Fifty-five months.
By my reckoning, that’s how long we’ve been playing Defense of the Ancients, a popular mod off of the also-popular Warcraft III. Through the better part of a decade, we’ve engaged in a series of sometimes-epic, usually-fun battles built on top an aged engine (1). Matter of fact, I had to go back to a previous version of the site to find my blog post about the game; it was that long ago.
I’ve probably obtained more value out of this one game than pretty much any other form of entertainment or vacation. It comes out to about 20 cents an hour – assuming an hour a week of gaming for 5 years – on a $40 purchase price. Certainly more economical than, say, a movie ($5/hour or so) or slamming down drinks at a club ($20+/hour, depending on alcohol consumption limits).
Gamers are getting a lot more value out of games in the past 2-3 years. A few ways to look at it:
A small number of companies – Blizzard and Valve – have supported their games for years, and grown a dedicated base of gamers who have enjoyed their product for a very long time. The likes of Starcraft and Counterstrike are popular worldwide for a decade and more, and free mods extend their lifetimes even further.
iPhone games are a newer, cheaper genre of games which usually retail for a dollar or two. These are good games too: full-fledged puzzlers, shooters, and word games sucking away hours at the airport or the in-laws. It’s bite-sized gaming finally calibrated with bite-size prices.
Then there are the blockbusters, games with tremendous production values which retail for $60 but cost $30+ million to make. Production times have doubled and budgets increased ten-fold; games are getting close to big-budget movies in development resources but also quality. Most still provide 10+ hours of entertainment, though, with tons of interesting content, and immerse players in ways far beyond a two-hour popcorn flick.
And if the above is still deemed to rich for your miserly tastes, there are plenty of ad-supported Flash games, micro-transactional social games, and plain free PC games all over the interwebs. Sure, some are literally poor-men’s versions of popular commercial games, but the entire social gaming and to an extent the indie Flash gaming space are unique experiences. The low, low entrance price of free plus the ease of play also draws a lot of non-traditional gamers.
I remember when my grandpa finally broke down and bought an SNES for me; it was $180 CDN, and came with one Tiny Toons game. Took me another 3-4 months of saving to afford Super Mario World, and I played that game for months. I guess that kind of dedication just doesn’t exist anymore, not with thousands of games competing for your time and most of them designed to be rapidly-consumed, easily-disposed experiences. Time and choice has replaced money as the primary constraint.
Now to find a way to make more time.
- Incidentally, I recently found a few games which updates the Warcraft interface but keeps the same formula: see Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends (↩)