You really shouldn't think of it like this. There needs to be a base cost associated with designing the engine, gameplay, graphics, audio, and story. Level design and length of the game can be extended a lot easier than consistently creating new gameplay mechanics and engine improvements can be. If you put a base cost of $10 dollars on the core game, you're paying $1.66 per hour for both games.DancingMad wrote:I guess it's sort of a "price per unit" situation?
Where in this case the unit in question is a unit of time.
If I pay $60 for a game and get 30 hours of play out of it, I just paid $2/hour.
If I pay $15 for a game and get 3 hours of play out of it, I just paid $5/hour.
Time being money etc that might be the thought process behind all of it even if you don't initially realize it.
Obviously you can't quantify FUN, so the above is specious on a lot of levels, sure, but if you have roughly the same amount of fun with that $60 game that lasts much longer in comparison, it becomes hard to justify paying so much more per hour of fun had on that shorter game.
Thing is, money is the top factor for a lot, if not most, people. Which ends up screwing over a lot of indie games, which are made by fewer people with fewer resources and it takes them LONGER to complete a 3 hour game than a bigger game company takes to complete a game with more content.
It sucks but that's how I see why things work out the way they do.
Of course, trying to quantify fun and the experience you get out of a game in dollars and cents is a more complicated process than even my example, let alone trying to quantify cost in pure game length terms.