Movies aren’t video games. The value comes from a different place. We do not have a reasonable expectation of hours and hours of interactivity with a movie when we buy it. The movie is a passive medium. The value proposition of a movie takes this into account. (Incidentally, I don’t know anyone spending $40 on 90min-long Blu-ray movies, anyway.) The pricing model of this industry has largely been commensurate with this structure.

Video games are an active medium–there may be passive points (more now than in the past), but they are purchased with the expectation that there will be some considerable time investment in that interaction. In this case, too, the pricing model is largely solidifed. Exceptional, award-winning, industry-changing endeavours like Journey still priced themselves at $15-20 at most, if the playtime was not sufficient to charge more. People, with video games, expect that they are buying a work of some length.

$40 for 5 minutes of gameplay or 90 minutes of experience is not a good value proposition within this industry. You can point to things happening outside the industry, but that isn’t a relevant manoeuvre. As an analogue, comparing what happens in academic book publishing cannot give me a guideline for how Game Publishing ought or oughtn’t be done. The expectations on the part of the buyer and seller in both industries are entirely different.

In any case, even setting aside the false analogy, it is not sufficient to say, “People put up with this shit, therefore this shit is, in fact, OK, and not actually shit at all.”

EA has released the gaming equivalent of Malware. But I’m sure he’s right, a whole rotten mess of little future dictators are out there right now engaging in and dumping cash into it. It bids me to ponder, while psychologist have studied the effects of violent game content on aggressiveness in children (with the common and woefully inaccurate experimental models used to extrapolate almost totally irrelevant conclusions), will we ever see studies on the psychological effects of free-to-play on innocent, tabula rasa minds? Or the sympathetic/parasympathetic reactions to the decision to pay for progress in a game like this? The latter interests me more, because, somewhat paradoxically, the decision to buckle down into the commitment you’ve started with such a game actually constitutes a flight from reality, so it would be worthy to note which synaptic pathways light up for that and compare it to theoretical evolutionary mechanisms for survival.