Recently a post from two years ago by Gabe Newell founder of Valve Software was given a lot of coverage. Gabe mentions that he thinks games are too expensive. I hate to disagree with a gaming legend, but he is wrong. Games are not too expensive. They are astonishingly good value.

So where to start really? Well I’m going to use Deus Ex: Human Revolution as my example.

More Matrix than you can shake a stick at.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DE:HR) was released August 25^th here in the UK. On Metacritic it received a high 89% average and was celebrated by fans as a great video game. It was announced all the way back in November 2007 by Eidos Montreal where a hundred staff members were working on the game and the team was expected to grow to 350 by the end of 2009.

That is just shy of a four year development which let’s say is 45 months on average (or 190 weeks). Team sizes are hard to estimate, but let’s give a low average number of 80 working on the project for all those months (even though the number probably greatly increased at times in the project) and let’s say the average for each worker’s salary was £10.00 per hour working a 40 hour week. That works out to around £32,000 a week in salaries for the studio. Let’s multiply that by the weeks worked on the project and we have a cost of salaries of £6,080,000 for the project whole. Adding on property rent, equipment, out-sourcing, marketing, sales, customer support, and every over item of expenses that go onto making a video game and you can probably add on around 12 million to that total. So in all, we can say DE:HR was around a twenty million pound project. Probably more.

Deus Ex has sold to date 647,255 copies on Xbox360, 154,607 copies on PC, and 446,733 on PS3. That’s 1,248,595 copies worldwide totally to date. Let’s say on average each copy is sold for £25 on average due to sales, second hand sales, returns etc. That means the game has made £31,214,875; a profit of roughly ten million. Which is good, don’t get me wrong, but when you think to fund another project the studio need another twenty million investment again from a publisher and things get a little tricky.

So does it not seem weird that after three weeks DE:HR Limited Edition was being sold for only £18.99 online? Well no. Obviously demand goes down and, even worse, gamers turn to second-hand sales. Every wonder why you can’t get DVDs or music in mainstream shops second hand like you can video games? That’s because DVD and Music industries clamped down on second hand sales, mostly with a competitive pricing structure. Exactly what the games industry has to do now. Batman: Arkham Asylum was a huge success, selling around 4.7 million. 1.6 million of those sales were second-hand sales. Second hand sales do damage the games industry. Its why pre-order bonuses, first-hand only DLC, and sudden drops in prices exist. But I’m not here to discuss that. I’m here to talk about how expensive games apparently are.

Let’s weigh up the game against other entertainment forms. Let’s be fair as well, DE:HR at launch was £40.00 so I will judge it at that price. According to howlongtobeat.com, it takes an average of 15 hours to beat the main story of DE:HR. So you’re paying £2.66 per hour of game play. If you want to 100% complete the game it apparently takes an average of 46 hours. So that would be 86p per hour of game play. If you waited three weeks and got the game for £18.99 it works out that you pay £1.26 per hour to complete the main story and 41p per hour if you try complete 100% of the game.

But let’s work with £2.66 an hour for DE:HR if buying at full price on release and ONLY completing the main story. How does that compare to other entertainment forms?

(The above numbers are the price I pay in my local area. I admit that they maybe more expensive or cheaper elsewhere and in your local area)

Remember; these numbers above are buying DE:HR at full price. So, aside from music, you are getting the most for your money with video games. If you buy the game at the discount price of £18.99 you are getting the best value for your money.

Let’s look also at game prices many years ago just for fun!

I can almost smell the nineties.

This ad from 1996 shows Destruction Derby at £43.97, an average at the time for new releases. Destruction Derby took on average around six hours to complete. That is an average of £7.43 per hour of gameplay. Fair enough; games were made to be played many hours over back then, but the core game could be completed within six hours.

So actually, I have to disagree with Gabe. I don’t think games are too expensive. I think gamers are getting some of the most immersive entertainment experiences at a price that is not only reasonable but incredible value. Games drop in price weeks after release. Second hand sales are huge and great value despite the damage. Steam and Onlive offer games for literally pennies without even leaving your PC screen.  And iPhone and iPad games that improve train journeys tenfold are also less than a sandwich. Considering the time that goes into making a game, I’m amazed that anyone can say gamers aren’t getting value, quality, and longevity for their money.