With the decision to reduce the recommended retail price of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, in reaction to swaths of negative feedback regarding its length, the question of how to best to judge a game’s value is becoming increasingly relevant. While it was never a fully priced title, the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game were initially planned to be sold for $39.99, not far off from the standard $60 price point most big games launch at.
The news about Ground Zeroes’ surprisingly short campaign emerged in early February, after multiple press outlets got to spend a few hours of hands-on time with what was surely a final or very near to final build of the game. It turned out that the main campaign mission could be completed in about two hours. This is quite a contrast to the average single player game duration, which tends to range anywhere from five to ten hours. Konami has insisted that it’s more re-playable affair than past games in the series, presumably featuring a significant amount of side content. It’s fair to say however, that most players come to the Metal Gear Solid series looking for heavily narrative driven action.
The decision to reduce Ground Zeroes’ pricing raised some interesting questions over both fan interaction with developers and the perception of value in gaming. It seems unlikely that such action would have been taken had Ground Zeroes fans not opted to raise their concerns so loudly; in that sense, it’s hard not to see it as something of a victory for the consumer.
Putting a price on time spent with a single game has become an important topic as titles that buck such expectations are popping up more often. The rise of digital downloads as a delivery service has afforded developers the opportunity to experiment with pricing structure. Gone Home for example, one of last year’s most critically acclaimed indie games, launched at $20 and could easily be finished in less than two hours. Is that an inherently bad value proposition? Some felt immediately ripped off while others were more than satisfied with what got for their cash. There’s a great divide between those that prioritize quality over quantity and vice versa. Of course, the two might be very much intrinsically linked, quantity a necessity in order to achieve quality. This debate certainly applies itself in the case of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes
It seems as though we’ve been conditioned to place a massive emphasis on length as a defining determiner in whether or not the money spent on a game is money well spent. It’s something unique to gaming too; a film with running time of only an hour and twenty minutes is almost never criticised as being a bad value proposition. Rather, it is simply judged on its own merits and if the film is too short, it doesn’t have anything to do with money. One could of course counter-argue that the monetary investment in gaming in generally much higher than other mediums and so it is an intrinsically more important aspect of this industry over others.
These are questions that are going to be raised more and more often in the future, and the answers and balance between length and value aren’t likely to come easily.