World of Goo does a Radiohead. Pay whatever you like.

Am doing now, got a 503 with FF but plugged in address to wget and am getting about 160kBps, 2 mins to go.

It's solid marketing regardless. I've heard of WoG before, but used this opportunity to buy a copy...for more than $1.

I made a point to tell barrkel that I hadn't met him and that I wasn't intending my remarks personally. I don't feel comfortable judging somebody by what they write online. The friends I'm most in touch with from my hometown are gamers. By some standards I'm a gamer, though I'd disagree with the classification. So obviously I don't mean "everybody that plays games" when I refer to the "gaming community".

That said: I stand by what I said to begin with. Does replay value matter in a game? Of course. Is a game without replay value worthless? Certainly not. If a game takes me six hours to beat and I willingly play through all six hours, I've spent as much time playing it as I'd spend on a two-hour movie if I'd watched it three times.

So there's the first thing that I find offense in: The suggestion that something worth "only" six hours of time hasn't given me enough value. In the "gaming community" as I define it, having a game take up dozens of hours of your life isn't an offense. I've always disagreed with that. I remember having a conversation with a friend over Final Fantasy VII, which I played for an hour and then put away. "It takes a few hours to get good," was his mindset. I find that casual disregard for time appalling.

The second thing I found offensive was the suggestion that World of Goo was worth only two dollars. Two dollars? I pay more than that for a fucking cheese steak! For five dollars I will pay a man to sizzle some meat for me and put it in a plastic bag. For two dollars I will pay a fast food chain for a plastic cup to pour syrup into. When two people spend $10,000 of their own money and countless months developing a gem of a puzzle game that takes a quarter of a day to beat—and it's taking me much longer than that, personally—I think it's worth more than 20 minutes' worth of minimum wage.

Craft and finesse has become so devalued. I blame it on gamers, though "gamers" here is a category that includes a whole bunch of non-gamers, including a whole branch of programmers that I occasionally criticize here as well. It's this attitude that other people's work is meaningless, the attitude of FAIL and meh., where having twenty hours of gameplay is expected but making any of those twenty hours magical and beautiful is utterly disregarded. It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock. And it bugs me not just because it's obnoxious and tasteless, but because on the flip side we have a lot of tasteful people who argue that video games are not art, can never be art, and I disagree with them as well. I love video games. But it's hard to argue with those tasteful game-haters when the average gamer works to hard to convince others of his crippling tastelessness.

Yes, two dollars, when compared with the value I get out of a decent FPS.

It's funny you mention the orange box; Portal is another puzzle game, and similarly not particularly replayable after solving it, which similarly takes about 6 hours.

And as for Half-Life 2, Ep 1 and 2, these are some of my least favourite FPSes because they are obsessively linear and don't reward creative approaches. For these reasons, they are more like a movie, and don't have particularly good replay value (IMHO).

Far Cry, on the other hand, was a masterpiece of playability, leaps and bounds ahead of any Half Life game, again IMHO. The freedom to tackle each situation resulted in large rewards to creativity.

Far Cry 2 took it even further; rather than just having to tactically plan one's approach to action bubbles, one needed to plan an entire navigation across the map, avoiding guard posts, road patrols, etc. I've never played a more immersive game than Far Cry 2, a game that took me to another world, save perhaps Outcast or Thief.

After reading you carefully, I believe you have a fundamental problem in your understanding of the world, and in particular, how economics works.

Things don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves. The fact that something has had "$10,000 of their own money and countless months" invested in it does not mean that the end product is valuable. You appear to be subscribing to the labour theory of value here; it's like something out of Marx.

My point is that I can choose to do multiple things with my next unit of time. I get to choose how I spend my time and money. By analysing my preferences, I can figure out how I value different ways of spending my time. And the fact is I only chose to spend about 6 hours playing something that cost me $20, while I spent perhaps $90 for over 1000 hours playing Far Cry / 2. If you work it out, you'll see $2 is actually pretty generous, as it includes the aspects of the WoG playing experience that can't be directly substituted by the FPSes, such as novelty and newsworthiness. Nevertheless, I regretted spending $20 on WoG. Not hugely, but I regretted it.

Accuse me of tastelessness all you like. Perhaps taste, like value, is in the eye of the beholder.

(Of course, when you factor in the cost of hardware and the like, the cost for me for various FPSes is actually pretty substantial; but these are sunk costs, and almost all of the resources save the graphics card are used in my day job anyhow.)