[thriftwy]

Most games do not give you near-endless dynamic content anymore. Gone are the days of Master of Magic/Orion. Most "single player" games are basically interactive movies. There's maybe 20 hours of content and that's that. 40 if you are slow. But it is not as great as a good movie, which are also scarce.

Even if there's randomly generated world (roguelike-like), you can usually see all the content in the first 20 hours or so. Sometimes faster than that. Even if the game was amazing, there's no reason to play it once you've figured out ins and outs.

For some reason people keep paying for that stuff, incidentally I've never enjoyed it and only recognized that fact in my 30s - I've never played these most popular genres at all!

[johnnyanmac]

>Gone are the days of Master of Magic/Orion. Most "single player" games are basically interactive movies.

sounds like you're talking mostly about the AAA industry. And I don't think we ever really got that "infinite content" in AAA. They have the staff to craft more content over time. Maybe the Sims or city builders? But those also release DLC regularly.

It's the completely opposite in the indie realm. rougelites can be argued to be oversaturated, but the power of such games means that you can play for 5 hours of 500 hours if the loop is good.

>Even if there's randomly generated world (roguelike-like), you can usually see all the content in the first 20 hours or so.

You can argue the same for old school open world games like Skyrim, but people sink thousands of hours into there. It's not a rouge-lite, but people play different builds, roleplay different characters, mod to add in variety, etc. Mods are rarer in indies but you'll still find them for the popular ones. A few have native mod support as well.

>incidentally I've never enjoyed it and only recognized that fact in my 30s

A shame to hear. I'm in my 30's and I love games more than ever. But I have much less time to I have to be choosy by necessity.

[thriftwy]

I do enjoy some games, but it seems I was never into AAA titles or their 90s equivalents.

After all, HoMM3 HotA got an update just this year.

[FredPret]

Master of Orion 2 was the peak.

Some games like Factorio have minimal content but endless combinations of it in interesting ways.

One that stands out is Europa Universalis, which both encodes and presents a crazy amount of history.

But even a paper-thin game with 20 hours of value is cheap at $50. That's $2.5 per hour, ~one-third the rate of a movie, and kind of on par with a new book.

[thriftwy]

The problem is that they are competing with TV series and books. Why pay $200 for a game when that buys a year of premium Netflix subscription or smth like that? Or ten e-books? Only huge hits will be sellable that way.

Also, imagine what world looked like when books were as hot sell as games two decades ago. Any books, really, were inifinitely sellable because they provided a dozen hours of mild entertainment and often were the only option.

[johnnyanmac]

> Why pay $200 for a game when that buys a year of premium Netflix subscription or smth like that? Or ten e-books? Only huge hits will be sellable that way.

pricing philosopies are really the only difference. That's why no one sells you a $200 game. They sell a $30-70 game and then sell you 5 $20 expansions along the way, and maybe 10-20 $5 skins (and sadly this is very conservative. Just check out prices in the mobile sector). Gives more time to develop (or cut your losses) and it drip feeds more money out of customers without necessarily making a whole new game.

[thriftwy]

You can only pull it off if the game is real nice, though. Or if it's real good at milking you.

Some movies can also sell you some merchandise and a poster and perhaps a second go to cinema. More important, they can also sell IP rights to make a game out of it.

And people seem to forget that The Witcher is, first and foremost, a great book series.