride and Gluttony 3 times and Lust 4 times, making it my most replayed non-seasonal escalation out of the whole trilogy. Do I think it was worth the full price? Yes. I still believe the free Dartmoor Garden Show is better than any of the paid escalations, but I no longer believe the collection’s a ripoff like I thought when it was first announced.
I think Hitman 2’s DLC is much better, but that one included entirely new maps which automatically boosts it considerably in my eyes, and even if the Year 2 paid content only has one new map I’ll still probably consider it better than the 7 Deadly Sins. Regardless, I got much more playtime and enjoyment out of the 7DS than I got out of the Deluxe Pack, where The Satu Mare Delirium was the only one I liked. To me that is the real worst DLC in Hitman and the only one I’d actually consider bad.
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I don’t even think its fair to say they did that - consistently the people claiming the package is overpriced or the beginning of the end (which I have been hearing about since the Hitman 2: Silent Assassin announcement) have been pointing other games. “IO Interactive isn’t doing this, but they will be soon!”
Add to that there’s a lot more pushback which is supposed to be directed at megastudios like Blizzard Activision and Rockstar over their use of exploitative microtransaction techniques such as multiple currencies, loot boxes, limited time offers, etc. Unfortunately as these companies generally make the games that are zeitgeist and have the largest fan bases - this often slides down hill to smaller studios who are being much more forthright with their methods, pricing, etc.
It’s pretty much what sunk Day 1 DLC - which was a win/win in that it let people who wanted it buy extra content right away and let mid tier studios keep staff who they normally contracted and let go between games on the books to create and maintain the DLC. Now they don’t do that because people scream it must be a scam, and giant studios sell season passes and release unpolished version of Day One DLC as part of it.
And that is a thing that should be forefront in their mind and not simply dismissed with “Don’t know so it can’t be relevant.” It is profoundly relevant before it defines what is reasonable to expect from a studio - a long running problem.
Before it was extra maps, etc there were people wanting open world, multiplayer, next-gen recreations of classic games, etc all practically for free because in their imagination it was just a couple of weeks work for the studio with no ongoing costs (servers, licences, etc).
This is also unhelpful speculation because the reality is - none of us see the sales figures. IO Interactive has said that digital sales are immensely helpful to them, because it lets them plan and adjust price points, thus take better advantage over shifts in market etc. They’re the only ones who have the data on what sells at what price point.
Think back to when Apex Legends adjusted their pricing system during events, and a bunch of people (who didn’t spend money) screamed that it wasn’t fair for them to do that when they were “clearly making lots of money”. The devs explained that no, the previous events were in fact not making any money and the same people then screamed it was really rude to call them out for not paying for content.
When you don’t have the information, you don’t have the information - you need to be aware of that and consider the full spectrum of possibilities. Nobody feels bad calling out Activision-Blizzard because they post their reports about making billions, spending less on creative staff and have a toxic work culture straight from the bowels of Hell.
IO Interactive has only recently gotten its footing as a major player and has had a long history of Hitman games getting critical acclaim but low sales - so we really can’t make assumptions that they can just charge whatever they like or that they feel they have community good will to burn etc.
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Has it been stated whether the year 2 stuff will be pay to play or free to people who already have H3?
If some of it is free for all or free for deluxe owners then I am hopeful that this conversation becomes more or less moot.
I haven’t seen anything related to what the year 2 stuff will cost or how it will be made available. I think the community is currently waiting for some sort of news and (based on previous release trends) assuming we’ll get some sort of something around New Years or that week.
I don’t disagree. My only real point in all of it is that it’s unfair for players to (seemingly) constantly complain that what we’ve gotten so far has been “just escalation and reskins” comparing it to what we got in earlier games. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just what the player sees in the final product.
A bit later:
We’re pleased to announce that HITMAN 3 – Year 2 will begin on 20 January 2022 with an exciting roadmap of content.