How To Calculate A Game’s True Value From Its Price And Length

As we all know, video games are judged on four criteria: the graphics, the familiarity of the gameplay, the price, and the length. But often the “video game media” conflate such objective judgments with pernicious elements of so-called artistic merit and cultural impact. With games like the recently released but woefully short (well under 20 hours!) cult of the Lamb receive inexplicably flattering grades, something needs to be done. So forget all that. With this handy guide, we can help you never read another review or Metascore ever again.

Too many arguments rage on Twitter (and maybe TikTok?) about the nature of a game’s worth. Unfortunately, some people lately have been swayed by talk of a game’s emotional resonance on a player’s psyche, or whatever pop-psych mumbo-jumbo they can think of. But to avoid all this kotaku has devised the ideal format for rating games based on theirs Is correct Value.

Remember that games are priced primarily based on how good they are. If everything works correctly, it’s obviously a $70 game about twice as good as a $35 game, although of course it’s not an exact science – the percentages could be off a few notches here and there. (But what if a game is discounted in a sale or long after release, you might be wondering. They forget that games lose value and meaning as they age, and so this is reflected in the pricing.)

But the more important question here is what do we mean by “good”? And that’s important because here so many sites allow subjectivity to creep in when reviewing games. Fortunately, our measurement requires no such intrusion into a person’s mind, but rather the cold, precise accuracy of mathematics.

(GAME LENGTH / PRICE) x NUMBER OF DEVELOPER EMPLOYEES

Let me break that down for you.

Some will have seen arguments before that the method of judging a game should be based simply on the system of game length divided by price, where the higher the number, the better the game. But this actually leaves the whole system vulnerable to abuse and does not properly reflect the objective qualities of a game steeped in player recognition of the development studio or publisher.

It might be a fair way to do things just thinking about a game Far cry 6, where you would divide 25 by 60 and get an amazing score of 0.42. But let’s say some indie developer comes along and makes a 15 hour RPG but sells it for $3, you get 3 points! The whole system collapses when people cheat with incredibly low prices. This is solved by multiplying any score by the number of people who worked on the game in recognition of the higher quality that comes from AAA development. In this case, our solo-developed indie game stays at 3, but Far cry 6 gets the much more realistic 1.995. You can see the meaning.

This allows us to play current games such as cult of the Lamb put in the right light, after some current controversies, with many Wokerati game “journalists” screaming and crying over a Steam review brave enough to call out its paltry 17-hour runtime. For about $24 with a three-person development team who appreciates it cult of the Lamb like the 2.1 game really is.

Now the savvy developers behind Supergiant have figured out how to get around the limitations of their small team by not just developing their game Hades almost infinitely repeatable, but also cheating the total with the suggestion of being a “supergiant” studio. While they don’t get a huge multiplier for the “headcount at developer” portion of the formula, they’ve successfully tricked enough people into believing the game is better than it possibly can be, simply by exaggerating the size of their team .

However, such exceptions are few and far between. With this truly objective and fact-based method of rating games, we can see where real value can be found, where real games are pleasing Rainbow Six extraction and Balan wonder world Scores in the thousands, but these ridiculous “progressive” art games that examine the belly button are considered the single-digit games they are. Especially if they have the audacity to charge double digits.