Should a Game’s Price Affect its Review Score?

This week in the Epilogue Gaming Discord server, a series of opinions exploded around a central theme: should a game’s price affect the way it is reviewed? It began with a discussion of Joseph Anderson’s recent video examining Hollow Knight’s downloadable content – all of which has been included free with the game. In the video, Anderson makes the distinction between reviewing a video game as a product and reviewing it as art. From this starting point, many of our core community members offered their take on whether price should be considered in a holistic review.

The first line of contention when considering whether a game’s price point should be considered when reviewing the game is that money is of different value to everyone. Given this arbitrary and subjective relationship between a person and the value they place on money, some of us argued, it would be an unhelpful variable to complicate an already complicated review process. In our “Three and Out” series of reviews at Epilogue, we don’t take price into account when scoring a game. But is there something inherently wrong with acknowledging the relationship between consumer expectation and price point?

One of us made the point that they try to dissociate the two because the price of the game will be variable over time, whether a title simply goes on sale or begins to lower its initial price point over time. The art produced, and how players experience it, can be timeless in a way that price point isn’t – at least when a review is well written. Conversely, there’s an argument to be made that gaming mechanics of a time period can retrospectively become obsolete and unintuitive. They concluded their point by acknowledging how, when reviewing a $60 game the day it releases, the same arguments won’t be relevant when the game is a mere $5 several years later.

But another one of us wasn’t so sure. Price must in some fundamental sense affect any reviewer’s opinion, because if you pay $60 for a game, you most likely expect AAA quality. Sure, price is arbitrary and people value money differently, but there is some clarity to acknowledging the correlation between high-end and low-end games. And yet games like Hollow Knight that offer dozens and even hundreds of hours of high-quality content – without asking for money when releasing downloadable content – serve as relevant counterexamples to the aforementioned clarity.

Price assessment is evidently something that people want, broadly speaking. Hence the rise of a new genre on YouTube where channels produce videos and title them something to the effect of, “Days Gone: Buy it, Rent it, Wait for Sale.” These channels serve an audience that already expresses some interest in a game but is unsure of the risk they are taking in buying it on launch. Sticking with Days Gone as an example, you can find dozens of tweets in reply to official posts promoting the game that say something like, “It looks cool, but it’s one of those games where you wait for a sale to grab it.” Whether or not you agree that Days Gone is a must-grab or a wait-for-sale release is independent of the point that there is indeed a hungry market for this kind of correlation between price and game quality.

Some people, regardless of review scores, will wait for a sale on any game. Whether they have collected an enormous backlog of unplayed titles on a Steam sale, or they are currently playing something lengthy like Persona 5 and don’t see the need to jump on brand new releases, you’re going to encounter people to whom a $60 price point will never be asked of them. So to focus a review primarily on the relationship between price and quality is a dubious endeavor with a definite expiration date.

One of the hang ups made in our discussion was that, if we’re dismissing price as a review factor because the value of money is subjective, then we have good reason to be skeptical of reviews at all – because what looks interesting to play is subjective as well. Of course, it’s absurd to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Gaming is always going to be subjective, even if you can identify certain objective qualities about the game (i.e. performance). But just because gaming is subjective doesn’t preclude the value in attempting to review a game as though it were objective. Similarly, even if it’s a good idea to avoid focusing a review on a game’s price, there is value to the potential consumer if this relationship is at least included as an afterthought.

Ultimately, the divide between whether or not to include price as a consideration when reviewing a game comes down to the reader’s motivation for clicking on the review in the first place. They are either reading the review to determine whether it’s worth a purchase or they are reading it to gather people’s perspectives about the game – or both.

But would certain games be considered “better” if they were discounted on initial launch price? We came to the conclusion that games should be reviewed on the presentation of the game itself, but that price became a more relevant factor when discussing a mid-tier game (i.e. something with a 50-70 Metacritic rating) rather than a top-tier game (i.e. game of the year). The best thing you can do as a reviewer is allow the reader to assess whether they would enjoy the product, and how much they think they would enjoy it relative to the price at the time. To try and guess how much value a dollar has to your reader is a hopeless endeavor.

At the same time, price does affect how we feel about an experience. One of our community members made an analogy between video games and steak. If you buy a low cost cut of steak and it only tastes average, then, because of the price, nothing seems wrong and is perhaps what you expected. If you buy a high cost cut of steak and it only tastes average, your level of criticism will raise. You will judge the steak with higher standards because you paid more for it. We respond to video games in the same psychological way, according to this analogy.

There is a relationship between price and how we feel about an experience, but it also seems to be true that you won’t enjoy a game any more because you paid less for it. Some of the most artful games come in $20 packages, and some of the biggest, most broken disappointments come in $60 ones. A broken game is still broken, and a beautiful work of art is still beautiful.  

Maybe the two underlying philosophies our conversation identified were (1) reviews that aim their evaluations towards readers as consumers, and (2) reviews that aim their evaluations towards readers as players. At Epilogue, we tend to write for the readers as players.

Unless your background as a writer and reviewer is in Economics, there is no real point in evaluating products based on their value to consumers. Even if we ignore this point of authorial credibility, we haven’t solved the problem. Games that are expensive have more of a potential to let you down, but even a free game can be hot garbage.

There is also the counterpoint to price, which is the relationship between time and money. Some players would rather waste their money than their time, while others would rather waste time than their hard-earned paychecks. However we target the relationship between price and enjoyment, we will always return to grounding them in subjectivity. As aforementioned, even as we return to subjectivity, there is use in discussing things as though they were possibly objective. But the subjective nature here means that, if we’re reviewing a game for Epilogue, we should be nuanced in that topic. Game reviewers are not economists.

We decided that it isn’t our place as writers and reviewers to determine how our reader should feel about playing the game, which is why so many of our reviews focus on the reviewer’s experience of it. There still remains the snag of review copies. Many websites receive free copies of games in advance of their release so that gaming websites can more easily write accurate, comprehensive reviews that facilitate the promotion of a new game. If price were to be a relevant factor in their review, how might receiving and playing a game for free change the reviewer’s opinion, if at all? Hopefully not at all.

I personally think there is a simple solution to this debate. When reading the reviews of others, I always appreciate it when reviewers say something about price but don’t focus on it. A simple “And for the $60 price point at launch, it’s absolutely worth picking up right away” would do. Any more attention to that detail starts to lose me. When the game goes on sale next week, nothing about the review needs to be revised due to the detail, “at launch.” It’s a simple detail that indicates to the reader whether to purchase a game right away, or wait until a lower price point in the future.

Or, at least, I thought there was a simple solution to the debate. What about games that run as live services? What about paid DLC? How does this discussion translate to other countries like Australia, where games are not priced similarly to how they are in the United States? We don’t write for an exclusively American audience – nor would we want to – given how many of our friends live in other countries. Unless your review article is specifically headlined something like a “price comparison across countries,” I don’t think many readers would click on a review for those reasons. But the questions still remain.

So what do you think? Should a game’s price affect its review score? Is there a place for cost as a considerable aspect of reviews in general? You can add to the discussion below in the comments.

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