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. 

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.

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?

Well I can't say I agree if the quests are optional, but like you say to each their own.

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. 

In regards to the bolded, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. Most of my favorite games of all time were old NES & SNES games designed to be beaten in a single sitting. I never once felt like they were rip-offs. If I can play a full-price game that lasts a couple of hours dozens of times over, then I'll have spent as much time in that as I would in some gigantic open-world sprawl that takes 40+ hours to beat. That's why "price divided by hours of gameplay" needs to account for replay value.

I do think 6-10 hours is a reasonable middle ground, though. I can beat most old Halo campaigns within that time range (exact time depending on the specific game & difficulty level). I've also played those Halo campaigns many times over not only because they are fun, but because it's not a huge time investment (having discrete levels with definite beginnings and ends helps with finding good stopping points for the day). Play for a couple of hours, beat the game in three to five days. All killer, no filler. Meanwhile, I've played Infinite's campaign only three times: once on Heroic for my initial playthrough, the second time to get the speedrunning achievement, and the third time as a co-op run with a friend. Infinite has good gameplay, but the campaign suffers from the standard uninspired open-world bloat.

Exactly. A game should not feel daunting to play, we are on the same page. You shouldn't be in the middle of a game and have a life circumstance or just enough time away from it that it's impossible to pick up again without restarting. There are tricks to this like replaying the first hour or two and then skipping to your last save but you should not have to employ them. 

A lot of issues and good points surrounding this topic have been brought up in this thread and I'll add another one. If games are very long, they should be designed in a way that you can play for short periods or long periods and still you get something out of it, they should be easily picked up if you need to take and months break and have no trouble resuming the game. The Witcher 3 is the perfect example of this design. 

3 to 5 hours you can play over and over and have a blast.

Golden Axe is about an hour long, we played that together for months! And it wasn't difficult either, just pure fun. (Difficult as in you can hit each other, which made it that much more fun!)

Xenon 2 the same, just an hour from start to finish without doing optional stuff. It was a blast to play through that once a week.

Prince of Persia 1989, 2 hours. But so fun to replay.

Now we have The Last of Us at 15 hours which was pushing it, Part 2 is 20 to 30 hours. It's just too long. I paused my second play through, got fatigued from all the corridors. Same with GoW Ragnarok (20-60 hours), haven't picked that back up yet and probably won't.

This "hours for full price" ruined gaming!

Shorter games are more fun to replay and have a much lower threshold to replay.

I totally agree the last of us 2 is far too long even though it's great and kind of gets a pass but it dragged and Ragnorok is brutal because it's so long and bland at the same time unlike GoW '18 which was perfeclty sized and paced but surely you can see in the opposite direction to and see that those games are too short (if they are full price) doesn't matter about replay cause some people may not want to replay. 

First off, are you sure these games are that short on the first pkaythrough? Like I can beat Sekiro now in 4 hours but that game took me 100+ hours to beat, main + sides the first time. 

If not then how can you justify spending full price on games that short, regardless of replay. What if you were to only play it once, would you see that as a minus? People perceived value differently. I for one can't justify full price for games at all anymore even if I know I'll spend weeks on it and love it before hand and I have become obsessed with finding cheap indies that have massive fun factor that exceeds their low price but I end up spending a lot on those games cause of all the failures I come across but man, Refunct is a fun game with great replay value, infact the whole idea of the fun of the game is knowing how to beat it fast enough as it's a very simple game, even visually basic game that's 45 minutes the first run and 4 minutes at like top speed run. Yes you'll get more out of it than 45 minutes but it is priced accordingly at under 5 euro... 2.99 if I remember correctly and that's great value. To think that this could be priced at 70 euro and you'd be okay with it is mind boggling to me. 

I know I made this thread but perhaps I'm seeing the light a little when it's taken to this extreme. Last year I was so happy with Vampire Survivors releasing at 5 euro and ending up having 70 hours in it, it was so much fun and filled with content. I felt like I was stealing from the devs so I bought the DLC without any intention of playing them. 

Those are times from time to beat. Xenon 2 took me longer simply because the PC I played it on was slow lol. Which made it easier too of course. Prince of Persia was hard, took me much longer to finally beat it. However those games never put me to sleep like Ragnarok or grinding for materials and xp. Spiderman-2 also dragged on. (14 to 30 hours) Great gameplay but no desire to replay, while I loved replaying Infamous Second Son. That's already 10-15 hours and people complained it was short :/

I've always wanted a setting for games for length next to difficulty. Selecting story length instead of story difficulty. I don't want a piss easy game to enjoy the story, I want a story cut version. Reign in the enemy fodder, repetitive corridors, cull unnecessary mechanics and filler side quests. Declutter the world and map, I rather explore a more empty map with more valuable things to find than have something pop up every couple steps. Ghost of Tsushima became a drag because of all the repetitive extra content. A couple times is fun, then it becomes a chore to unclutter the map... Repairing became a drag in TW3, just an annoying mechanic. Plus I set the difficulty lower there to simplify the combat. Way way way too much loot fodder in that game.

But what if there's something important in there...

Loot drops started to feel like a punishment in TW3. You beat this area, now go clean it up :/ Am I a Witcher or a garbage collector lol.

Yet it depends on the game, Fallout 4 had a reason to collect fodder which I put to good use!


Same in TWD S&S, hoarder mode

But I did feel more like a scavenging game than horror/adventure. So many drawers and cabinets to open! At least TloU and RE8 don't let you open every single drawer and cabinet, 90% empty!


Hence I'm advocating for 'story cut' options for games. Even on the fly. You want to do more filler stuff, turn it on. You getting exhausted from all the loot and extra mechanics, turn it off. In PoE2 we now ignore most of the loot, just want to play, don't want to constantly compare and do the inventory puzzle. HZ FW I also played on lower difficulty, I never bothered with traps etc. That's my way nowadays to simplify games and remove all the bloat mechanics.

Without that available I'm replaying Tlou2 on 'story' difficulty to get through it faster. It makes for some chaotic shootouts since you're nearly invincible and have plenty ammo, which is fun too. (See how many you can take on without dying, run around round em up and shootout lol) I just can't fathom going full stealth through such a long game again. And I still didn't make it over the holidays. Although PoE2 is also to blame for that haha :) (Which is also full of bloat, but playing together is the price there, 111h on it already lol)

Games are like the extended version of LotR, plus all the extras and rewatch with commentary track. I watched all that and enjoyed it but perfectly fine with the theatrical version if ever rewatching again. We need a (optional) director's cut for games that make them shorter, more focused, more suitable for people with jobs and busy lives!

I'm at a stage in life where the value for money equation works the other way around. Time is worth more now than money. I rather spend more for shorter, more intense experiences than less for time I don't freely have to spend. Hence VR, where I still don't finish most games.

Compared to movies, $30 for a 4K blu-ray, running less than 2 hours, most I never rewatch. I could buy the cheaper blu-ray, stream it, but rather spend a bit more for the more impactful version. So $70 for a 5 hour game, perfectly fine to me, as long as it's a polished, memorable, replayable experience.

Anyway it's simple imo. If you (the publishers) want me to spend more money on games, make it possible for me to complete more games. Time is the limited factor for me. (Not saying money is unlimited, just time is more limited) As it is now, I'm also gravitating to indies, not for the price, for the shorter game lengths.

Transistor at 6 hours was perfect! I want to feel satisfied at the end of a game, wanting more. Not getting in a state where you either quit or take a long break (likely also quit) or push through to reach the end.

Can shorter games be better?

*takes a look at SNES*

Yes.