A discussion you can often find around gaming websites and forums is whether the size of a game should affect the cost, not downloadable content, although, that will be covered (and sort of has before), but the full price, full base game.
A while ago, I did a couple of features called What Price Determines a Quality Game and The Cost of DLC, this time, it’s about what’s considered a worthy price for how big in Megabytes or Gigabytes a game is. The main questions are how big is the game and how long does it last? Is a game costing £9.99, is 600 MB and lasts for 20 hours good value?
One of the reasons for asking this is demonstrated in the featured image, it shows F1 Race Stars is only 1.1 GB, relatively small in comparison to what could be considered a bigger game such as Call of Duty: Black Ops II which is 7.41 GB. Just because a game is bigger in filesize doesn’t necessarily mean it has more content, right?
You could argue that they both have an extensive online multiplayer mode, giving many, many hours of gameplay on top of the single-player campaign, that’s possible, but as they both retail for £39.99, which one gives you more bang for your buck? It’s a factor some people take into consideration when buying games and it’s made easier to see more details due to digital download, online stores or on demand services.
With some indie and most ‘arcade’ games now having less or no restrictions in how small or big they can go up to, it’s no surprise to see games on Steam from indies developers hit 2 GB in size and because it’s released on the PC, the cost is as much as half of what you will pay on the PlayStation Store or Xbox Live Marketplace, why that is, is for another debate and usually comes down to development costs.
Rather than mention differences in quality, I refer you to the previous feature linked at the start of this post in which I ask whether the quality of the game factors in the cost, like, do better graphics make a difference, but it’s more related to mobile gaming than what is being referred to here. Also linked is something about downloadable content which also has a similar price-to-content vein to it, but that’s not what this is about.
So, do you think you get enough content or a big enough file for your money/satisfaction?