Isn't that, the mechanics of the game, the hardest and longest to create?

Once that is out of the way, contents can be made base on the available mechanics, which should take much less time.

There's really no reason to gimp on the contents to extent gameplay and make that another reason to sell the game.

That said, why do we end up with quite many games with 6 hours or less of gameplay?

So you can buy the rest as DLC?

What game has 6 hours or less of gameplay?

MW2

MadWorld

MW2 has hundred's of hour's of gameplay with Spec Op's and it's online features. 

MadWorld doesn't have DLC though, what they offer on disk is what you get, their not holding any extra content back from it.

Terminator Salvation

OT:  IMO I think it's devs way of being able to sell half-ass games at full price at a much shorter time while making money and still continue to work on the game even though its already been released.

Hmmm... through my opinion, is it just me or do most games with DLC comes from American based games? Causing their games to be released at a faster pace, and so from this, there are many(gamers and companies) that say how American devs are increasingly better and overtaking Japanese devs?  Cause i read how Japanese devs are taking forever to release games, but to me, Japanese games feel more complete and longer gameplay than American games.  And cause of this, the American media is trying to present that America themselves are becoming better than Japan.

Anybody feel im right/wrong about my opinion? 

I dont think its fair to mention online features or else every games with online features have an infinite amount of gameplay hours.  An old games like Counter Strike thats still going on is then considered one of the longest continuing games of all time?  Doesnt seem fair.

There are a lot of reasons and it's generally not hey guys, lets make a short game!

Take Ghostbusters for instance, the single player was 6-8 hours.  There was more planned but in an effort to actually release something fun, that meant things had to be cut.  Some of this was because some parts of levels just weren't working, some levels weren't fun, time, and sometimes a long level can warm out its welcome if it's too long.

Ghostbusters use to have a Parade level which is missing from the final product.  When it came down to getting the game to a finished state, we had this level that really wasn't that fun.  We could spend a lot of time making it passable and completely forgetable or we could scrap it and spend that effort making other things even better.

And even in other levels there were other parts cut because they weren't fun or would take too much time which would take away from other parts of the game. 

Someone mentioned MW2 specifically and while the campaign may be short and forgetable, that's fine because multiplayer is that games focus.  People aren't going to be playing MW2 6 months after they purchase it to play through the campaign again and again, they're going to be playing the multiplayer.

Instead of spending a lot of time focusing on the single player, they decided to spend more time focusing on the multiplayer which is the real reason most of the people are going to buy that game anyways.