The Cost of 'Fun'

Triple AAA, Steam, Indie, Free-to-play. These are probably just a few of the labels that are pasted onto video games. Another thing pasted onto them(Since you know, they are products), is price tags.

But then I've been thinking:
How do you measure the 'value' of fun a game has and put a price tag on it? (I.E Monetization in gaming).
So I made a list of how games have been earning bucks.

When in arcades, their source of income come from pennies. Coins. The game cabinets required a small amount per play.Arcade tokens soon came in, being a kind of 'exchanged currency' for you to use in that land of fun, though now arcade credits are stored in smart cards(Thank heavens. Those tokens were nightmarish to keep and heavy...).  An arcade game's earnings are mostly dependent on the user(s), how good they are at the game and how much their willing to fork out to keep playing, though there were some machines that were rigged to only /possibly/ give a win after a certain amount of plays, doll catchers or prize machines to be specific. Though not as popular as before, arcades still have an appeal, seeing that the cost per play was cheap and that certain games are pretty much exclusive to them due to the software and hardware, such as guitar controllers. Though the games are cheap to play, it's the travel fares to arcades that probably take a bulk of expenditure(For those unfortunate to be far from one anyway).

As for game consoles, their income of course came from the games sold (Originally anyway). Back when gaming was first starting, there probably wasn't much on games design or quality control in the industry, so early games could be made by almost anyone who knows programming. Such a bloat of terrible games of course caused consumers to start doubting publishers, with one of the last straws being E.T for the Atari.
This decline in trust for video games lead to its major collapse.

Infamous for being a major part of the 

industry crash in 1983

After it was revived, the industry seemed slowly picked up on the concept of proper quality checks(for the most part, anyway). It would seem that these console games had to measure their costs by the amount used not just in production, but advertising as well. Naturally starting with TV ads and print media, games now focus more on online advertising and gaming sites, with print media still being used while TV ads are practically non-existent since they are more expensive. Sadly, as certain publishers pool a lot of money into ad campaigns, they end up having a loss in revenue(Tomb Raider sold 3.4 MILLION COPIES).

As technology became more advanced, online transactions came in. Games could be purchased online after a user has had a try of the free demo provided. Such games tend to be much cheaper to purchase due to the absence of a physical disc to pile on the production costs. These kind of games also provided users a basic preview of what they were going to get, unlike console games where by the only few ways to tell if a game was good was to either hear it from others, or buying the game and hoping it would be good, which was in essence going in blind sometimes. The quality of the games might be mediocre, however, since the sites can basically be just there for advertisements.

Downloadable content for games(DLC) were like a branch off of online transactions. They provided more content for an existing game after purchase, thus placing more replayability onto a game. Besides additional game content, however, DLC also let developers patch up issues that a game might have which are spotted after the game has been shipped. Although this can be a good thing for a game to have good optional content to stack onto what it, some games take it as an excuse to release a relatively buggy or glitchy game, their reason being "We'll fix it in a patch at a later date". Some games even cut off content from a game that are supposed to be there(I.E Special modes or costumes that used to be rewards for finishing the game). The cost of certain content are also unjust, considering that they could only consist aesthetics that do not affect the gameplay. Certain DLCs could have been free had certain developers the choice, but publishers can possibly force them to 'sell' their DLC instead of distributing it for free(See also: Epic Games and Microsoft)

Massive Multiplayer Online games soon introduced a new form of monetization: The free-to-play model. In essence, the game itself was free, requiring a user to just register, download and play. How these kind of games earn money is by having players purchase items with virtual currency traded from real life money. The functionality of these items can vary from being merely aesthetic to making one's character more powerful (In which can possibly cause a game to become what is known as a "Pay-to-Win" game if they focus on the latter. That's bad).

With the age of smartphone games, microtransactions came in. Considering that these kind of games are to be played at one's spare time, be it during travel or awaiting something, their transactions tend to dabble more on providing the user more 'playtime', as they tend to limit the amount one can play in a sitting. Besides that, they can also provide a user an advantage in the game, such a premium items or units that help them progress, or expand on a certain aspect or resource. Some smartphone games, however, exploit this by basically making the wait times between play tortuously long or make the process of going through certain portions of the game very tedious without purchasing the premium item.

At the end of all of this, each method of monetization has it's advantages and disadvantages, the only question being how well they're executed and the interaction between buyer and publisher. A good way would be to ensure a buyer is WILLING. Because when they don't feel like their wasting money, they'll feel like spending more(Or at least consider spending more). A publisher should also keep realistic goals and be careful not to overspend on ads, trusting that their game would be good enough to spread by word of mouth as well.