Bannerlord is a gift to us all from TaleWorlds.
It wasn't gifted to me, I bought it with hard-earned money.
Most games go for 60$ and provide only a limited time of gameplay before going stale.
"Most" games aren't 60$. Triple-A titles are, and except from some stinkers those that are usually have far higher production values and don't have such a repetitive game loop after a 10+ years development time. Sandbox games are also *designed* to be replayable for many hundreds if not thousands of hours.
If we take Bannerlord and round the price up to 50$ and play for 500 hours, then that is 0,1$ per hour, basically free. Let's say you go out with a friend and buy him a drink, and he gifts you a pen. That pen can be used for a long time before breaking down, and the only real investment you made was giving your friend a drink.
This is an absurd example, far from being applicable in the case of digital goods. But... if you really wanted to go that route as many are doing these days I could tell you that you're avoiding including the electric bill, the monthly fee of your internet access required to download/play online, the cash you could literally earn if you were working instead of playing, the MTBF of your GPU, PSU and CPU and the difference between that enjoyment or that you could have experienced while doing something else. Sounds absurd, right? Right. So was your example.
I have a wonderful tea cup bought in the UK in 1998 and have used it to drink tea thousands of times. I payed it something like 3 pounds back then. I'm not going to tell you that cup was a wonderful investment, I'm attached to it because it's part of my daily routine and has been so for many years, but another cup would have done the same job the same identical way. It's not that different with video games, or I could say that Morrowind (according to my playtime) was worth 2500 dollars for 20 years old me.
This applies here as well. We are friends with TaleWorlds because Warband was given to us in the past and now they've upped their game and given us Bannerlord.
We aren't friends with Taleworlds at all. We gave them money in exchange for a product. The previous product was satisfactory for many and enjoyed by lots of people all over the world. That made them, at the time, a good company with good business sense. Then they came out with an inferior product (given the time between the titles and the team behind it being huge compared to that they had before) which costed more and was much more unstable. That makes them a dubious company, either unable or unwilling to do their job properly. Stop being friendly with corporations and companies, THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS and you shouldn't view them as friends either.
We are grateful to have been able to enjoy so much time with Bannerlord and for being able to enjoy it further into the future.
I'm not grateful for having playtested a broken mess for a hundred hours or so. As for the future... we shall see, won't we? I'm not a prophet, but neither are you.
I never payed 50 bucks for a gift. That would have made every Christmas I celebrated when I was a kid very weird.
"Mom, here's 50 bucks!"
"Thanks honey, take this sweater!"
Seriously, if this was a bait it's a bait to master-bait to, but if it's serious I'm absolutely puzzled and flabbergasted.
?
