most of the gog reviews are useless anyway so I think there is a bigger problem than just the reviews focusing on price.

I think he meant that price shouldn't be the entire review, if you look at most of the reviews for the game theres tons of simple rants about how over priced the game is and nothing else. I mean if your going to complain about the price of the game in the review section then at least do so in a actual review of the game.

The problem is how to measure value for money? What justifies a certain price? Should older games be confined to the 5.99 region just because of their age? Should it matter how long it takes to beat a game? Production value? Some pseudo-objective measuring unit like fun per hour? Is a game that takes five hours but is constantly fun better than a game that takes fourty hour but has about ten hours of downtime? How do you factor in multiplayer?

People judge value for money in different ways. Maybe someone who has less time will prefer a five hour shooter over a fourty hour RPG even if the RPG has still a larger total amount of fun. What if I don't care about the multiplayer mode? What if I prefer pixelated sprites over detailed polygons?

In the case of RCT3 you could say that it is twice as expensive as other games, but on the other hand Tyrian 2000 is free, so following that logic every game on GoG is too expensive.

A review should just focus on the product, what is has to offer and how those things are, because that is something you can actually judge. Value for price is too specific for each person. Sure, mention it in your review if you want, but don't base your judgement on it. People are intelligent enough to decide if something is worth the money when they are given enough information on the product.

I agree, in most part. A review is worthless - to me anyway - if it doesn't say anything about the actual game; e.g. gameplay, replayability, controls, graphics, audio, voice acting, high and low points etc. You have to play the game to be able to say anything about those factors, but you don't have to play the game to know the - current - price; it's listed right there on the page. The review is supposed to give you a way to figure out if you think it's worth the asking price - the reviewers opinion of the (then) price tag is of minimal value - you don't even know how much money he/she has to spend on game, his/her income etc.

I don't mind if the reviewer includes his/her opinion on value for money, but it should only be a very minor part of the whole review.

I basically agree. I mean, I see where posters like jamyskis are coming from, but GOG has users from all over the world, in all income brackets. To one person, $20 may be pocket change. To another person, it may represent a week's worth of groceries. So you ask them both, is something worth $20, and their opinions are going to be radically different. You really need to describe what's good and what's not about the product, and let people make up their own minds based on their own incomes whether it sounds like it would be worth it.

Also, RC 3 was somewhat of a special case, as it was the first "old game" released beyond the old 5.99$ and 9.99$ price tags.

if EVERY GAME costs 1 million dollars each, then nobody would be complaining about having to pay 14.99 for a game. but the deal is that there are so many AWSOME games for cheap cheap cheap, that there's really no excuse to charge 15 or 20 bucks for some crappy game. frankly, if i was reading a review and it said "this game is mediocre" i would probably put two and two together and realize its not worth paying 20 dollars for. you don't have to mention it.


that being said, it really doesn't bother me if people include price in their reviews, as long as they discuss how good the game is on its own merits too. but i agree, the star rating, out of five, should have nothing to do with price. it should be only on the game itself.