Retail Price & Play Time -Versus- Indie Price & Play Time

[Kosheh]

Have you ever beaten a modern videogame?
Have you ever watched the credits, and seen the hundreds of people that work on videogames now compared to the games of yesteryear?
Have you noticed many retail games try to maintain relatively high standards throughout the course of the gameplay - particularly American games, which do their best to maintain Hollywood-quality storylines, characters, and acting?
Have you also noticed that you see advertisements for those games on gaming websites, television, and magazines (lol)?
And most importantly - have you noticed that games are developed by smaller companies and then published by larger ones?

There's big companies putting big money behind their games to ensure that they're big successes in the marketplace. Retail games maintain a retail standard and therefore generally have retail prices.
When the advertising run and the purchase "boom" of that game ends, it's up to the company and/or retailers what to do with the remaining product - which is why you'll see price drops or clearanced games.

Most indie games have considerably less, well, everything to do in that regard when releasing a game. Most indie companies don't really have a huge legal department, human resource department, or a humongous facility to maintain - it's just a single floor of a building as opposed to a multiple-story complex belonging to one company. And most importantly, they'll self-publish their title, which is far less and in the end costs the consumer far less than a retail title.



That said, I'll generally be hesitant to buy a retail game at full price (or a used, uncommon game like, say Chrono Trigger or something) unless I know for sure that it'll keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes there's exceptions with some uncertainty but then on some weird whim I end up playing the absolute hell out of it (like Disney Magical World; a game I thought was going to be a dopey few hours with my girlfriend - it ended up turning into dozens of questing and grinding and one of my favorite games that I've played in 2014)

And as someone with fleeting hours of mortality, longer is not always better.

I'm reading this as "well I'm gonna die at some point better spend my time playing GOOD games"

grind till i die #yolo