180 réponses à ce sujet

[Brass_Buckles]

TheMadCat wrote...

Ah yes, the Gamestop employees. The stories I could share about my experiences with their "knowledge", but I'm drifting off topic here.

Just so you know hearsay is never a viable form of evidence. Now I'm not saying your wrong, you very well could be completely correct, but at this moment your evidence is garbage and doesn't really do anything to aid in your defense. Melo had made a few comments related to length and none of those really support the 15 hour theory. So we can hypothesize off of Melo's comments or we can trust the word you had with a Gamestop grunt.

Seeing as the Gamestop employee had no foreknowledge of the expansion (when the original 15-hour statement was buzzing around on the forums) prior to the info he had for release, I'd say he was telling me the truth to his knowledge.  Does that mean he was right?  Not necessarily, but it does lend some weight to that info that had been on some sites beforehand, and two months is not much time to build on the amount of gameplay within a given game, even if you recycle all the graphics from the base game.

I happen to believe that fifteen hours is probably right--it's not much gameplay, no, but I'll be replaying it with all of my characters, so no biggie.  Would I rather have thirty hours tacked on?  Yes, but I suspect this expansion has only been in development since around the time DA:O was released a few months ago, and I also suspect it takes lots longer to make all of those new models, script and record the new dialogue, and build new areas than most of us are willing to believe, particularly if you want any kind of quality.  Then you have the play-testing and bug-fixing.

I also fully expect the release date to be pushed back.  I have yet to anticipate a game that doesn't get pushed back.  Now, if it gets pushed back all the way to December, I'll happily agree that the fifteen hours thing was just a rumor.  Until then my belief is that it is a rumor with at least some basis (and so it may be more around 20 hours, or closer to 10, but somewhere in the give-or-take around-15-hours range).  I'm not going to write off what the game store people tell me just because they are "Gamestop grunts."  I've discovered that frequently, rumors based on release info on game store (and occasionally game info) sites tend to be fairly accurate.  How do you think we found out about Awakening prior to the official announcement, anyway?

[Aeto Alessos]

Gamestop is only good for inquiries about battletoads.

[Voltemond]

It's priced that way so they can hire new people to fix RtO which at this rate will come out after the expansion if not at all.

[Virusu]

VanDraegon wrote...

Sammimo wrote...
Hmmm. just because I pay for it dosn't guarantee it'll be quality though, does it?

Has Bioware failed to deliver quality thus far? It is reasonable to expect the same in the expansion. We have a lot of history to look back upon to justify it.

Yes, they have. Unless you don't consider charging $5-$15 for 30 minutes worth of  bland DLC content a failure of quality. I'll give them credit for their sly marketing strategies though. Ever since EA jumped on board, the scum baggery has gone up a few notches. It's what EA is famous for. . .

[SirDremor]

Oh, man, 40$! Bioware (well, actually EA), I am always on your side - but this time you are really pushing your luck.

I will of course buy this expansion, of course will pay 40$, but I don't like the idea of paying the same ammount of money for my PC version as those, who buy this game for consoles.



Console games are always more expensive, because they're the main source of income for console makers... PC makers have an everchanging hardware for income, that's why PC games always cost less (not ONLY because of this, but partially...)... so I can't justify in my mind, why this time we pay the same price.

And anyway - 40$ for an 15+ hours expansion is a bit too much (except if it is packed with gold nugget -)), considering the ammount of experience the original game gave us with nearly 80-100 hours for one complete walkthrough.

[Rhodric78]

I'm confused, DA: Awakenings is now available for pre-order via Steam for $39.99. Wasn't the PC version supposed to be $29.99? I'm sure this has been debated to death, but how the heck do you charge $10.00 less than the core game for an expansion? No way it's got 30hrs of gameplay. Really not pleased with the direction they're going in.

Modifié par Rhodric78, 25 janvier 2010 - 11:49 .

[MerinTB]

Brass_Buckles wrote...

TheMadCat wrote...

Ah yes, the Gamestop employees. The stories I could share about my experiences with their "knowledge", but I'm drifting off topic here.

Just so you know hearsay is never a viable form of evidence. Now I'm not saying your wrong, you very well could be completely correct, but at this moment your evidence is garbage and doesn't really do anything to aid in your defense. Melo had made a few comments related to length and none of those really support the 15 hour theory. So we can hypothesize off of Melo's comments or we can trust the word you had with a Gamestop grunt.

Seeing as the Gamestop employee had no foreknowledge of the expansion (when the original 15-hour statement was buzzing around on the forums) prior to the info he had for release, I'd say he was telling me the truth to his knowledge.  Does that mean he was right?  Not necessarily, but it does lend some weight to that info that had been on some sites beforehand, and two months is not much time to build on the amount of gameplay within a given game, even if you recycle all the graphics from the base game.

I happen to believe that fifteen hours is probably right--it's not much gameplay, no, but I'll be replaying it with all of my characters, so no biggie.  Would I rather have thirty hours tacked on?  Yes, but I suspect this expansion has only been in development since around the time DA:O was released a few months ago, and I also suspect it takes lots longer to make all of those new models, script and record the new dialogue, and build new areas than most of us are willing to believe, particularly if you want any kind of quality.  Then you have the play-testing and bug-fixing.

I also fully expect the release date to be pushed back.  I have yet to anticipate a game that doesn't get pushed back.  Now, if it gets pushed back all the way to December, I'll happily agree that the fifteen hours thing was just a rumor.  Until then my belief is that it is a rumor with at least some basis (and so it may be more around 20 hours, or closer to 10, but somewhere in the give-or-take around-15-hours range).  I'm not going to write off what the game store people tell me just because they are "Gamestop grunts."  I've discovered that frequently, rumors based on release info on game store (and occasionally game info) sites tend to be fairly accurate.  How do you think we found out about Awakening prior to the official announcement, anyway?

My friend, speaking as someone who worked at EB Games for over a year, and later at a Gamestop for the holiday season several years ago, as well as at numerous other retail and rental stores in my checkered career (even being in management) -
Store employees at Gamestop are told by their company as much information about products they sell as are employees of Best Buy-
that is to say, they are trained very well on warranties and discount cards and how to push those.
PERIOD.
Whatever information the people working at Gamestop or some similar retail outlet have, they got it from the same sources you did - magazines and the internet.

That isn't to say tha places like Gamestop don't have company newsletters and the like - but what you get from those are store policies, store sales, quarterly sales, and release dates.

Any other information a retail store like Gamestop has is provided by - gasp - the marketing and sales departments of the game publishers.

So ...

Any true information a Gamestop employee had would come from -
1 - the same media sources you or I or anyone else with access to gaming magazines and the internet have
2 - whatever promotional material the game publisher sends out... in other words, the same stuff they'd put out in a press release on on their websites

Where you think this Gamestop employee got information that Gamestop is privileged to have but Bioware doesn't have posted on their website, I have no idea.

[Tlonuqbar]

I haven't bought many expansions lately, but back in the day (that is, like 5-10 years ago), I remember most of the expansions that I bought being between $10 to $20 dollars less than the original game, and typically only adding around 15 or so hours of gameplay. I really don't see how this is significantly different.



Also, it's not like when determining pricing that marketing people sit down with the game and say "yup, this is a $40 expansion, in that the length of time adds up to $40" as well as "This is CLEARLY only a $20 expansion, but we're going to unscrupulously double the price for the sake of corporate greed." I would assume that for the most part they look at the market value of the original game to determine how great the demand for an expansion is and most of the price is determined by that. If you figure that the nature of an expansion is typically large enough to no longer be considered merely DLC, you can guess that length is usually not that big of a factor in determining price; a expansion with 10 hours of gameplay would sell for the same price as a 30 hour one, provided that the demand for both expansions was the same.



If ANY other factor influences the pricing of expansions significantly, it's not going to be game length or even quality, it's going to be overall cost and man hours to create the expansion with little if any regard to the results of all of that development.



N.B. None of what I have written is intended as fact, merely conjecture.

[EvilIguana966]

errant_knight wrote...

EvilIguana966 wrote...

$40 is a pretty standard expansion price. I'd be perfectly willing to pay that assuming the game lasts a decent amount of time in a playthrough. I'd expect at least 20 hours from an RPG expansion, bare minimum, and ideally quite a bit more. Fifteen would be too short for the price. The reason that people are running with fifteen right now is that so far it is the only estimate available and Bioware devs have not attempted at all to debunk it. Quite the contrary, in several cases they have defended the concept of charging $40 for 15 hours of game. It seems to me that 15 hours was at the very least the original concept for the expansion when the info was leaked if not anything final.

I would really appreciate it, however, if people would stop comparing the play time of this expansion to completely unrelated activities. You can't compare it to a movie, a book, a concert, or even a game in a different genre.

Sure you can, if you're talking about entertainment value for your dollar.

You're talking about entertainment time for your dollar, not value.  Duration is only part of value.  I can enjoy a 15 hour FPS like, say, Crysis, as much as a 60 hour RPG like DAO because, while the former is much shorter, it is also more intense and fast paced.  In short, it is a different experience that gets judged by a different standard.  It would be impossible to judge both games on the same standard because, put simply, it takes probably three or more times as much effort to create an hour of Crysis than it does to create an hour of Dragon Age.  The only fair way to judge game duration is by comparing it to other games within the genre, and by that standard 15 hours would be terribly short for a $40 game.

[Bibdy]

The absolute amount doesn't really bother me - its half the cost of a hotdog at Oakland Arena, after all...I'm just confused on the relative price. $40 for a PC game expansion seems a bit steep. Aren't the games usually about $50 and the expansions around $30?



I can only assume its going to have a good chunk of content.

[Immunis.Tribe]

I know i read it somewhere, but it was stated its a almost its whole own game theres so much content in it. If i can find the article I'd quote it, but if memory serves it's going to be the size of a full game if not larger content wise, so in my opinion 39.99 is letting us off easy.

 Found It:

" it'll just have a downloadable version as well. But it'll be fairly massive. It'll be bigger than most retail games. "                                                              - Fernando Melo found @ : http://pc.ign.com/ar.../1058656p3.html

So yeah, not expensive at all and we're probably getting more than our money worth of content.

Modifié par Immunis.Tribe, 25 janvier 2010 - 06:33 .

[JrayM16]

I do feel its a little steep but I'll just deal w/ it.

[VanDraegon]

Virusu wrote...

VanDraegon wrote...

Sammimo wrote...
Hmmm. just because I pay for it dosn't guarantee it'll be quality though, does it?

Has Bioware failed to deliver quality thus far? It is reasonable to expect the same in the expansion. We have a lot of history to look back upon to justify it.

Yes, they have. Unless you don't consider charging $5-$15 for 30 minutes worth of  bland DLC content a failure of quality. I'll give them credit for their sly marketing strategies though. Ever since EA jumped on board, the scum baggery has gone up a few notches. It's what EA is famous for. . .

The quality was still there and it fit into the official campaign seamlessly. You just dont like the price they were asking for the DLC. You have two options, get used to it or move on to a new hobby. DLC and its pricing is here to stay.

[Andaril78]

Brass_Buckles. Think of the fact that DA were completed almost one year ago but was moved until november because the console versions. So Bioware had much more time than " two months" to make this expansion. In fact Bioware have stated they have many groups who makes different things like patches, DLCs and of course the expansion. So I think the expansion has good quality and length.

(sorry, isn´t native english speaking so perhaps a bit bad english).

[SheffSteel]

If you think the x-pack isn't good value for money, maybe you could spend your gaming budget on that other game you've had your eyes on. You know the one, the game that offers better value for money, using the "gameplay hours per dollar" metric that you use to evaluate all games.

Modifié par SheffSteel, 25 janvier 2010 - 09:21 .

[Magic Zarim]

TheMadCat wrote...

Ah yes, the Gamestop employees. The stories I could share about my experiences with their "knowledge", but I'm drifting off topic here.

Just so you know hearsay is never a viable form of evidence. Now I'm not saying your wrong, you very well could be completely correct, but at this moment your evidence is garbage and doesn't really do anything to aid in your defense. Melo had made a few comments related to length and none of those really support the 15 hour theory. So we can hypothesize off of Melo's comments or we can trust the word you had with a Gamestop grunt.

This really sounds like "Oh dear god don't burst mah bubble, let the GameStop guy be a dork, give me reason to invalidate this hearsay! Please let the expansion take a lifetime to finish.."

15 hours or not.. Arguing against 15 hours is as clever as assuming it's 15 hours by default.

[Brass_Buckles]

Magic Zarim wrote...

TheMadCat wrote...

Ah yes, the Gamestop employees. The stories I could share about my experiences with their "knowledge", but I'm drifting off topic here.

Just so you know hearsay is never a viable form of evidence. Now I'm not saying your wrong, you very well could be completely correct, but at this moment your evidence is garbage and doesn't really do anything to aid in your defense. Melo had made a few comments related to length and none of those really support the 15 hour theory. So we can hypothesize off of Melo's comments or we can trust the word you had with a Gamestop grunt.

This really sounds like "Oh dear god don't burst mah bubble, let the GameStop guy be a dork, give me reason to invalidate this hearsay! Please let the expansion take a lifetime to finish.."

15 hours or not.. Arguing against 15 hours is as clever as assuming it's 15 hours by default.

This.

I readily concede that the expansion might be more (maybe even much more) or even less than 15 hours, but given that some of us heard this early on, it's as valid an amount of gameplay hours as any.   If it's more then I guess I'll be pleasantly surprised.  (And by the way, the release date that Gamestop had for the PC version originally was this month for the 13th, and that was like... Tuesday the first week of January?  The release date of Divinity II--which I don't recommend buying, by the way.  But they called to inform me that the release date was shifted for March.  There were others who were wondering/complaining at the time why the PC release date was so much sooner than the console--search the forum if you don't believe me.  That's probably one of several reasons--including bugfixes--that the PC version did not in fact release this month on Jan. 13.)

[F-C]

they are charging that much for such a little expansion because they can.



you smart people have been buying up this DLC at 10$ per hour of gameplay and telling them they are awesome for it, so at this point they now think giving you 15 hours for 40$ is giving you a great deal.



they are laughing all the way to the bank.

[TheMadCat]

Magic Zarim wrote...

This really sounds like "Oh dear god don't burst mah bubble, let the GameStop guy be a dork, give me reason to invalidate this hearsay! Please let the expansion take a lifetime to finish.."

15 hours or not.. Arguing against 15 hours is as clever as assuming it's 15 hours by default.

Actually my argument stems from Melo's comments which lends more credence to the fact the 15 hours rumor is bogus. That information is straight from the horses mouth for everyone to see while BB's persumable source (No way to verify if he's telling the truth of BS'ing us) comes from a Gamestop employee on the lowest rung of the totem poll. So no, it's not because "I don't want my bubble bursted", rather it's because BB is trying to cite a nonconfirmable and unreliable source as "evidence". I mean why should I give any hearsay the time of day when I have actual facts to go off of. Yes any argument using those facts against the 15 hour rumor is speculation at the moment. But reasonable speculatiion based on known facts is quite a few steps above hearsay. 

But for kicks I just called up a gamestop around here and asked them about it, the kid I talked to said all he knows is that they're taking preorders, you must have the original game, and it's supposed to come out the 16th of March. So either BB's source has an "in" somewhere or mines not quite up on his information. Fun stuff.

Out of curiosity though BB, perhaps you can answer this little conundrum. Why would Gamestop employees be privy to these details yet on their webpage for Awakening makes no mentition of it.

Modifié par TheMadCat, 26 janvier 2010 - 01:14 .

[grieferbastard]

You know I thought I already beat this subject like the dead horse it is somewhere else.

Some salient points to keep in mind:

By the very nature of expansion, their being an additional expense and requiring the original game to purchase, they must inevitably sell less copies than the original. Their sales are capped, so to speak, by the original copies of DA:O that go out. Do 75% of people who bought the game buy DLC? 50%? 80%? I'd say more like 50-75% of copies of DA:O will generate return revenue for DLC of any sort.

Thus you are going to generate less sales with DLC than with games. That means that in order to even break even in profit over development/publishing/licensing costs you have to charge more for each copy.

With licensing and publishing/distribution costs involving a lot of fixed expenses you hit a base production expense for a digital product - above and beyond operation expenses (salaries) and capital expenses (buying stuff). Thus, regardless of how efficient you may be at resource management for developing a product (that means how cheaply you can develope, code and produce the stuff. Minimal salary expenses, paying voice actors, keeping your coders in Mountain Dew and porn, that sort of stuff) you are going to have a set per unit costs above and beyond your inherent production expenses that goes out just to get it to the consumer.

End result? DLC can't take advantage of larger sales to recoup expenses. It's on a paper thin profit margin compared to potential game sales.

Why do it? Good question. You'll notice that almost all games that have done DLC have provided a limited amount over a short period of time and called it good. Law of diminishing returns so to speak. My hope for DA:O ( I can't speak for BioWare/EA  marketing obviously) is that it helps create and sustain a devoted fanbase and generates prolonged revenue and sales both of the game itself but lat adopter purchases of DLC. By effectively extending the 'lifetime' of the game by regular releases of additional official content for an already top-notch game you have the potential to create sales of the original game PLUS all associated DLC content several months after the original game hit the shelves. You also continue to grow your fanbase aggressively so when DA:O2 comes out it's going to blow up when it hits the streets so to speak.

It's a hit-driven industry. I'm eager to see how this approach for DA:O works. Generally this market focuses on selling a lot of games very quickly and then bleeding those profits for a few years to pay for the development of your next big hit and when possible, staggering hits in several fields. For example, EA also releases Sims 3, a number of sports titles, as well as DA:O and ME. Notice how they're staggered by fiscal quarters.

What if one game generates viable revenue for twelve months? A well-fed fanbase whos existence will almost ensure a market-crusher out of every full title release? That sort of guaranteed 1 million + units sold is what makes franchises the cash-cow of this industry.

Anyway. It's $40 because that will make it profitable if it sells to whatever projections the people who did the marketing for it made. I'll buy it. That's 2x what I paid to see Avatar and it's going to give me 1000x the entertainment. Hell, even if there's no story to Awakenings at all but just pictures of gear and hot chicks it'll still have a richer and more complex plot.

[Franpa]

Also, DLC can be used to demonstrat what can be done with the editor, giving additional ideas to people working the editor etc. 

This would, at a cost, help the public community to some degree.

Modifié par Franpa, 26 janvier 2010 - 03:21 .

[DoctorPringles]

As sort of an aside, the expansions for WoW were all $40.00, as were the expansions for Guild Wars and Neverwinter Nights. So no, charging $40 for an expansion is not new, nor different. It's exactly what everyone else charges.