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

It did.

The key word in that sentence is "decent", and I don't think it's the word you wanted.

Games like Far Cry, TF2, etc., are outliers, they're not "a decent FPS". I doubt you'd be willing to pay full price for a "decent" FPS, if you value World of Goo at $2.

It's interesting how skewed the perception of value can become due to AAA titles with huge budgets. Yes, in some ways these games ARE underpriced, and forcing a race to the bottom. You get silly situations like people paying $40 for L4D and playing it for hundreds of hours, while still complaining about the lack of content. The only conceivable scenario under which L4D is bad value is if you compare it to, say, TF2 - which is receiving ridiculous amounts of free content upgrades, in my opinion.

If you set your "baseline" for value to something like TF2 or Starcraft, then work downwards from there for all other games, then where does that leave the rest of the industry?

If you use that baseline, is WoW worth the $15 a month that millions of people happily pay?

Or, if you work the other way - if WoW IS worth $15 a month, which many people obviously agree - then doesn't that bring Far Cry closer to hundreds of dollars of "value"?

I'm not talking about what specific games you or I enjoy - I'm trying to play along with extracting some abstract "value", regardless of genre. My only conclusion is that you can't really do that - bad games are vastly overpriced, good games are vastly underpriced, and the only ones that get the pricing right are MMOs.

In my opinion, $20 for World of Goo is about right, assuming you enjoy that kind of game. It's short, but intensely enjoyable. I'd rather have 6 hours of excellent, memorable gameplay than dozens of hours of mediocre gameplay.

For comparison, a game that is not particularly AAA (certainly not by today's standards) would be something like Civ 2; this is another decent game that has huge replay value. If WoG had replay value similar to it, then I would have really gotten my money's worth, from my perspective.

But then you go on to make a rather odd argument, which seems to me to be moral in nature, suggesting that I should feel bad because I like getting lots of stuff for very little cost. Well I'm sorry, I don't see it that way; the key advantage of software in a global economy is that marginal cost is tiny, so excellent content should be cheap.

And the experiences I've gotten out of games like Far Cry, Thief, Civ 2, etc., have been infinitely more memorable than the gameplay I've had from WoG.

Thief: once, when looting a room, I was surprised to hear a guard say "what's going on here then", and I was just able to avoid detection by nipping into the shadow behind a pillar. When I was playing it, it affected me so deeply I walked down the street differently after sundown.

Far Cry: the experience of coming out of the cave where you wake up, and into the lush Pacific island environment, was amazing; one of the first things I did after I got my hands on my first jeep was drive through at relatively high speed past most of the mercs on that first level, all the way to cliff looking towards the aircraft carrier, and jumping out at the last moment, and watching my jeep sail over, crash and explode at the bottom. It was cinematic, unscripted, and I was in control.

Civ 2: Well, every time I get into that game, and I can still get into it now over a decade later, I build a country that becomes part of me, the names and locations of the cities familiar. It becomes my own territory, a place I feel at home.

WoG: it's a puzzle game, it's a bit like those ad-sponsored flash timewasters, only drawn out and developed a bit more. But I just don't see it as being particularly valuable. Sorry for feeling happy about having that judgement.