Czacki, I couldn't give a rats about content-to-price ratio.
I do respect money however. By not giving a rats about the ratio, you seem not to.. oh well, maybe you have a lot of money and don't care. I don't.
I don't have a lot of money. But that's beside the point. When I say I don't care about the content-to-price ratio, you shouldn't interpret that as me saying I don't care how much it costs, because I do. However I don't look at entertainment products as content divided by price. If I go to see a movie for $10 or whatever, I don't go around whinging to everyone that even though it was a great movie the content to price ratio was pathetic and that I'd get better value from playing a $2 game I bought off the internet for 5 hours. (Actaully, I have seen people on the forum construct similar arguments about entertainment-time to price ratio just like what I described)
I'm still very curious as to what you'd say to someone who bought the Deluxe Edition for $90. If you are genuinely concerned about the price of video games because you don't have much money, what's stopping you from not buying the game so close to release? I assume you've already bought it, yes? Did you check whether you could buy it for less than $50? Did you buy it on steam, which tends to have not very competitive prices (except arguably at sales times)?
And if you do insist on that line of argument, do you realise that it's just as logical to claim the content-to-price ratio of the DLC proves that the game is an absolute bargain at the price it is? (not that many people would take that view
but it's just as valid as yours)
And what prevents devs from selling it at the same "bargain" price? Hard to call it bargain since every game comes within more or less the same price range.
Right back at you. It's hard to call DLC a "rip off" since every other DLC for other games comes within more or less the same price range.
Developers don't code something up and go "this is how much content there is, let's multiply it by z and we get the price it should be sold at". It's just silly. Any rational business person would sell something for the price that people are prepared to pay for it and such that it will generate a good revenue stream or value for the company. You don't base a price on some arbitrary figure that one of your customers insists on.
As a customer, I don't give a rats about their profits and calculations. I'm a fan of a game, I see a small expansion, I want it but they want me to pay a big amount of money for a tiny add-on, so I don't buy it because its content to ratio sucks and I'm not happy about it. That's all.
Fair enough. This is the method you use to determine the value to you, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sorry if I have come across as suggesting otherwise, which I may have done.
Well honestly, if I had no need for a backseat (unlikely
) then I'd buy a car without one. If not, I'd just go to one of their competitors.
I'm talking about a person who wants backseats, but is forced to buy them later for a massive amount of money "cause they are optional" -> see DLCs.
So we have a hypothetical car market where not a single dealer/seller sells cars with a backseat? That is really hard to imagine I have to say. But if it were the case, I'd just buy a second hand car from a year when they did come with backseats as standard, or from someone who has bought a new car and already paid to have the backseats installed.
I guess the point I should make here is that the backseat-of-car analogy is starting to not make sense any more.
The fact is we're talking about a
digital entertainment product. As such it would probably be more apt to make analogies with other digital entertainment products. For starters, civ5 and its DLC is a product you can't legally resell. It's also something that can be duplicated by its seller for practically zero cost, unlike a car or its backseat.
And since there is no other dev making Civilization games, competition does not exist, I'm afraid
This is an argument I have made in the past, but I think it's a bit in error. Going back to your car analogy, it'd be like saying that no one but Toyota makes Toyotas, so if I want to buy a Toyota there isn't any competition. Civilization (including civ5) is just another video game competing with hundreds if not thousands of other games on the market. You can argue that only a small portion of those are in the same genre, but it's not as if there is zero competition. There is GalCiv2 for example, and plenty of other good strategy games that compete for players of a certain mind.
