TheKreep

Yeah it's pretty fucking brutal.
I have a pretty hard time with beer in my belly at the best of times.

...It's probably at this point that I should admit that I've never successfully completed a centurion :(

Nope, otherwise we'd probably call it "Power Hour" and not "Centurion."

EDIT:
Does anywhere in the world do this?

From listening to the last Bombcast, my understanding of the power hour was 60 shots of beer - one per minute.
If you guys do a shot of liquor every minute for an hour, that is fucking crazy talk and I will completely concede on Australia's behalf that you guys are way more hardcore!

Pretty sure you guys are the ones who are missing out.
On 40 shots of beer.
Pansies!

Don't apologise to me - the only people you're letting down are yourselves!

We have "Centurion", which is almost the same thing, except it's a shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes.

Harden up, America!

Super Mario RPG would like to have a word with you.

One thing definitely worth noting is that MGS1 only came out less than a year after the first DualShock hit the market.
I imagine that the design of the controls for the game was built around the fact that most PSX users only had a D-Pad, face-buttons, and shoulder-buttons to interact with the game.

EDIT:
After some Googling, I was reminded that the PSX Dual Analog controller existed, but even that only came out months before the DualShock.

@ianh83:

No potential for exploitation beyond the initial purchase? How many games trail off and are poor towards the end? Game breaking bugs? How about locking you in with a $60 purchase so you are invested and then dropping the bomb that you have an incomplete product that requires $30 - $60 of DLC to be complete, or to keep playing with your friends? Not to mention all the exploitation that you admit happens before the initial purchase.

As far as the "games trail off and are poor/game breaking bugs" argument, the difference is that those games aren't designed to do that on purpose. They're mistakes.
As far as the "incomplete product" argument, yeah that's shitty, but it is well and truly the exception, and furthermore, those games aren't designed specifically around that.
That is the main part of the issue. What you propose requires game developers to design their entire game around the idea that they want you to keep giving up money, continuously, as long as you want to play it. There is no way that kind of design philosophy can foster creativity as much as one where a dev can put together a top-to-bottom experience, and charge a single nominal price for.

Also I never said that "exploitation happens before the initial purchase" because that doesn't make any sense. How can you have been exploited before you spent any money?
Literally any purchase of anything is potentially exploitative. There are just some models that are more exploitative than others.

It's a popular feature now so there's a reason a return of this model would produce even better games than before.

Charging a cost-per-game on a game that has procedurally generated content is ballistically stupid. Proc-gen works because you aren't literally wasting money if the RNG happens to be working against you.

At a point where you can get PC games that would traditionally be $20 - $60 for around $1 per 5 games from the humble bundle each week (giving devs ~10cents per game when you account for the humble cut and charity donation) the model is not sustainable. The industry is going to crash. The quality of games is going to go down and devs are going to be unable to make a living without drastic changes to how things currently work. At least the system I'm proposing rewards the dev that comes up with the game that you feel deserves a few hundred hours of your time.

That's not a problem with the "traditional" model. That's a problem that almost every creative industry has: People will always create because they want to create. Because money is secondary to a lot of our creators, they're willing to undercut each other for a better chance at getting more exposure.

You keep saying that your proposed system rewards devs for coming up with good ideas, but really, at the end of the day, it's a system that revolves around one thing: make people keep paying money.

You've skirted my example/question. The new Tom Clancy F2P multiplayer shooter offers more powerful ammo/better camo/guns that better suit your style of play for real money putting poorer players at a disadvantage. It's a F2P game aimed at "gamers". What is better? That system it is currently using; or would it be better if it was rebalanced so everyone has access to everything and everyone pays 5c per ~20minute match with 5 free matches to start

If I had to pick one of those two options (and let me reiterate: I think both are shitty), I would choose the one where everyone can play, even if some people are at a disadvantage.

@ianh83: You're being really selective about what you want to substantiate your argument with.

Why does it have to be a system to cheat players any more than the $60 model or the F2P model?

Because once someone has paid $60, they own the game, and they can play it as much as they like. There's no reason a developer would need to make a game unnecessarily hard or tedious to squeeze more money out of the player. Noo potential for exploitation beyond the initial purchase means there's no opportunity to design an entire game around that exploitation.

I'm not arguing that your model is worse than the F2P model. I think they're both just as shitty as each other.

You don't jump back in to arcade games in an entirely different "didn't see enough of the content yet" reason. You jump back in because you died and you now better understand the mechanics that killed you and so you jump back in to get a little bit further, just the same as Spelunky.

No, it's not really the same, because Arcade games generally didn't kill you dead when you lose all your lives. They gave you an opportunity to "Continue" by putting another quarter in.

Also, most of those games weren't different every time you played them. The levels were the same, and the enemy placement was the same. The whole design philosophy of Spelunky is that it wants you to develop skill and knowledge of the systems, rather than just rote memorisation. Like I said before: The game wants you to try stuff and fail so you can learn, and putting a new game behind a pay-wall actively incentivises surviving above everything else. Or I suppose you could go with a more traditional model and put in 5c if you just wanna keep playing, but that also kind of destroys everything that Spelunky is about.

I don't buy the idea that Arcade games specifically targeted a small enthusiast audience. They wouldn't limit themselves so much. You don't make money by limiting the appeal of your game. It just seems like they were targeted at an enthusiast audience because they are now only loved/still played by an enthusiast audience.

This is objectively incorrect. Yeah, they didn't limit their audience on purpose, but their audience was limited to the types of people who would go out to and spend money at an arcade. There weren't a lot of non-enthusiasts who did a lot of that.

The limitations of designing a game to run in a browser on a low powered computer created farmville.

Flash-based browser games that were actual games had been on the internet for years before Farmville was ever a thing. They were mostly targeted at an enthusiast audience as well. Farmville exists because there is a market to exploit, not because somebody thought"this would make a great game."

I don't think you need to divide people up into mainstream consumers with bad taste and "gamers". It's a problem of accessibility and not knowing better products exist. If people think that their options for entertainment are these terribly paced F2P games then they will play them, show them something better and they will play that instead.

How is that not a relevant distinction? How many gamers out there do you think actually spend money on shitty F2P games? How many Farmville players do you think would get way into Spelunky if you showed it to them?
It's not just a matter of "they just don't know any better." Shitty F2P games and actual games are two different types of products that exist for two different types of audiences that exist largely independently of one another.

Show a "gamer" Spelunky for 3 - 5 cents per life and do you really think they would turn it down?

If they had to spend 5c every time they wanted to play? Are you kidding?