How much would you pay for a game review?

[Alan Williamson]

Video Games Interactive released their first ebook game review today, for Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. It costs just over a dollar from Amazon. This naturally raises the question: would you pay for it? If not, how much would you pay? What length of review would you pay for, if any?

There's quite a lot to discuss here. I am still thinking about this, so to get the ball rolling:

- I said on Twitter that I would only pay for a review if it was comprehensive and unique. Something like John Siracusa's OS X reviews, which are available to purchase, but crucially also free at Ars Technica. I don't think anyone would want to read a game review like this, but maybe they'd want to read a review like Brendan Keogh's Killing is Harmless, which I imagine many of us have bought.
- Wesley Copeland asked if I would pay 10p for a review, and again I don't know. I feel like at that price, it's of insignificant value and therefore seems hardly worth charging for at all. There is a reason that the Kindle and Apple stores have a minimum charge.
- No one values reviews enough to pay for them. Most would not be missed if you couldn't read them; they are a commodity. Why pay for a review from VGI if you can read one at Eurogamer etc. for free that's of equal quality? For example, here's the VGI review of Thomas Was Alone and here's Eurogamer.

Without being too pessimistic (because I do wish them well), it's not something I would personally be interested in purchasing. I'd be looking for original, in-depth features like Zoya Street's Dreamcast Worlds book or Rowan Kaiser's Mass Effect compendium. With reviews, I would buy them 'in bulk', and indeed do through my EDGE subscription, but I couldn't think of an EDGE review I would buy individually.

[Ethan Gach]

I tweeted something similar to Wes about the pricing.

 

At 10p it's having to deal with Amazon at all that's the hinderance. I'd rather pay the $.99 for a 5000K word review/criticism that basically lays everything on the table--because unless the review is uniquely insightful and entertaining, at the same time (and more than most are not) I can get the broad overview, no-spoilers critique from almost anywhere else.

 

The circumstances in which I'll actually consider paying for a review are when I'm in the intial throws of just having concluded a game, and want to read anything and everything about it to help construct my own thoughts about it. I'm not the biggest fan of Tim Rogers, but I would pay for one of his reviews because their very readable and go much deeper into considering the actual game and rendering his thoughts fully.

 

The problem comes in trying to take a review format that's built around casual traffic seeking free info, and then paywalling it because "you worked hard on it." If you want to change how the material is distributed, the material itself needs to change and be better adapted to that new model. 

[Ethan Gach]

Also the buying in bulk is key I think. I'd rather pay $5 for a bundle of 10 reviews of a certain game than be asked to pay $.25 seperately for each one.

[Daniel Nye Griffiths]

The pricing is interesting - at the risk of going all Nicholas Lovell, you want your first purchase to be affordable, but also to be so beneficial that it doesn't make any sense not to make it. A dollar is _fairly_ affordable, and 10 cents is certainly affordable, but I'm not sure why it's a no-brainer for me to make that initial purchase - which is the one that gets me on the escalator/travelator etc.

There are a lot of reviews on the Internet published by people who fit some description of games journalist or another - even if that is simply "person who has a journal about games" - what might otherwise be called a games diarist or a games scrapbooker. Is there a USP for a particular one? As AW says, a very long, detailed review of a game I care about passionately has a case to be made. But Keogh's "review" of Spec Ops is intended for people who have played it, primarily, I think. And Siracusa's reviews of Apple OS upgrades are worth buying partly because their sheer length means they do not lend themselves too well to Ars Technica's CMS or website reading habits, and partly because the direction Apple takes in UX and UI has consequences far beyond Apple.

So, if I'm being asked to pay for a review in the same format as an online review, which aims at achieving the same goals, and which is written by somebody I am not already loyal to or interested in, I'm not sure where the incentive is.

In this particular case, I was actually more struck by the assertion that there was no point in doing this with news (which is true), because that was just taken from press releases (which is horribly disheartening as a statement).

[Amanda Lange]

I would rather pay for analysis than reviews. Something designed as a deconstruction of the game for someone who had already played it such as Killing is Harmless (which I also confess I haven't read yet, but it's in my stack) is more valuable to me than just a review.

[Johannes Köller]

Did VGI go back on that already? The pages seem to no longer exist.

[Alan Williamson]

Kind of:

http://www.videogamesinteractive.com/2013/05/editors-blog-is-videogame-journalism.html

It didn't go down too well. There was a lot of angry arguing on Twitter (who would have thought?) and a Facebook group, which led to Wesley taking the review down from Amazon.

[Ethan Gach]

In that case he'd probably be better served including a paypal donate plug-in/widget/whatever you call'em and do quarterly 72 hour long fund raising drives.