COLUMN: Entertainment should cost how much it’s really worth
I love all sorts of entertainment mediums. Movies, music, video games and books all call to me from every corner of the Earth, thanks to the Internet.
With the exception of a few mainstream media companies who look for ways to charge viewers, the great digital sea provides an endless bounty of fresh entertainment at little to no cost for everyone to experience and share.
I have nothing against entertainers and artists wanting to be paid for their work. It’s not a crazy idea; I would want to be paid for what I create, too.
What I don’t like in the world of entertainment is the arbitrary price tags affixed to everything with no thought as to how much something is actually worth.
What makes a compact disk worth $13, a movie ticket $10, or, the biggest culprit, a video game, worth $60 a pop?
The uniformity of these prices under-inflates works of artistic beauty, while over-inflating steaming piles of crap. Does it seem right to charge the same amount for a Beatles album as they would for a recording of someone farting into a microphone?
I can’t get too mad at music, seeing as I don't know anyone who has bought an actual album since the inception of streaming music apps like Pandora and Spotify, but I can still throw rocks at the video game industry.
With a few special exceptions, every new game is released with a $49.99 to $59.99 price tag stamped on it, regardless of how much content is actually in the game.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to bring this up, but out of all the different forms of entertainment out there, video game companies should be the biggest medium to rethink their prices.
Some games with lots of content or strong replay value, like any Bethesda RPG or Grand Theft Auto game, are easily worth $60 or more. But games that are fun yet easily finish-able in one sitting should have their prices reflect the content.
Or how about dividing a game in half and charging for what people really want to play, such as charging a couple bucks for the single player campaign in a Call of Duty game that can be finished in a few hours and charging something else entirely for the online multiplayer that never ends?
Understandably, game companies have to make enough money from their product to at least pay for the game’s production, but if there is nothing to the game, how much effort was actually put into it?
