Retail Price & Play Time -Versus- Indie Price & Play Time

[Sengir]

Retail price games are often in the $60 range. Many, however, only give say, 4-7 hours of gameplay. However if you look at indie price games such as Terraria or Minecraft ($15 and $30 respectively), you get over 400+ hours of gameplay.

I could hardly credit Minecraft with gameplay. Sandbox games don't have legitimate gameplay; they are toys. You can't buy a tub of Legos or box of little plastic army men and claim they have more hours of gameplay than a video game.

However, what about indie games in the same vein as retail games, such as the Binding of Isaac versus Legend of Zelda?

The Legend of Zelda may have cost the traditional 50 USD at launch compared to The Binding of Isaac's 5 USD (8 USD if you are including the expansion as the "whole game"), but The Legend of Zelda was a completely new game at the time; it expanded significantly on its predecessor (Adventure for the 2600), it had a monumental amount of content in an era of puzzle games and arcade games and basically created the genre.

The Binding of Isaac's price is low; it was developed by two guys with a much lower financial requirement than a team of professional developers (probably with families) living in a large Japanese city. The Binding of Isaac was programmed in Adobe Flash, which cuts development time by an enormous amount and has a massive amount of existing codebases plus online tutorials. The Legend of Zelda was programmed in Assembly on a 6502 in an age before you could Google for help. These all factor into the budget, not to mention Nintendo had cartridge production costs, marketing costs, transportation costs, shelf costs and enough to not only pay the developers, but to keep Nintendo profitable as a company.