Paying By The Hour $ The Phantom Fallacy

Real quick mention before I start, this blog will be broken into the prologue and the main blog because I find it fitting considering the subject matters I'm going to talk about. I will talk about the arguments on Ground Zeroes which will lead into what I really want to talk to you guys about, paying by the hour.

Let's start.

Paying By The Hour $ Two Hours
If you've ever seen the complaints raised against MGS V GZ it often revolves around the fact that it's a 2 hour game priced at $30 and I wanted to quickly make them feel really dumb. The argument is Konami are anti consumers and ripping consumers off by charging $30 for a game that can be beat in 10 minutes and while it is correct you can beat it in 10 the things is you're not going to.

Unless you know exactly where to go, what to do and the guard patrol patterns beating in 10 minutes is not going to happen, you'll most likely beat it in 1 hour maybe a bit more. Now that has nothing to do with what I have to say, what I have to say is these pro consumer liberals can shove a sock in it when it comes to this game because they clearly don't understand the actual issue.

If you saw Angry Joe's review you'd see him complain that this is a very anti consumer move and in that regard he's correct but he like many of the others who seem to have their heads up their rear ends preventing them from seeing the real issue involved. Yes Ground Zeroes is $30 and about 2 hours long but the issue is not the length or the price but the fact you are paying for a major piece of the game that has been cut off to be sold to you extra.

If you are asking what's the difference between what I'm saying and what they are saying is that my argument ends there at paying for important content, theirs however ends at it's 2 hours long and it's $30. My argument doesn't bring length or price into it because they don't matter, that's not the issue it's that content has been stripped and sold extra.

You can argue that because it's a main piece of content and priced at that much with it's short length it's worth mentioning but it really isn't. You see by complaining about the hour it takes to beat it this $30 game what you're saying is, it's alright to chop a part of your game off to get more money out of me just as long as it's a long experience.

So really those complaints can only help companies see to get away with doing stunts like this is to give you something that is going to take up more than a couple hours.

And this brings me to the real blog

Paying By The Hour $ The Phantom Fallacy

If you've been gaming for as long as I have you probably had a game you were looking forward to get points deducted from the reviews because it wasn't a super long experience. Regardless of how you feel about review scores hearing a full retail game you want might clock in in under 8 hours but you expected something longer does affect you.

You start questioning it's worth because of that review and some of them even go as far as seeing because of it's length the game is better off as a rental than a full purchase and this complaint is a fallacy.

As consumers we shouldn't be judging the time a game takes but rather the quality that it offers, like the Ground Zeroes rant I did at the start people are no longer paying for quality but for quantity.

Now I'd be lying if I said I never cared about game length because I did, there was a time when I wanted my games to be 10 hours long reaching to 20 and more. I was there but after a while I started to realize that's a wrong way to look at it, I shouldn't care about the length.

Sure there has to be a limit, no one should sell an hour long game for $60 but the thing is no one is, so even if it's a short game it's not unreasonably short either.

Another reason why bringing up the length to a game is pointless is because while game time varies per game, game prices don't. An 8 hour game will cost the same brand new as 30 hour long one, so on that note should I not get that 8 hour game just because it's $60 and I can get another game for the same price or cheaper with more length?

It's a structurally weak argument. This brings me to the thought that this way of thinking can actually hinder a game, recently a friend of mine played and finished Skyward Sword and he loved it but he hated the needless backtracking to make the game longer.

That is what complaining about length does, it puts publishers to artificially extend a game's length by padding it out and that's not good. Everyone complains about games being too short but no one ever says games are too long and I'm not saying they shouldn't just as long as it's not for the sake of making it longer.

Quality people, that is what we should be paying for, what we should be asking, what we should be demanding, because end of the day a company can make a 500 hour long game but if it's mostly terrible than you just wasted money. Better to have several hours of pure greatness than tons of just bleh.

Don't pay for the hour it gives but whether those hours are good.