Wow, Has everyone forgotten that games used to be $40 a pop? No one remembers that they were all 39.99 before the next gen consoles came? PC,PS2,Xbox and nintendo were all 39.99 your handhelds were 24.99 and your junk games you could get for 29.99. Then with the xbox 360 release the prices got bumped to 49.99 and people were up in arms,especially since the pc titles changed to the $50 price point. Now its "for as long as I can remember"

I loved Portal 2 it was great, but its hard to recommend a game that i beet the solo and co-op in under a day of total play. I agree with what you said about modding being future potential, but for now it's just a $50 paperweight.

One thing about portal 1 though, the reason the price point was good was the Orange box set, when you get that many of valves best game in one box, it's hard to complain that one of them only had ~5 hours of game, Portal 2 on it's own doesn't have that deal to soften the game play blow.


Edited, Apr 27th 2011 12:45pm by Talhn

I just noticed, it looks like Age of Empires is releasing an online version with beta keys open now,
sounds exciting to me.

I just wanted to dispel some of the predjudice that people have about the game.

Portal 2 is an exceptionally polished game, the level design and gameplay flow is a testiment to the quality Valve produce. Compared to a game like dragon age 2 which is long, tedious, wildly unpolished and dull as all hell this game is definately worth the money.

I may only play through the story once but i really enjoyed it, Valve have a perfect way of telling story through events, environments and things going on around you, not taking you out of the action to watch cutscenes. I agree that once you have completed a puzzle its not a challenge to play it again.

Remember, Valve are reknowned for releasing FREE DLC for their games, just wait until October or something and i'm sure they'll have a bunch of new chalenges for Co-Op. (as well as community created mods and map packs)

Hats you buy in TF2 are compatable with Portal 2 Coop robots too.

The difficulty in this game isnt hard but thats because the game design is so strong that they teach you how to play and interact with new mechanics, so i dont understand why people seem to think that being stuck is a good thing, it's just frustrating.

the game is much longer than 4 hours, i've spent 16 hours on it already, I expect to see this as game of the year.
(By the way im not a valve fanboy, i just know about what makes a quality game.)

Edited, Apr 22nd 2011 6:19pm by Chard6

Living in Sweden, I am fully used to buying games at a higher cost than I would have in the states, but the price for this game is prohibitively expensive. It costs as much as a normal game, which as I stated is normaly higher that in the states, but at current exchange rates the 600 sek it costs translates into roughly 100 dollars. I consider this to be to high a price for the amount of entertainement you get out of the game.

I think a lot of the people complaining that it was a short game and therefor not worth $50 are focusing purely on the time it takes to complete it and ignoring the co-op mode which is really a whole second game as well as the overall story. For me I brought Portal 2 not because I thought it would be some amazing time sink, but because I wanted more Portal flinging fun with the continuation of a very awesome story.

A big piece of the Portal fan base is set around that story, sure the gameplay is cool and it won many with that alone but its the Chell, GlaDOS, Companion Cube, Aperture story that keep many in love. That spawned all kinds of fan theory's, art, Prequels etc.
In my opinion this game did a great job of "possibly" concluding the Chell storyline while doing an amazing job of giving us all the Aperture/Cave Johnson back story in game.

All that at a price point and play time equal to many other Console/PC game nowadays makes this well worth the $50 and that's USD, I payed more once it was converted to my dollar.

1. 8 hours and then your done: You said it yourself, once you get through the content once there is no real draw to play again. However the user created content may be strong enough to give the game more life, but its hard to make that kind of prediction. Console gamers won't see much benefit from user created content.

EDIT: I'm reading that the time issue may not be a legitimate complaint as it seems as though Steams timer is on the fritz. How people don't recognize it took them longer than 4 hours to beat a game is beyond me though.

2. Portal is a puzzle game: Puzzle games have traditionally been thought of as what I would call "lesser" games. By that I mean that people can enjoy playing them and even think their awesome, but will rarely see them justifying a 50$ purchase. It might be an unfair bias, but it is definitely there.

3. Portal 1 was sold at a value price: As others have said the first game was included in a relatively cheap bundle package as an afterthought. Jumping from that very low price point up to 50$ is going to throw a lot of people off. I would argue that if the original Portal had been priced at 50$ it would not have been nearly as popular with fans and critics.

4. Co-op is not generally recognized as an essential part to a game: Yes playing co-op can make a game funner, but most people do not feel a need to play a game with other players to experience what the game has to offer. Now obviously in Portal 2's case co-op offers a whole new experience lasting as long as the single player mode. Still I would argue that it is hard for people to get passed the prejudice against co-op that has been built into their brain.

4a. Not everyone has friends into the same types of games: Most of my Gamer buddies are FPS fanatics so I rarely get them to play games outside that genre. I also have never found much enjoyment with playing with some stranger online so there is little recourse offered to me in terms of co-op. Now while this may not be the developers fault, if a game's full experience relies on co-op then I am likely to shy away from spending money on the game when I know I will not get everything I can out of it. I doubt that I am the only person who finds themselves in this position.

Edited, Apr 21st 2011 3:39pm by iamBQB

I do agree with you that the co op has to be included in the length of the content, but 8-10 hours of gameplay isn't really a lot of gameplay. Compare that to an MMO, you pay 50$ and then spend the whole 24 hours of the first day playing the game, and then keep playing it every day for a month (only counting the first month because it becomes more complicated if you add in monthly fees). Most FPS or strategy games are going to cost you 50$ but will also get you a lot more gameplay due to the multiplayer content. Sometimes even the single player content lasts longer than 10 hours, but I wouldn't get my hopes up for an FPS having any decent amount of single player content.

Midway point: Portal is an FPS so people really shouldn't be surprised it lacks content. I pretty much expected that and only purchased it because of peer pressure.

Secondly, 50$ isn't the only price you'll pay for games any more. There are lots and lots of indie titles, or even titles from less popular studios, that cost 30$ or less. There are plenty of good games you can get for 10$. They might not have more than 10 hours of content, depending on the game, but if Portal 2 had only been 30$ I would've felt that was a decent price.

As a final note I think Portal 2 was an excellent game outside of price issues. I did very much enjoy my limited time playing it. In the end I felt kind of ripped off, though, which I expected when I first saw the price tag a month or two ago.

I think the reason why the solo campaign time is getting more attention than the time of completing the solo+co-op together is that it isn't really the norm (at least in my experience) with games that the co-op is vastly different from the solo stuff.

Also it probably isn't that those complaining have no friends but rather having... a limited number of gamer friends and having to wait until one is available to play through with you ^_^

Might be sticker shock, compared to the original I guess you could see portal 2 as exorbitant if a lot of people got it for free or picked it up for a couple of bucks. I know I was taken aback by the price originally but I mean... $50 is way way cheaper than a night out, hell its practically cheaper than going to the movies, so I'm not really complaining. The game is polished and well made, and to me worth the $$

People complaining could always just wait till the game's been out for a while and the price point comes down :P

I'm not done with the single player yet but finished the co-op last night. Yeah there weren't any puzzles that fooled us for long but it was still fun. That is the main thing I look for when paying for any entertainment. I've spent that much or more for sports events that last 2 hours. If doing both sides of Portal 2 takes 8-12 hours, figure average movie is 2 hours, my local theater costs $10, so thats $40-$60.

Portal 2 is way better than most movies.

I can see where some just count the single player, because most games still released are single player type games. Portal isn't a FPS or a MMO so its not going to have that same huge draw for multiplayer action. Still though since a lot of work was spent on multiplayer and its in the game, it counts as content whether you play it or not. Just how it is. I think there is a mentality about the price of a game sequel that is more expensive than its original. Like how well did Geometry Wars do as a full retail game. It's a lot of "i bought p1 at cheap price, why is p2 so much more?" Also we're used to cheaper games now days. We spend lots of our money on PSN/XLive/Wiiware/Phone. None of them usually pass 10-20 bucks. People were raging that Limbo only had like 3-4 hours of gameplay and it was what, like 15 dollars? Seems its just a mentality of gamers. RPG X has 120 hours of gameplay for 60 dollars, why is this 9 hour game 50? I have no problem with the 50 dollar price. The game has nice visuals, will take me way longer than 4 hours because i fail at puzzles, good voice acting, and hopefully more levels in the future. I would figure the cost to make it justifies the price. Plus nothing wrong with starting high and price dropping over time. Get the suckers, and still get the rest of us later for a profit. Win! Wow wallotext.

While we've been conditioned to paying 50 bucks for video games since i can remember buying my first at toys r us in the late 80s/early 90s (ugh getting older)... I read an article on joystiq today regarding the battle thats going on with mobile devs vs the major dev houses like nintendo.

I spent 99 cents on battlehearts and just looked at my /played time on the one save i have... It was 8 hours

Compare that to a game like portal and its 8 hours of single player/co-op content from a ***Purely*** "time it kept me content playing it" stand point and its kind of a holy sh*t moment.. for me at least.

It'll be very interesting to see how that price point fairs over the next couple years or so.

Personally I think Portal 2 should have been around $35. Clearly super polished, good voice acting, well thought out, dev time, graphics teams etc etc etc. That is worth something.. Kongfu also points out that a game like dragon age 2 thats just as polished (if not more so) at the 60$ price point contains way more then 8 hours of gameplay.

if anything holds portal 2 back, it will definitely be the price point.

A lot of people don't realize that people who make games are people. And like money. They will always charge you more then what they should that's why the gaming industry is an industry.