If you ask me, no computer game is "$30k good". But the post in the submission made you wonder and I bet that was the purpose. Promotion and "no such thing as bad publicity".
It's a pity. Computer games is something where you can make anything happen, and if done well, players could get really invested and be able to experience things they would never be able to experience IRL. It saddens me that the gaming industry isn't doing very well IMO.
If there's a game that all of a sudden makes people enjoy it that much that they'd spend $30k on it as the rule not the exception, I'll be very worried that those people will retreat in the game from real life. It would go way beyond "I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game".
$30.000 is a lot of money anywhere in the world so it takes a lot to make a balanced person dish this kind of money for a game. Most of the world's population doesn't have $30k as their entire wealth.
Think bigger. Any single player game is not what I am talking about. You can only feel superior to others, etc, in multi-player competitive games like Counter Strike (where, I'm sure, lots of people spend a lot of money on in-game items already). I think that real life is the ultimate game of this kind, but it is not always fun because you only have one life you can receive punishment like going to jail, etc, so there is a limit to what you can realistically do and what you can experience. I think of real life as a sort of a lobby between computer games.
> I think that real life is the ultimate game of this kind
Until you give them a game that's beyond street-drug-level addictive, which a game that can extract $30k from a majority of people definitely would be. People would withdraw from real life into the game and that can't be healthy. So I don't agree that it's a pity we don't have such games.
Don't get me wrong: I do not have a 60k a year entertainment budget. I get plenty of kicks out of my well-coordinated Squad gameplay with my friends. But thinking it's how I'd best be spending $1000 a week for maximum enjoyment? Absolutely not.
