This question occured to me today after finishing the main story on Mass Effect.  Took me the bones of 15hours on my first place through.  Did around 10 side quests too...dead a few times and still it only took 15hours.  COD4 took less then 10hours to complete.  To be honest I feel slightly cheated out of my €'s.  Gears of War and Halo3 also spring to mind. 

I'm not a particular fan of replaying the game either.  I play games for the story and playing it a second time is repetitive imo.

What do ye think? 

I can´t remember games ever beeing much longer... at least shooters, I think 15 hours for a WRPG is ok... but it shouldn´t be much shorter... JRPGs are known for beeing longer so if you like those you should try LO or Blue Dragon... if you wan´t a WRPG that lasts forever play Baldurs Gate 1&2, not just the best games ever but you can play the forever...

I remember when games used to be no more than 1 hours. Or games without save function, so you have to start from the beginning everytime.

As long as it's high quality game with great storyline, I don't mind if it's between 8-16 hours.

Yep, heavenly sword was barely 6 hours, and thats on blu-ray,

Robocop on the C64. Now that was a pain.  No saves and if you died the only way to reply was to load the cassette again which took 20mins.

The problem with making an epic long game is that people usually don't finish those. Anything longer than 10-12 hours for your average non RPG game people just aren't going to finish. So why would people put in the very large extra effort (because even adding an extra hour would be an incredible tast) for something that most people aren't even going to experience?

 I don´t see what Blue-Ray has to do with it... if you put the original Prince of Persia (great game btw) on a Blue-Ray you would still need to finish it in an hour or lose... from what I heard heavenly sword was just missing a few levels to beeing somewhat normal length... I wouldn´t mind playing it but only as a rental...

I dont agree with you, theres a reason why people waste 60 bucks for a video game, they want a long and fun game.

I don't think so.

Short games should have some sort of replay value added, diff. modes, extras, and so on to make it worth the purchase.