Do game devs need to respect our time better? Can shorter games be better?

[Shadow1980]

SvennoJ said:

I agree, but the problem is your last sentence.

These shorter games were never $40, they were full price games. You're doing the same you accuse gamers of for the trend to bloated games. "price divided by hours to beat"

With the perception that shorter games should be lower price, you end up with the same problems, just in shorter games. That's what's happening in VR atm, 'story' games are $30 / $40, around 8 hours to beat, full of artificial padding. Recently released Metro Awakening, Behemoth, Alien Rogue Incursion all guilty of padding / repetition to make that 8 hour mark.

Portal was full price, time to beat 3 hours. It was perfect! Great to replay.

Ikaruga was full price, 5 hours. Why should these games be cheaper now?

Sorry. I'm slow in the mornings. I was thinking about how much such games actually cost (IIRC Mega Man 11 was like $30-40). I'm just trying to find a middle ground. People do use that metric. I'd pay $60 for a Mega Man 12, but few others would.

LegitHyperbole said:

You can always wait for a sale and I agree but 3 or even 5 hours for full price is pretty fucked up. That's three times the price of a film. There used to be a sweet spot of 8-12 hours for linear games for full price and then you'd get MP tacked on. Idk what happened to those days. 

You would have hated gaming in the 8-bit & 16-bit days and felt it was a rip-off. The original Contra was beatable in under a hour and it cost $35 upon release in 1988, which is over $70 in current dollars. Seriously, this was the whole game:

And we loved it! We'd play games like this over and over. The number of recent AAA games I've played more than once I can count on one hand with digits to spare. Horizon Zero Dawn is literally the first open-world game I played through a second time, and only because it had the remaster with the Frozen Wilds DLC included (which I never got back when that was released). So many games are just one-and-done for me, because it took me two months worth of play sessions to beat. Meanwhile, I still go back and replay old games because they don't demand much of my time.

Does replay value mean absolutely nothing in these assessments of "getting our money's worth" when it comes to single-player games?

Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 10 January 2025