4301

I haven’t listened to this but the subject seems like it might be interesting to many so here goes: The Brainy Gamer is starting a 3 part podcast series with game designers. First up is Manveer Heir, Senior Designer at BioWare.

Link to the podcast page is here.

4302

So whatever happened to the Irrational podcasts? Is this another one of Shawn Elliott’s pet projects that he eventually got too cool / too bored to deal with anymore?

4303

Depends which you’re talking about. The Irrational Podcasts were a run-up to the showing of Bioshock Infinite, and they haven’t done another one since. The Irrational Interviews still show up from time to time, but I imagine that guest availability (and Tim’s availability) probably play a governing role on that one.

4304

I just heard this … My god, that was excruciating.

Super, super wrong. And, worse, obstinate and shouty about it. Just awful.

It would be true that cost should never be a factor if you’re explicitly reviewing games as an art form - in a philosophical sense in which I might never make a purchase … But how is value never (never-ever-never!!) a consideration for a reviewer?

Particularly having just concluded discussing how portable gaming has been turned on its head financially, that seemed like such a removed perspective …

You’re never going to be able to align yourself completely with the perspective of a reviewer. If time is a legitimate factor, then so, too, should be relative cost. There are plenty of kids who are able and willing to devote much more time to a game than can a professional reviewer - so there’s no way to ever properly align the priorities of the two.

Just … augh … That was painful.

4305

The Irrational podcasts seem like they were destined to run out of content. They were basically about how great it is to work there, and there’s only so many angles to hit that from.

4306

Well that was the point. I thought they were only supposed to go up to the announcement, and after that it morphed into Ken Levine interviewing other people having various levels of relative fame.

4307

I’m interested to hear Jumping the Shark this week. I’ve always been of the opinion that the cost of a game is a valid piece of data to consider when one reviews games. I understand some folks prefer to pretend that their game reviews are pure criticism without any consumer reporting aspect to them, but personally I appreciate it when a reviewer deigns to acknowledge that us peons are paying $50 or $60 for these games.

What galls me is when I hear folks on podcasts talking about games that say they don’t know how much they cost, or even worse, people that still can’t wrap their heads around how many MS points are in a dollar (80). To me this shows that those people are completely out of touch with the plight of the consumer given that the podcast guys are almost always getting the games for free. This allows them to pretend that cost doesn’t matter, but for most of us, it’s an issue of some importance.

4308

Yeah, what really got me - the suggestion that price should be completely removed - never bear any consideration.

If a game comes out at a price point many hundred percents more expensive than its typical competitors, the reviewer would have to be a nut to not factor that at all …

4309

I haven’t listened to the episode in question yet, but I actually agree (very strongly, even) with the idea of removing pricing from consideration in reviews for a couple of reasons:

  1. Not only is it impossible for the reviewer to make a value judgment in line with their audience – because everybody has different approaches to dollar or time valuation – but it may also be impossible for a reviewer to even make a real value judgment for themselves, since they may be working with a complimentary review copy. Rather than trying to critique the game within a nebulous value spectrum that’s always moving and always different for everybody, why not simply address the game on its own merits and let the consumer use that analysis to make their own judgment against their own personal values for dollars and/or time spent playing?

  2. The price for a game never remains the same forever so, by framing your review against a price at the time of release, you’re automatically building in a shelf life for your critique. What good is a review that slams Child of Eden’s price point as a $50 retail boxed game going to be to a consumer that’s thinking about picking up Child of Eden three years from now as a $20 entry on the 360 (or Xbox 720, whatever) Games on Demand service? With publishers waiting even less time after the initial launch of a game to cut prices, reviews that rely upon assumptions of pricing are going to be out of date (or perhaps simply irrelevant altogether) much faster than before.

4310

Why, that’s why your review score is a dollar value. I think that CAG kicked around that idea for a little while back before the incessant chihuahuish yelping of that wombat creature finally persuaded me to bail out a couple of years ago. I’m firmly in the Gerstmann camp of what reviews are for (I’ma tell you how to spend your forty dollars), though, so my position was pretty much decided before they even started barking at one another.

4311

Disagree. Also, to the point (above) you made, that’s not taking into account that not only do games get cheaper, they arguably get better with patches/mods. Game reviewers are universally adamant (that I’ve seen) that they review a game as it is out of the box, and as such, they should never take into account that the game will be on sale at some point, either.

4312

You make some good points, Ozymandias. I don’t have a problem with a reviewer excluding a value judgment in his/her review for the reasons you stated, or any other reasons really. I just don’t think one can say categorically that price should never be considered in a game review.

I understand that price is a moving target, but if a review has any consumer reporting aspects to it, it’s going to be most consumed and most relevant at the time a game releases. It makes sense to me for a reviewer to build in his value judgment, if any, based on the price that a game launches at. Someone that comes back to the review later, after a price cut or sale, can try to parse that value judgment if he wants to. I would expect that any reviewer that has an explicit value judgment in his/her review would probably state what he thinks is a fair price for the game, but if not, I still think the review can remain relevant.

With regard to everyone having a different approach to time and dollar valuation, I don’t see why that should prevent a reviewer from commenting on same. A review is, after all, a very subjective thing. If it speaks to and helps others, that’s great, but a reviewer can only really say how he/she felt about the game experience. There’s no reason in my mind why a reviewer can’t also comment on his/her perception of value for the money of a particular game. That valuation is no more subjective than any other part of the review.

4313

There are no shortage of factors that prevent future-proofing a review. Graphics or gameplay don’t hold up, mechanical iterations can vastly improve on the model, story conventions can become tired, etc. The reader will have to put the review into context at some point - so why not for pricing, as well?

It’s not as though this must be some binary yea/nay threshold. A reviewer might say, ‘this game is a tough sell at full price’, or ‘it’s not long, but, fuck - it’s pocket change’.

If a reviewer is articulate and thorough enough, I can parse out his pros and cons and decide what weighs more in my opinion, and what doesn’t. This personal capability doesn’t stop at market value, any more than it would stop at graphical fidelity, or shitty writing, or lousy checkpoints - which likely all have a relative value between myself and the reviewer.

Ultimately, I don’t mind if a reviewer decides he doesn’t want to generally factor price into his evaluations, since for the most part games are generally priced to match expectations … but to say it should never factor into a review (and with such thunder!) suggests some ludicrous scenarios in which a reviewer could seem completely divorced from reality.

4314

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against the idea of review scores here. (Review scores, in my opinion, serve a very important purpose to the consumer as an evaluative and comparative shorthand.) I’m disputing the idea of framing or scaling review scores within a context of a price or an amount of hours played.

And rendering the review score as a dollar value doesn’t address the issue at all – if anything, it just makes a giant red, flashing sign that points directly at the problem – because the reviewer, whether they realize it or not, are going to bake their own pre-conceptions and assumptions about value into that dollar amount “score.”

Yes, bad critics are going to do that for the review score anyway, whether it’s letter grades or dollar values or elephant testicles, but it would be even worse when they have to assign a dollar value to their evaluation because the idea of having a lot of something (e.g. mediocre 60 hour RPG) is going to have more monetary value than a smaller, but more enjoyable package.

(Alternate argument: think about all the good games out there that are free or free-to-play. Now, how does that affect the value calculation for a game?)

I’m not a reviewer by trade, but I’d imagine that game reviewers are universally adamant about reviewing products out-of-the-box because there’s no way that they could keep up with the stream of patches/mods – many of which are optional or unofficial – that can fill the airwaves for any given game. (You might even say it’s a lot like the inability to keep up with the market value of a game!)

And, even if they wanted to embark upon that futile exercise, I would argue that the scale of impact behind a mod or a patch has got nothing on the eventual and inevitable degradation of a game’s market value. Valve was giving away Portal, a $20 standalone game at one point, for free over Steam a few months ago. There are countless games on Steam sales or GamersGate sales at twenty dollars or less after hitting the marketplace at a sixty dollar clip a year ago. There may be a game like a Vampire: Bloodlines or an Arcanum that gets “saved” by fan patches over time, but I would contend that those games are the exception, rather than the rule.

I don’t disagree with your point towards consumption in this case, but I do disagree with regards to relevance. If anything, I’d say that “late” reviews have more value now than at any other time in gaming history, because more games are available and playable on more systems right now than at any other time in gaming history. Consumers have more options now than ever before; hell, there’s a thread on the first page of this section of the boards right now called “Overwhelmed by so many good games”, which has 3+ pages of conversation about the struggles of keeping up with the flood of quality gaming on the market at the moment. (See also: the endless stream of LTTP threads on every gaming forum ever.)

With all of those options and all of that content out there, consumers are much more likely into come to any given game late than they were in the past. And those consumers need review love too. :)

Yes, time/dollar valuation is subjective in the same way that other evaluation of the game would be, but I’d argue that it’s far more fragile, if that makes any sense.

I’ll put it another way – I feel like truly good games are good forever, regardless of the imitators that may follow, whereas dollar values for games are anything but.

4315

If a reviewer adequately explains why he or she likes a game, I’m perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether that game is worth the sticker price.

4316

What should I do when an XBL arcade game gets an 8.5 and then so does a full retail game?

4317

But that’s all the difference between ‘I don’t need a reviewer to evaluate cost’ and ‘a reviewer should never consider cost’.

It’s also not necessary, in considering cost, to make that an overriding factor. A competent reviewer should be able to articulate that he feels something seems over/underpriced in a given market, and still broadcast the relative merits of the game …

A reviewer might also comment on how amazingly cutting-edge the graphics are. This truth dwindles before even the game ships.

That should not proscribe reviewers from ever considering a game’s graphics, nor any other element of context under which it arrives …

Are there ever any conditions that you feel reviewers might mention a game’s cost?

If you were helping a friend make a choice between two games of similar merits and pricing, would you not give the advantage to the one which offers more value?

4318

I’m not arguing for some kind of time played for the dollar scale. I think that’s a foolish exercise as well. But I don’t think that if a reviewer discusses the price in his/her review and finds the product lacking for the amount a publisher expects for it, he/she has somehow written a bad review or failed at his/her job. I’m interested in if a reviewer thinks whatever game is worth the asking price, whether it’s a 60 hour RPG or a six hour shooter. If a reviewer chooses not to mention whether he thinks the game is a good value for the asking price, that’s fine too.

I certainly never meant to imply that more hours in a game automatically makes it a better value. Hell, I’ve long said that I’d rather have a very good six hour shooter than a mediocre one stretched over 10 to 12 hours. Genre expectations do come into any estimation of value, so play time could be a factor, but it would hardly ever be close to the most important factor in my personal estimation of value.

4319

That’s a pretty severe exaggeration on both counts.

With the price and mod/patch content, we’re talking about external factors to the original product. You can’t really get away from the graphics of a game and graphical technology isn’t going to dramatically sink in value over the course of a couple of months.

However, that doesn’t mean that a critique of the game’s aesthetics has to read like a feature list for a 3D card. If the reviewer wants to forgo the technical achievement of a game to focus on the art direction instead, so be it. If the reviewer wants to call out the importance of an innovative feature in presentation or an new piece of technology for the sheer spectacle of it, so be it. (For customers that are looking for cool looking games that are going to allow them to show off their fancy new gaming rig or their new big-screen HDTV, that could be certainly valuable information.) In either case, that gets into the subjective territory of a review, the aspects that each reviewer feels are important to the experience.

I don’t think I ever said that the cost could never ever, under any circumstances be mentioned – if that’s how it came out, I apologize.

The question, as I understood it, is whether the price should be considered into the evaluation of the game…and I personally don’t think it makes a lot of sense in any case, genre, or price point. A $60 game that earns a C+ for having competent execution, but a couple of poor design decisions shouldn’t miraculously become one of the best games of the year if it dips down to $9.99. A price reduction doesn’t make those poor design decisions go away.

And I feel the same way about mod/patch content too, just for the sake of completeness. While a rare mod or patch might be able to alleviate some of those poor design decisions, I’m not sure that the original product should get “credit” for those changes anyway: not only are we potentially talking about a community modification that may be correcting a very deliberate (yet unpopular) design decision on the behalf of the developers, we’re also positively reinforcing the just-patch-it-later strategy, which has been a scourge of game development for way too long, if you ask me.

Giving some advice to a buddy on which game to choose at a given moment is a different situation (with dramatically different context) than writing a formal review or critique through a publication/website for mass consumption, isn’t it?

4320

Nor, by that same token, does addressing a game’s relative market value need to be an exercise in bean-countery. Take: “it’s an interesting experience, but I can’t see many people dropping two-fifty, plus to use a periscope around their kitchen table.”

You did not - but that was the contention in the show.

Generally, reviewers won’t have to think twice about the cost of the game. There are tiers at which most games release which are comfortable-enough to most of the industry. But if an iPad game comes out at $30, I have to imagine most people would be left a little confused to not find that elephant addressed in the review.

You don’t spend much time in the bargain thread.

I don’t see why that should need be the case … If I read a restaurant review, the reviewer will almost certainly mention whether or not the venue was on-par with the results of the check. A travel review will certainly not ignore the expense of a given locale. A hardware review will absolutely compare the performance of the item against similarly-priced counterparts.

Again - the reviewer shouldn’t need to hinge every score on an entertainment point-per-dollar ratio, but completely neglecting an anomalous market price doesn’t help much … Paper Airplane Deluxe might be a well-crafted, sharp five-minute-waster Flash game, but how the fuck can one completely ignore that the developers priced it similarly to a box retail game?