Microsoft has long been an easy target for the pedestrian hater. Among the ranks of the Fortune 500, there is a very short list of companies that are referred to as an “Evil Empire” more frequently than our friends in Redmond. Yet, how much do people really think about the value that we derive from big, bad MSFT? Every time the price tag for new downloadable content is revealed, you can almost feel the seismic activity generated by the legions of pissed-off Halo fanboys that are stamping their feet with fists clenched and nostrils flaring.
Gamers even get upset by the mere existence of merchandise that they don’t have to buy, as if a corporate marketing strategy is capable of cheapening their pastime. This gamer always found that to be a touch unfair. Unfortunately, it is near impossible to make that point without invoking a subjective argument – one that is easily countered with: “That is what you think!”
So… I decided to build a case for the argument…
When this Overlord isn’t “smoking evil-doers out of their caves” on Coagulation, I am selling photography for a global media company. It’s a tough racket. Ironically, when you sell “photography”, your product is “invisible”. You aren’t really selling an image; you are selling a license to use that image. The product is access to intellectual property. You can’t grasp that in your sweaty hand. It’s a concept – one worth substantial revenue.
Just the other day, I was crunching what we call a “Value Proposition”. That’s a bullshit term for the sort of ammunition you fire at a question like: “What are we paying you people for?!” It’s an analysis of cost, offerings, and benefit. It’s how businesses justify what they charge. It’s also how they make consumers feel good about their capital investment.
Having finished that task, I did what I do a little too often in my place of business: I started surfing Bungie.net. While my right brain was tracking kills and deaths [more deaths than kills, truth be told], my left brain remained stuck on the notion of value. It was amusing to jump the fence of the vendor/client relationship and contemplate what I was reaping from the hard-earned dollars I had spent on products and services offered by the Microsoft Corporation – and all of its globally-dominant, wholly-owned subsidiaries.
See that? It’s the very first game of Halo 2 that I ever played on Xbox Live. Remember yours? That was me and Jericho, now Overlords in the service of the TTL Gunslingers, on recon through what had become of Battle Creek. Back then, we were just LAN Party refugees on a scoutting mission.
Since that educational cease-fire, this blog-bound Warthog Pilot has logged 4,794 games in the old Master Chief Simulator. According to the statistical wizardry made available to us at Halo 2 Junk, my average game of Halo 2 on Xbox Live lasts about 8 minutes : 40 seconds. That 8.8 minute figure encompasses every single game ever played under my trusty gamertag – from the epic CTF custom among friends to the training match in which every single opponent quits after they lose the lead by an embarrassing margin in the first 30 seconds.
Rolling right along under that fair assumption…
It can be calculated that 4,794 games translates to 703 hours, or 42,187 minutes, or 2,531,232 seconds of heart pounding carnage and mayhem. Just imagine the mountain of Battle Rifle casings left in my wake!
That body of work as a SPARTAN is the “product” that I have enjoyed as a consumer of the video game industry – and the specific corner that Microsoft has staked out for itself. Much like the product I sell at my day job, it is not something I can grasp in my hand. The game disc is just a delivery mechanism for the real deliverable. My access to Microsoft’s intellectual property has resulted in a pretended war – one that has raged in my living room for three years.
That’s what you get when you think about consumerism in terms of value. We don’t buy the beer, we buy the alcohol buzz. We don’t buy the shoes, we buy the street cred.
To better understand value, we will need to quantify “overhead”. That which we personally invest to procure a product is a crucial component when contemplating our satisfaction of said product. This is where the case study starts to sound like an advertising meme for a ubiquitous creditor…
Xbox Gaming Console… $400
Limited Edition Copy of Halo 2… $60.
Gamertag [never banned!]… $50/year
Downloadable Map Packs… $20
Commanding an army from the safety of your couch?
Priceless!!!
There are some things in life that money can’t buy.
For everything else, there is a shotgun and a ski-mask.
Moving on to the point…
Each of those long hours spent playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live cost me less than a dollar apiece. Eighty-Nine cents an hour. That equals thirteen cents a game. That also resolves itself to about a cent and a half spent every minute. Imagine a shiny, inconsequential penny dropping into a really deep jar every time a single moment passed me by in a game; and you start to understand how little it has actually cost me to become a veteran of the Halo Nation.
Compare that to what you might pay for your hourly amusement in a pool hall, video arcade, bowling alley, sporting arena, dining establishment, paint-ball venue, movie theatre, local tavern, coffee shop, casino, or brothel. Now, we are arriving at a value proposition.
It turns out that Halo 2 is the cheapest form of entertainment to which I subscribe. It’s also my favorite. That is a textbook definition of value. Gotta beef with my Math? Here is the proof, Killer.
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Click this link to enter your own gaming and financial statistics, and participate in this exercise yourself. It would be interesting to see which of you gets the biggest bang for your buck.
It begs to be said that those estimates are enormously conservative. It is hard to assign to Halo 2 the sole blame for the money I spent equipping myself with a gaming system. All of the hardware resources that were factored into this equation have been used to support other virtual campaigns of war or sport or both. When I wasn’t chasing the occassional good game in Halo 2, I was…
...racing Lamborghinis.
...battling the Locusts with Delta Squad.
...leading a revolution against Dr. Breen’s Alien Combine.
...piloting enormous Mechs for the Morskojan Army.
...or invading the Strogg homeworld.
I even liberated Mars from the forces of Satan, for crying out loud – talk about an Evil Empire worth battling!
We won’t even begin to think about Internet access or electricity. That would be crazy talk. On the flip side, if we subtract the purchase of our gaming consoles from the cost matrix, Halo 2 ends up costing pennies on the hour – to say nothing of the numerous campaigns through story missions on varying degrees of difficulty. This analysis is exclusive to exploits on Xbox Live!
So endeth the lesson. Think about all of this the next time you reach for that keyboard to flame big, bad Microsoft on your favorite Internet forum. Or, train this logic onto the person in your life who accuses you of wasting your money on video games. You will never look so good than when you are sitting on that couch.
As a gamer, you are a losing proposition for those perceived as the Bullies of Silicon Valley. That’s right. We are what business analysts refer to [affectionately] as a “Delta”, or a “Profit-Loss Center”. It turns out that “THE MAN” our gaming community lampoons for sport LOSES revenue in providing us with the service that we so richly enjoy – millions of dollars worth in revenue.
Why do they do this? Maybe it is from a place of hope that we will adopt this pastime enough to [someday] pay for it what it is truly worth. I dunno. This is where the blogger’s understanding of big business comes to an end.
Game Over. Class Dismissed.
great article deej! i’ve always thought that the amount of fun i’ve had playing halo was worth the cost of my xbox, halo disc, and XBL subscription many times over.
Since Halo came out I have spent:
$700 on consoles
$400 on controllers and head-sets
$70 on copies of Halo CE
$150 on Halo 2
$250 on XBL accounts for Gryphon and I.
and about $900 on other games…
I rarely play those other games, and aside from Chrome Hounds and Oblivion, Halo 3 (if as good as Halo 2), will justify my purchases even more.
Now, if I could only get my type S controllers to work with a 360, I’d be happy beyond beleif.
This is great DeeJ – hopefully the various sites will pick up on this one and it goes for a big ride.
I did the homework (which was easy for me as I play Halo/Halo2 99.9% of the time). Unfortunately i haven’t logged the games that many have, so my cost is on the high side at $1.83 per hour, just right at 25 cents per game. That said, my quarter for each Halo2 game i play in matchmaking lasts a lot longer than all those arcade machines i used to feed – i know i didn’t average 8.2 minutes per quarter on those!
Definitely money well spent in my opinion.
Nice spreadsheet by the way ;-)
Well put together Sai Deej.
My favorite part of it is that everything on here is factual. No room for opinions here folks, simple numbers that needed a good crunching.
Can’t argue with the Math, but it leads me to another point.
This is really one of those situations where you get out what you put in.
Someone who casually plays once or twice a month may be more inclined to flame about costs, because their enjoyment stacks up way under those of us who get on XBL several hours each week.
Paying for an XBL account, and then not playing on it? Sure, if that makes you feel better.
Personally, with my old Gamertag tacked onto my current one, I stack up to $1.29/hr for online warfare.
Not a bad deal, seeing as XBL is the most cost effective may I manage my time. (Work doesn’t count)
Solid write up.
This article has two components, people who bash MS for marketing and merchandising, and those who gripe about the overall cost of the console/entertainment.
For those who complain about the liquidation of their experience because MS licensed their IP to a gamestore who wanted to make a missle pod CD carrying case, because in their mind, who whould ever buy that.
For me, I could imagine how wide eye’d my child would be if I would come home one evening with a Halo Missle Pod CD carrying case. The build up to the game release is going to be a like Christmas so if there is something I can do to make my kid happier, give them great memories, and get them so riled up that they’ll flip out like the kid w/ the pokemon card or the N64 kid, I’ll be happy because memories like that can only happen for a short time because kids grow up, and they get jaded, and then they’ll post on message boards about MS diliting their memories by licensing the Halo 10 missle pod SuperHD-DVD carrying case.
But that’s life.
Goose.
Interesting Article, and for me, I worked it out to $1.11/hr for my online warring. That said, I haven’t been playing much recently due to bad connectivity, but oh well. This was a great read.
Geez.. With nearly 10,000 games under my names, I run to about 44 cents an hour.
That’s 6 cents per game on average.
That’s obsessive Halo playing with every spare moment for the last 3 years.
Here’s to the next 3.
Great Read Deej,
According to Halo2.junk.ws my average game time is 7 minutes 40 seconds. I have played a bit over 7,000 games. That all figures out to about 73 cents an hour. Close to just a penny a minute, but not quite. The best part about all this is that if you want more bang for your buck the solution is MORE HALO. ;)
Here are my calculations
http://o7ah.net/sigs/stats.JPG
-Compton
Here are my stats.
Hours 0.584841 58.484061
Games 0.085289 8.528926
Minutes 0.009747 0.974734
Seconds 0.000162 0.016246
Stu has me beat on the value (since I do machinima my costs are increased as I bought extra equipment and 4 copies of the game over the years) but at just over 15,000 games at less than $.09 a game or $.58 cents an hour I’d say I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
And I’m not done playing yet. ;)
Great write up Brotha! I am quite disturbed by this information. Last night for two hours worth of thrilling online slaying, those bastards at M$ got into my pockets for $1.57.
Curse you M$! Curse you to hell!!!!!!!
btw Deej 8 minutes and 40 seconds is 8.6666 minutes, not 8.8 ;)
Blech!
I use a spreadsheet to do simple math. What do you want?
Fortunately, a 0.2 variance in my time per game didn’t change my stats enough to revise the value proposition.
You wanna share your results with us, Eisen? Or did you just come here to reveal my mathematical ineptitude?
I did something similar to this a while ago, just didn’t figure out the time and whatnot. After everything was said and done, I came out with something around $29,500 spent since 2001 on Halo. Consoles, controllers, games, computer upgrades, more consoles, more games and controllers, travel expenses, game server rental, HaloImpulse expenses. With what I spent, I could currently live for TWO years, and still have money left over. That being said, I wouldn’t change anything, even though Halo 2 was a huge disappointment for me.
DJ
Dang Deej….you got me beat by an opinion ($.02) There is one slight flaw in all this in that this isn’t taking into account time spent in Campaign. Personally, I’ve spent as much time in Campaign (Delta Halo, Heroic w/Thunder, Mythic, GBP, and Catch roxdomz!) as I did playing my 4100 games. If there’s any math genishes on, perhaps they could figure out a formula to compare XBL trash talk/comments like “Woa…it’s like a post card!”.
Playing on the same XBL account you purchased on launch day of H2 = priceless.
Another mind-bending blog article, and a worthy brain-buster. Very nice, Deej.
My 8,838 games total up to 1,276 hours of Halo 2. As I’ve spent about $660 dollars (very roughly) on the total package, that ranks me at about (correct me if I’m wrong), $0.50 an hour? Something can’t be right with that. I feel dirty.
For just Halo 2, my cost comes to .44 an hour, the same as Stuicide. If you factor in the time I have spent on the Arcade alone, I am pretty sure I owe Microsoft some money.
On a serious note, my figure is not accurate. There wasn’t a place to factor in the red ring (x 4 or 5), the hassle of dealing with their difficult to communicate support system, all the repairs, the numerous warranties purchased, and the overall frustration from my consoles breaking. If there were slots to enter all that stuff, I know my numbers would be dramatically different.
I’m slightly bitter right now. But that is a whole different story. Excellent article, and I love the spreadsheet. Very thorough and well done.
There will always be misc. costs that aren’t normally accounted for.
Like, the amount of extra junk food we ate because we couldn’t break to make real food.
The amount of work missed because of the Halo 3 beta.
But with all of the hidden costs, there were hidden savings. The amount of money saved, not going to other entertainment venues because we were gaming.
The amount of friends that we gather. The 100 people on our respective friend’s list that we consider family.
I’m sitting at about .72 an hour, or .10 a game. Just wait for the H3, everyones numbers will jump
I think this is one of the best Deej, honestly.
heres my homework:
Hours0.78848078.847972
Games0.11012411.012433
Minutes0.0131411.314133
Seconds0.0002190.021902
Now, if you include the 1009+ new brothers I got in the last 6 months, the spectacular time I have with each and every one of them and the stupid things I stoped doing, That well gets that value way up, or down, how ever you want to see it. Defenitly my best investment ever!
I’ve logged in 8,315 games (a lot less than I thought) which comes out to .65 cents an hour and 9.4 cents a game. Not bad considering how much I play this game.
This doesn’t even take into account the dozens of nights I spent at LAN parties for Halo 1 & 2!
Plus I’ve played the campaign on both dozens of times, both by myself and co-op.
This game has paid for itself many times over.
Great idea, and great write up. I just shudder to think about how many days that translates into.
I’m right at about .50 per minute, and 4.35 cents per game. Not too shabby for the enjoyment it’s given me.
Stu mentioned opportunity costs and that’s a great point, but we’ll save it for a different article.
Now for the bad news: Bill Gates just saw this and Live fees are about to go through the roof.
Xbox 360 premium: $0.00 gift
Halo 2:$60
XboxliveAccounts:$100/year, I have two accounts in my name. One I use, the other mostly just sits there for a friend’s benifit.
Hours played: Let’s just not go there, k?
Bottom line ___ my gaming paid for itself (in entertainment value) in about 3 days.
Argh. I pay about 81.34 cents an hour. That’s just online!
What about all the random Halo swag I’ve spent my paychecks on (and never had buyers remorse)? I have a feeling my deposit into the First National Bank of Halo would be fairly large.
I think Locke brings up an interesting point about getting your money’s worth for a game.
Let’s say someone played Halo 2 for 8 hours a day from Nov 9th 2004 all the way up to Sept. 25th, subtract a few holidays and vacations and I’m being generous by rounding down to about 8000 hours of playing Halo 2. That would certainly be the most hardcore player that would also have to live with his parents. Anyway, this comes out to .625 of a cent per hour! Is he getting his money’s worth? No way! This imaginary gamer has soared way past the point of diminishing returns, he would have little time for life outside the screen.
Wow, this is perhaps the most well-crafted argument for gaming I have ever read. Nice!
just got around to reading this one and after using your spreadsheet i’ve arrived at these numbers:
40.431 cents per hour
5.458 cents per game
0.674 cents per minute
roughly 5 and a half cents per game? nice.