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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ixis" data-source="post: 5602027" data-attributes="member: 82429">$5 for a game, maybe, but only if it happened to be an incredibly amazing game. (This is my personal opinion).I once played in a Vampire LARP that was $15 per game, but it was to cover the cost of hosting the game run by some very imaginative and talented folks in a church. In this case I can see the game costing that much because I know it's covering the expenses of running the game, but more importantly the value I associate with the game (the high quality STs) is worth $15/game in my eyes.The analogies to movies is a common and flawed argument in my opinion, because we're not robots, we're humans. We don't sit down at movies, have "entertainment" fed into our heads and then walk out feeling totally satisfied with the experience. People see movies based on taste and quality. I'm not going to pay $9+ to see Ryan Reynolds muck up one of DCs premiere B-list superheroes in 3D but someone else WILL pay to see Hal Jordan become a Green Lantern and beat up Sinestro and buy the Burger King promotional items afterwards.If we want to spend the time to count up the utilities spent running a game store for X amount of time in Y conditions we can come up with some nebulous hard value to tack on to how much it really costs to host a game, but that's not a good number to go by because people aren't trying to discern hard costs of playing a game at a store, but the value. Furthermore, would you calculate the costs of running the store when X number of customers only browse? Would you increase the costs because the heating bill goes up during the winter? If we were having this discussion from the perspective of the shop owner, yes, these would all be perfectly valid and expected topics to discuss, but from the perspective of the customer we're not talking about the physical costs, but of value.If the games seem valuable enough to the person then it will obviously justify the cost. Seeing as the OP feels this is wrong I'd say in his case $5 per game is too much to ask for (I'm assuming, at least on some level, that Kzach feels that the benefits do not outweigh the costs.) That said, it is somewhat common for certain stores to charge for games, and that the value is very lucrative to the customers and fair to the shop owners. Some people do pay-to-play.One last subject I'd like to touch on, a store charging to pay-to-play is competing with people who could very well play at home for free. In order for pay-to-play to work there needs to be some added value or incentive. It is my opinion, that the stores should provide more than just a space (unless everyone in that particular area cannot play tabletop games anywhere. Which seems highly unlikely but completely possible.) This is slightly off-topic from my main point (utility costs =/= customer value sense) but I think it further illustrates why someone of the opinion "charging to play a game here is strange" isn't so far off. Why should I pay to play here? What value is in it for me, as the customer?</blockquote>

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