The Value of Games: Why You Really Can't Put a Price on Art

Value (n) – A fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged; relative worth, utility, or importance.

These two are drastically different things. When it comes to video games, great care should be taken to establish the difference.

Sure, as a necessity of economics our games have always come with a price tag. But that GameStop package contains more than simply a disc and an instruction manual, it contains an experience. We have expectations for our games based on experiences we’ve had with them in the past. We expect our games to have legs. There’s an implicit value to our games that has nothing to do with mere price. It’s the reason I can pick up Bastion for $15 and see it as an absolute steal, and at the same time pick up Street Fighter IV on my iPhone and feel like I overpaid.

The value games have is experiential, and has nothing to do with the price of the physical game itself. When we buy games, we’re not excited about the cartridge or disc, rather we’re excited for the hours we know we’re going to spend with the game. Unfortunately, up until recently, anyways, games required “things” (cartridges and discs) in order to play them, and “things” cost money – this is the basis upon which publishers and retailers have set a price on our games. Unfortunately, games historically have been so inextricably linked to their cartridges and discs that over years of paying for the latter, we have come to believe that we’re actually paying for the former. That is to say, our video games have been inadvertently assigned a “price” based on the price of the physical objects in which they reside. But regardless of how publishers and distributors adjust the price of video games up or down, seemingly on various whims, it seems they always fail to capture our games’ value – the price and the value of the experience the game provides me are utterly separate. It may be decided that a DVD with a certain amount of information coded on it will sell for $60 or $40 arbitrarily, but to me the experience of that game will have a totally different value that I determine myself. The value I give to my games is not based in the world of dollars and cents; the price tag on the game, whether or not it falls in line with my own personal valuation of the game, is simply the price of admission.

Ironically, once video games collided with the digital world things became even muddier. Whatever relation may have existed between “price” and “value” before becomes laughably obsolete in the face of digital distribution platforms. Now we’re not even buying a thing. There’s no disc for us to play or case to file anal retentively on our shelves or “new manual smell” for us to clandestinely enjoy on the subway on the way home from the GameStop. All we have now is a concept, a collection of bits and bytes that create specific patterns of electrons on our screens. What we are left with is pure, crystallized experience.

Not to get over-dramatic, but you get the idea.

That publishers insist on the same pricing structure as before in this system seems almost ludicrous; it is a purely fiat value embedded in an already fiat system. They say you can’t put a price on Art, but games in digital form could arguably be said to be pure Art – the Idea abstracted from any physical manifestation and, cruelly enough, they are subjected to perhaps the most arbitrary form of valuation. Yes, video games have always been abstract pieces of data, but at least when we were forking over our cash for cartridges and discs we were at least paying for the embodiment of that concept. In the age of digital distribution we don’t even have that anymore. Companies like EA are effectively deciding for us how much getting a glimpse of the Mona Lisa is worth in dollars and cents.

While this may seem like the depraved rant of a “starving-artist” type gamer, there is actual danger here. It’s very important to remember that price and value here are different, lest the two get used interchangeably. When that happens, video games cease being Video Games (in the sense of an art form) and instead become products, being bought and sold at times that maximize their returns, like used cars or stocks. Do you remember the first time you played Super Mario Bros? I can say with confidence you weren’t thinking “this game offers me in time spent a decent return on my money, and was therefore an efficient buy.” No, you were too busy being caught up in the experience of the game.

But with such an emphasis on price, we stop playing games to enjoy them and instead worry about playing them to get “our money’s worth.” That’s when we worry about buying Tekken 6, because it’s already 2 years old and its trade-in value will be negligible. That’s why horrible multiplayer modes are getting tacked on to games like Dead Space 2 and Bioshock 2 – because people now worry more about what a game will offer them for their money, rather than what kind of experience it can offer them for their time. Voila – “value” has evaporated, and we are left with pure, crystallized “price”.

To make matters more complicated, the implementation of the near-omnipresent DLC seems to be focused on making the valuation of games even more opaque. If trying to assign a material price to a game whose value is experiential is, at best arbitrary, DLC takes it to a whole new level. It takes only five minutes perusing the Xbox Live Marketplace to see what I mean – add-ons and extras are sold not even based on the same fiat values as the games themselves, but based on the enigmatic “Microsoft Point.” How or when this mythical system came about I’ll never know, but what it basically means is that now we have to pay a randomly determined amount of actual money to buy a [somehow] equivalent amount of fictitious money to then spend towards an element of a Game that really only has experiential value in the first place.

What the hell even *is* a "Microsoft Point?"

This hoop-jumping might be excusable, except that in several cases we’re made to feel like if we choose to ignore this system altogether our own experience of the Game will suffer. Assassin’s Creed II shipped with 2 “DNA Sequences” (the game’s “chapters”) conspicuously missing from its single player campaign, to be bought later as pieces of DLC. Id Software’s Rage blocks off portions of the game’s campaign to anybody who buys the game used. Games like Mortal Kombat have begun charging extra for “online passes” to allow players to play online multiplayer modes. While I may acquiesce to accepting arbitrary values placed on my experience of a game, when the very experiences themselves are withheld from me that’s crossing a line. Not only are they assigning a random value to our games, but they are arbitrarily changing that value on the fly with no justification. This results in rightfully-offended gamers having to choose between magically having to shell out more cash based on a publisher’s whim, or having their experience and enjoyment of a game forcibly cut short.

And yet I feel that there’s definitely hope here. Certain publishers/developers have been approaching games solely as something to be experienced, with nary a thought to price. The Humble Bundles, famed throughout the indie gaming community, are not only pay-what-you-can, but also offer gamers the ability to designate how much of their payment they want to donate to the Bundle’s chosen charity. While on paper a project like this seems like a commercial disaster, the numbers (quite encouragingly) speak to the contrary. The most recent iteration, the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, sold over 230,000 copies and netted $1,115,416.40. The average payment amount amongst the top 10 contributors was a staggering $975.70 – more than anybody would be willing to shell out for the latest Assassin’s Creed by a long shot, I’d think. Admittedly, the average contribution amongst all purchasers was $4.81, but I think the point was made: the idea that games have their own value, independent of what people may choose to charge for them, is not dead yet.

That’s not to say that every game ever should be released on a pay-what-you-can basis. I think at this stage that’s naive, even for a video games idealist like myself. The Humble Bundles are an important example because they are instances where gamers are encouraged to decide for themselves how much the games they play are worth, to them. Indie devs using ultralow prices and pay-what-you-can pricing structures are doing their best to separate our games from the physical product that holds them, and in so doing drawing attention to the value of games rather than their price. The good news is if this catches on (and if you’ve been privy to any of Valve’s massive sales on Steam, you know this is likely) it could change gaming as an industry. Developers wouldn’t be able to hide behind their guaranteed $60 price tag and churn out throwaway games with tacked on “value adds” like unecessary multiplayer. Games could enjoy a surge in quality reminiscent of the “good old days”. And the hell of it is, gamers wouldn’t even mind paying the price tags on these games – because they’d be worth it. Higher quality games being enjoyed more thoroughly by gamers and actually justifying their price tags – that sounds like a pretty damn good value to me.