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

[LegitHyperbole]

Shadow1980 said:

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?

No because Contra is really difficult. You can also skip Super Mario's Bros 3 right to world 8 in like 45 minutes and focus on that but it didn't lack content. Double Dragons is short as hell but I can't ever recall beating it because it's designed to be so punishing. Time Crisis on PS1, you can beat it with a light gun in an hour but it takes many, many hours of practice to get that good. Tetris the same. 

However I do think games were a rip off back then and we get so much more for our money these days, plus only recently has the value started climbing back up to the value of games back then. Mid 2000's to mid 2010s was the sweet spot. Lowest price for games ever, not too long and not too short, not designed like they were made for an arcade and MP included, no MP only games. 

However with that said and the premise of this thread, my favourite games of all time, I all have hundreds of hours in and all are very long and full of content but it's just that they are so good that that content remains fun through to the end and in replays without ever getting old. Perhaps the issue is that some games just aren't good enough to have bloat or padding and some are and devs should know QA better and find out if their title should have the fat cut or not before going gold.