Former EA producer - a $100 million game needs to sell about 6 million just to break even

[Shadow1980]

curl-6 said:

Yeah the notion that every major game has to be a 100 hour long open world extravaganza with hours and hours of cinematic cutscenes, celebrity voice actors, and cutting edge graphics is leading to insanely bloated budgets.

I kinda miss when more games were focused, linear 8-10 hour experiences.

Indeed. The thing about shorter games is that I'm more likely to replay them. I've replayed many old NES, SNES, & Genesis games many times over, which is easy to do when you can breeze through them in an hour or two. I probably replay Halo CE once every month or two, and I can beat it on Legendary in like 7 or 8 hours. The RE2 and RE4 remakes I've played several times each since they can be beaten in a handful of sittings. Most of my favorite games of all time are games I can reasonably beat in less than a week's worth of sessions, many of them in one to three afternoons. Meanwhile, Horizon Forbidden West was the first open-world game I replayed, mainly just to experience the remastered version. Before that, the only long games I replayed were some of the old Final Fantasy games.

Replay value gets overlooked in discussions of a game's value. Time investment is an important factor in replay value, at least for me. Like, I'd prefer a 6-hour game I'll play at least ten times compared to a 60-hour game I might play once or twice. It's also why it's easier for me to get motivated to rewatch a movie rather than an entire TV show. I only have so much time, and I have to decide whether I want to sink that time into a single big thing or a bunch of smaller things, especially these days when there's so much more stuff competing for my attention and my ADHD-addled mind starts to get overwhelmed by too many choices.