[Music] thank you for watching today this is kir welcome to another Starfield video since last Sunday when the June update dropped we've been swimming in some of the most fascinating arguments over Creations mods and DLC that I've seen in a while while my instinct is not to advise people to buy or not buy specific DLC the discussions have raised questions for me in this video I'm going to cover the history of pricing for games and DLC adjusted for inflation I'm going to take a quick look at the Starfield mod and creation ecosystem and I'm going to compare Starfield entertainment cost per hour to Alternatives finally I'm going to offer what I think is a realistic framework for assessing the value of the tracker Alliance DLC that could help you make a decision on it so let's get started so before I dive into this I do want to say that I'm going to try very hard to maintain a positive and objective attitude about the content and the discussion around it it's very easy to get wrapped up in the drama surrounding this and so I don't want to be cynical about this I want to be objective about this and I want to basically take apart the pieces that are subject and can be revealed using data and Analysis now since this is essentially a one-way dialogue I'm going to go ahead and tell you five ground rules that I'm going to use in order to convey this information to you the first is we all have agency or free will or whatever you want to call it we all get to decide whether we're going to buy or not buy anything that comes in front of us we're not victims in this process no one's forcing us no one's twisting our arm behind the back what we're trying to do is make a decision based on reasonably accurate information two Bethesda is demonstrably successful and good at this it's hard to argue that from a cultural or a gaming perspective that over the past two decades they have not been very successful their recent acquisition by Microsoft is one of the most clearest indicators within modern human society that their success is recognized and has specific value three the best decisions we can make are generally based on facts and data not speculation and not fear and panic that's being booed about the internet by people who may or may not have an agenda for I have biases and I will explain those the easiest and simplest bias to explain is the fact that I'm a Creator on YouTube and it means I would probably buy all this content just to show it to you anyway and I hope to do that so even if you have decided not to buy any of this yet or ever for that matter and you're considering it you should be able to watch the content that I put out and make some kind of reasonably inform decision as to whether it looks interesting to you or not and finally I'm not going to tell anybody to buy content or not buy content my real goal here is just to apply some analysis provide you with some data and some ways to look at this ways to frame these things and decide whether you are interested in them or not so with that let's get moving so the question that came to mind for me was first and foremost is the DLC priced appropriately but in order to answer that question I needed to go back and ask myself whether the games themselves were priced appropriately at all now fortunately for me I have been buying games for a long time and so I've gone back in the table that you can see on the screen right now to 2006 in the release of Oblivion I remember buying Oblivion I'm pretty sure I bought it on two platforms both an Xbox at the time and PC and the pricing for Oblivion although it's not in Steam we could go back and I found an article in in gadget the pricing was at $59.99 for the standard edition and there was a collector's edition which I think was $10 more but I wanted to be able to to look at this information and decide whether a game price in 2006 is a different price if it was released today and I needed to be able to look at that and compare that to games that have been released over time and you can see from this chart I picked four games those games are Oblivion Skyrim Fallout 4 and Starfield and the process here if we go from left to right is to list those games and then we'll get to some of the DLC as well but then going from top to bottom I'm going to go from the Year 2006 through the year 2024 I use the data up through 2023 in the calculations in the individual celles to the spreadsheet so if I look at a bivion at launch at $59.99 and I roll that forward Year bye it's modern price would be $93 now we know that Bethesda or any game company is not going to increment the game price by a $192 on a year-to-year basis prices are actually kind of sticky and they might stay at a certain point for a while and they might change at the next release etc etc and we also know that these game especially the three that have already been out for a long time have gone through multiple cycles of discounts so for those of you who are buying on Steam you know that a game that has been out for us an extended period of time is going to become available and in a lot in a lot of cases is going to be heavily discounted around the holidays or during the summer and special sales that steam does so what I'm using are the original prices of the games the price that the game was offered to the public when it was launched and I do the same thing for the DLC what we can clearly see across four titles is that from 2006 to 2023 Oblivion was at $93 if expressed in today's dollars inflation adjusted Skyrim launched at $49.99 which was a pretty good price compared to Oblivion just a few years earlier but if we rolled that forward is just under $70 today Fallout launched at $59.99 in 2015 if we roll that forward is around $77 today and Starfield launched last year with a base cost of $69.99 so the first question I ask myself is is Starfield reasonably priced in the first place probably is from a historical perspective now we could have an entirely separate discussion about the cost of producing these games I'm not going to do that here but I will note that from my initial research Oblivion was listed at around a $10 million development cost recent discussions about Starfield put that number closer to 400 million and if you look at the discussions around Skyrim and Fallout along the way way they kept going up over time so the cost of produce these games is dramatically higher than it's ever been and yet the price to a consumer in inflation adjusted terms is actually lower than one would expected if we went all the way back to Oblivion so as I move across this table from left to right you may notice there's a very long column titled marun razor this was a DLC that was released back in 2006 for the Oblivion game I remember buying it it was released at $22.99 and if I inflation adjust that forward that content would be released at $465 probably rounded up to $5 today that's worth keeping in mind as we compare the others far Harbor for Fallout 4 was released in 2016 as was Nua world I have a separate chart and we'll go talk about that in just a moment about the DLCs for Fallout 4 because they're fairly recent and a pretty good comparison of what type of pricing was employed now I've seen multiple people say that far far Harbor cost them $15 I suspect that was a discounted price because if I go to fandom.com which is a relatively well sourced Wiki on the subject of Fallout 4 it lists the original price at $25 or $24.99 Nua world was at $19.99 I roll those both forward adjust them for inflation and we come up with $32 $25 respectively and on the far right in the last column we have the trackers Alliance vulture TLC which was released at $7 and we'll talk about that one as well but first I want to spend a couple minutes talking about the Fallout 4 DLC because I went back in time to the same Wiki and I'll include the links in the description and I looked at all the DLC that's been released for Fallout 4 I looked at the dates it was released and I looked at the price that it was released at what we can see from this list is that the prices at release ranged from $5 effectively up to $25 now I've added one more source of data into this chart and it's a website called how long to be many of you may be familiar with it already and the great thing about how long to beat is that it is arguably a fairly objective website it's unlikely that people are gaming the system or misreporting data or trying to to make content that was eight years old look bad so we can go to it and we can get some pretty reasonable data on the top level metrics associated with a particular piece of downloadable content in this particular case how long to beat shows us how long it takes to play the main quest the main quest plus sides they show what people report as their completionist approach and then they give us an all styles which I generally interpret to be an average but I'm not going to use it so we'll just list it here but not have to talk about it much in a lot of cases people buy the DLC and they play it for far longer than somebody else plays it for and in those cases your cost per hour for the entertainment value is dramatically lower but if we go at the minimum level and we just look at what it takes to get through the main quest we have pretty good data that's a available on how long to beat for the Fallout 4 DLC so I'm going to focus on two specific dlc's far Harbor and Nua World these are the most expensive DLCs at $24.99 and $ 19.99 how long to beat list the time to complete these specific DLCs as 7 hours and 11 hours if I do a simple calculation what that comes out to is $182 per hour for nuca world or $357 per hour for far Harbor keep in mind these are values from 2016 when we go back to the other chart we'll see what that relates to in 2024 so if we return to this chart which is the cost of Bethesda games and DLC over time inflation adjusted I've already talked about maron's razor which I inflation adjusted up to $465 and I've mentioned far Harbor and NC World which are $32.25 if I apply the number of hours that we can find on the website how long to beat 7 hours and hours respectively we see that the average cost per hour of entertainment for each of these titles in the Fallout 4 category is $459 an hour or $2.33 an hour now some of you will immediately notice in the bottom right hand corner that I have put 1.75 hours as the amount of time it takes to complete the trackers Alliance content I'll talk about that later in the video but the immediate result is that the cost per hour of the content that was provided in the June update is around $4 per hour that's lower than far Harbor it's higher than NC world it's higher than marun Razer when adjusted for inflation so having looked at the Historical value of games and what they would cost us today and looked at several DLC items their launch price and what the equivalent would be today and comparing those to the amount of raw time that one would spend being able to play those the other area I wanted to look at before proceeding was that the mod ecosystem as a whole and when I say mods I'm referring to the Creations that are in the creation store and I'm talking about mods in other places so the first place I'm going to look is at nexusmods.com between two editions of Skyrim Fallout 4 Fallout New Vegas and Starfield we're well over 200,000 mods at this site so this is a pretty good place to take some initial points of data and determine whether Starfield has a mod problem as you might expect I copi these into a spreadsheet so I could do a couple of simple C calculations on them and primarily what I wanted to know was given the number of years or months that have passed since the game was launched if the rate of mod development and publication gives us any insight as to whether this game has good mod support and I realize that's actually a very subjective decision but I'm really just going to go for a very high Lev cut against this thing my take on this at this point in time is that with 7600 mods for Starfield only out for 9 months the rate of mod development is about 844 mods per month if I go back to Fallout New Vegas in the number of months and years that it's been out it has about 259 same thing as I go back further into Skyrim 385 Skyrim uh the Skyrim special edition is at 724 which is pretty close now I don't know between Skyrim the two editions of Skyrim how many of those mods have been let's say recompiled and re-released and are duplicates between the two platforms ultimately all I really want to know is is the rate of mod development and publication for Starfield on par with what we see in other games and I don't have any concerns based on this I do think you can do some very high level comparisons here so for example if we look at Skyrim from 2011 where there are 60,000 mods and we look at Starfield with 7600 mods there's roughly a 9x 10x difference between the two if I look at monthly downloads of 29 million a month and I just divide that by 10 that's 2.9 Million a month if I look at Starfield our monthly downloads are 5 million a month those aren't off by a ma an order of magnitude and it seems normal that Starfield downloads would be higher at this point in time given that it's a new game Skyrim downloads from the original version are still really healthy but it doesn't provide me with any concerns about Starfield mods the modding Community or the amount of mods that are being used by people at this point in time they seem to be in line okay so the last stop on assessing the health of the mod Community is to look at the Creations that were just launched a week ago and this is brand new information and frankly a week is almost not enough time to make any real determinations on however the Bethesda store does give us a ranking by popularity I believe it's ranked by the number of thumbs UPS or likes essentially on a mod it's not purely ranked on the number of purchases or downloads now bethesda's websites a little confusing in my opinion they do refer to these as plays and not downloads or purchases directly if you look at the front page and you display it as a list you will see a play indicator next to each one of the Creations that are listed and those numbers actually are considerably higher than the number that is listed next to the play indicator icon when you look at the mod or the creation itself so for example if I'm looking at the list at the starborn gravis suit which is the number one most popular Creation in the store it says that it has 2, 304,000 plays if you open up that particular creation Page by itself there's a different listing for the number of plays and it's 83,000 now I really just want relative comparable data that's primarily what I'm after it's not really important to me that it's 83,000 because I think 750,000 would be too low or something to that if effect I just want to be able to look at it and say something like the starborn gravis suit is a relatively lowrisk creation that people can add to their game it's just a costume just for your character it doesn't change a lot of functionality around it it doesn't have to interact with a tremendous number of things and so if I look at it and I couple that with the fact that it has a price of zero we can see that if 800,000 people have downloaded it that's a nice Baseline for comparison with other items it is the most popular that makes a lot of sense to us in a lot of different ways the observatory being less popular because fewer people perhaps build outposts and fewer people might actually know why they want this Observatory that makes sense as well the blackout drum beat skin if you're not using a drum beat in the game you may pick up this skin but you may not be using it it's not going to be flying off the shelf now the rest of the items in this list are not provided by Bethesda except for the ones you see in the far right hand column that say Bethesda and I wanted to lift those as well because some of them have relatively low downloads but they're very popular unlimited resources ammo cheat room uh improved follower Behavior things like that it's good to know where those are at I don't have an easy way within their store to look at just the paid mods but I'd like to do that at some point in time in the future maybe I can Discover it when we get down to number nine on this list we see the trackers Alliance the vulture paid DLC that is the source of so much controversy we'll get back to that one later but I did also want to add at the bottom of the list the two other paid Bethesda Creations the Ancient Mariner module and the constellation plushy set I wanted those both on there for two reasons one is they don't seem to be controversial and two they give us another set of data points for something that actually has a monetary value associated with it the constellation plushy set sells for $3 or 300 points so it's $3 equivalent and it looks like they have sold 55,000 of these generating around 165,000 in Revenue equivalent revenue or not we don't know if that's money that was spent based on creation credits that were included in premium purchases at the start or if people swiped a credit card and added that at the last minute the Ancient Mariner module is actually the most expensive paid module that they offer at the at this point and it's $10 and I don't hear a lot of controversy about that one it's interesting because I think people interpret it as being primarily a cosmetic module however it is very much a pay for convenience module once you get into it and you take a look around there is a large storage chest in the Ancient Mariner module that gives you unlimited storage just like the storage chests at the lodge do so now instead of having unlimited storage exclusively in your room at the lodge or in the basement in the crafting area you can now place the chest that is part of your build menu your Outpost and ship decorating menu you can place that chest in your ships or at your Outpost and have un limited storage at any place you want in the game so Bethesda has introduced into a single player game a pay for convenience option in the form of an ancient mariner module and a specific chest so it's an interesting data point and only about 65,000 people appear to have purchased it at this point in time the more interesting paid creation is the trackers Alliance creation and this specific item appears at this point in time to have sold 400,000 copies virtually that makes it about a $2.7 million piece of downloadable content now once again we don't know how many people acquired this using the 1,000 creation credits that were included in their Premium Edition and how many people paid for it outright on top of that but it's still a pretty good number and it's higher than any of the other paid content that Bethesda has offered us so I think from this measure if I look at what's going on at Nexus mods the volume of mods that are largely free at Nexus mods for the PC players only seems to be healthy and in line with the same monthly rates that we see across the entire Bethesda line if we look at the creation store and what's happening just in the first week these mods are selling as well and there are quite a few mods that are very popular and still have brisk download rates that are coming from independent creators as well I think having an independent mod Creator environment supporting and flowing into the creation store is good for everyone so at this point we've looked at the historical pricing of Bethesda games in general we've looked at the historical pricing of Bethesda DLC we've rolled those prices forward using inflation adjustments so that we can see what they compare to today and the ultimate result is that they're not out of line the price for Starfield wasn't out of line in the first place and the price for the DLC isn't out of line for first place now we still have to address the issue of what are the comparables like what is out of line compared to other forms of entertainment and then I think there's some time I want to spend talking about the trackers Alliance DLC as a whole and not just the vulture piece so we can think about how it compares to the type of content we've seen in the past so that at some point in time we can make a value judgment as to whether what they're offering is worth anything or if it's high low or otherwise so what does any of this mean when it comes to deciding whether you're going to buy a piece of DLC or cont content all I can do is share with you the way that I think about this I look at the games I play and I feel very fortunate because steam gives me the ability to look at specific games and see exactly how many hours I've played them and I look at those games and I ask myself what am I paying per hour to play that game and there are times and it's not in the middle of the game and it's not when I'm playing usually but there are times when I look at a game and I say that's far too expensive for me given the amount of time I am not playing it Starfield is not one of those games my play time in Starfield just to be transparent is over 1,400 hours at this point in time now a percentage of that is time that I spend making videos that I can share with you a lot of that time is me playing the game and just enjoying it so my cost per hour of entertainment is at 7 cents an hour now I have bought all the content that Bethesda offers and when I add that into this cost it does change my hourly cost for entertainment but not by much we're talking pennies per hour at this point and that's just because I've played the game so much and so it is naturally one of those things where if you have only played this game for a short amount of time and you keep buying additional content your overall cost per hour is going to increase faster if you've played this game quite a bit and you add some content in here or there your overall cost for entertainment isn't going to move much if you're one of the people who played Starfield for 23 and a half hours did the main quests and quote unquote beat it and walked away your cost per hour for playing Starfield from the original purchase price of $69.99 is closer to $2.80 an hour as a comparison if you were to buy a paperback copy of Ender Game and read that book at an average reading speed of about 250 words per minute that book would cost you $160 to enjoy for the amount of time it takes I think that's a fairly short read at 5 hours 6 hours something like that if you play Starfield doing the main quest and the side quests according to how long to beat and you put in close to 75 hours you've broken below the $1 per hour mark As far as entertainment value goes and this just occurred to me while I was doing this but I recently watched the Shogun series that was released on streaming and I remember reading the book Shogun long ago it's a long book and at the same reading rate if I were to buy the Kindle version which I think I can get for $10 reading Shogun would cost me about 47 cents per hour I think it's 21 22 hours to finish that book now I'm of course not looking at the clock while I'm reading Shogun and trying to determine what my cost per hour is however occasionally when I want to step back and look at it and say well what am I paying for entertainment what would I spend my time with I do tend to balance things out there are things that I do that are very low cost per hour and there are things that I do that are very high cost per hour if you look at the bottom of this list and I'm not really a big golfer but I did go out and look at the price of this top golf place that I've seen pop up here and there they went $35 an hour to go hit golf balls off the third floor of a building into a large net when I look at my own motorcycles and the amount of time I've ridden them the distance do some calculations here and there and then I look at the overall costs they cost me $25 an hour to operate I don't really go to movies in the theater that often so I went ahead and I looked up Garfield because it seems to be out right now and movies at this point in time are almost $7 an hour before you buy an overpriced drink or popcorn when we get to things like Netflix using average consumption data that was published in 2020 during the height of a very specific event we won't talk about in detail the average amount that people are paying per entertainment hour on Netflix if they're watching about 100 hours a month is close to 16 cents an hour that's not too far off of the data that World of Warcraft publishes when they say that their players are playing about 25 hours a week if you look at the monthly subscription price for World of Warcraft it's in that same range as well so that's a fair amount of data the question that still comes back is what is the value of the DLC that Bethesda has just offered to the public The Trackers Alliance DLC now if you remember earlier in the chart where I was listing the DLC and what the values were and what the equivalent cost per hour was for something like far Harbor or for Nua world or for marun Razer I included trackers Alliance and I listed it at 1.75 hours and on this chart I'm listing why I think it's at 1.75 hours I am of course disregarding the argument that the $7 charge is exclusively for a 15minute quest first of all because it's not a 15minute minut Quest you can watch my videos and you can see how long it takes to actually play through that Quest the 15 minutes is some kind of strange misrepresentation that seems to be going around the internet I'm not real worried about that it's just not true however the framing that I apply to this is that the entire trackers Alliance content system is what I was given in the June update and much like at the end of a meal when I assess the value that I have received from the service staff when I'm deciding what my tip is I'm looking at the value of the entire DLC at this point in time and I'm looking at it and thinking Bethesda gave us a certain amount of value in the first part of this that they didn't charge anybody for I don't think that was a mistake on their part I think they knew exactly what they were doing they also believe that if they give us access to that or they give people access to that even if they don't buy it today that they are much more likely to buy content in the future only time will tell regardless of that I'm looking an entire list here of all the things that they have provided within the trackers Alliance DLC and that starts with the moment the unnamed tracker arrives outside the lodge or Sedonia or wherever you happen to meet her and she invites you to come join the tracker Alliance that involves the trip there the entrance to the trackers Alliance Headquarters the first floor which is the only place you can go until you actually complete the first mission and you unlock the basement that includes the new Astra currency the new functionality for your scanner so you can find bounties it includes the first Quest and the second Quest it includes the ability to trade astras for legendary gear on demand which is pretty significant as well and it includes the three options on the second Quest as well so when I total all that stuff up and you can go watch the videos that I've already published that is an hour and a half or that's easily an hour and a half to two hours worth of content I didn't rush through it but I also don't think I spent all the time in the world looting and exploring everything that was out there I just took kind of a casual Pace to get through it so the actual amount of time is probably closer to 1 and a half to 2 hours and if I compare that to the cost of the second part of the DLC which is the only part they've even suggested that people pay for at $7 it's well within the range of two to four and55 that we see in DLC consistently if I actually look at it as the total package of content and I total it all up I probably would have personally paid more than $7 for the entire thing Bethesda could have made the entire thing inaccessible to anyone unless they paid for it that was a choice on their part you can decide whether that's valuable or not to you I'm not terribly concerned about $7 and that's me personally and as I told you in my bias I would have paid for all of this content anyway so I could share it on the channel however I'll also note that I've seen people piss away $7 a day at Starbucks and a hundred other places when I look at my comparables there are so many other things that $7 doesn't really cause me a lot of concerns from a raw dollar value now there is one really really really strong argument I have heard about how to compare the value of DLC or content and this was from a family member who said to me there are a lot of really great games available older games on on Steam that you can pick up for $5 some of those games are multiplayer and if you haven't played them yet you don't know if one of those games is going to turn into a 500 or a 1,000 hour game for you or if they're a multiplayer game if they're going to be just 10 times the fun because you're going to play it with four or five other friends that's an incredible argument in my opinion it's still comes back to this if you like Starfield and you like the content and you want more of it making a decision on the type of content that you're looking at and whether it looks interesting seems like a good choice in my book I don't buy into the exaggerated claims about the value of $7 and whether it's too much or this that and the other and I don't spend much time Imagining the future and and I've been very fortunate since 2006 that Bethesda hasn't beaten down my door and and forced me to buy 17 sets of horse armor it's just not happened each time I'm offered a choice I get to decide whether it's useful to me or not and so far it's been reasonable and it's only been two decades I personally don't have a high expectation that that's going to change in the future so I'm not going to spend a lot of time worrying about it I do suspect in the future I will be offered more content with a price tag associated with it I will have the ability to make that decision at that point in time I hope I'm still providing content for everybody so that decision will be easy for me I'll just pick it up and show you what's in it but I think I'm G to follow the same process that I've outlined here even if I'm not producing content for online consumption so that's it that's everything I can think of about this DLC I've played it for you I've put it out in videos I'll have links to those in the description as well I'm very interested to know whether you are going to buy this or not I'm not bothered if you don't it is your choice I'm not even bothered if you look at the way that I've bundled it all together and decided that it's one piece of DLC and you don't agree with that that's okay you're welcome to worry about the future or not worry about the future you welcome to play this content or not play this content thank you for watching all the way to the end I really appreciate it remember Simplicity is an exact medium between too little and too much it is the final achievement the crowning reward of art if you enjoyed this video please hit the like button subscribe and get notifications this is caner and I'm out of here
