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The Myth of the 40 Hour Game
Over at Wired, Clive Thompson talks about the myth of the 40 hour game, the typical length of time listed on the side of a game box nowadays. Mr. Thompsons discusses the ways in which that estimate fails to jive with reality. From the article: "This game offers about 40 hours of play. This is precisely what I was told by Eidos — and countless game reviewers — when I picked up Tomb Raider: Legend earlier this year. As I gushed at the time, Legend was the first genuinely superb Lara Croft game in years... I was hooked — and eager to finish the game and solve the mystery. So I shoved it into my PS2, dual-wielded the pistols and began playing... until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours — but still only got two-thirds through."
Man, I really wish their game wasn't as good as it is. And to think they gave me *more* game than they advertised! Oh, what false advertising is this?
I demand my crappy games back that I beat in a week.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
and he complains?
Someone call the waaambulance.
34486853790
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A good rule of thumb is that when a PC game is touted as having 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect about 16; when a console game touts 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect 200. That's just the way it is, and has always been in my experience.
Maybe the estimate is based on a average skill level, and you just don't make the cut.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Actually, I was expecting him to indicate the other way. When I bought Prey a couple months ago, I was expecting 5-6 hours single player, got 7.5 and was happy.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen a game, especially in my preferred genre (FPS) that carries anywhere near the playtime promised.
So, isn't this more of a problem that the estimates are just totally wonky across the board, and vary wildly between genres and the players playing the games, and not a singular "40 hour myth?"
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
My stepson was dissappointed in Tomb Raider because it only took him half the time as it said on the box. The key difference is likely that when you play a game here and there it takes you awhile to get back into it and get your groove back. If its summer break and you play for twelve straight hours, well, its not going tot ake as long. What would be interesting is if he took a week off to just play the game, and see how he does. Not likely, but interesting;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been. Time to complete for a 12 year old kid? for a thirty year old guy? for someone whose crap at FPS games? for which level of difficulty?
I play games because i want to immerse myself in another world, and play with some interesting stuff. Its not a race. I dont keep a clock going as I play (although oblivion does that for me for some reason).
Whats important is FUN, nothing else. People can't easily define fun, so they try to come up with other metrics.
how many unique units does it have?
How long is it to complete?
How many DVDs does it come on.
I had someone complain about one of my games once because it was "only 23 MB". Apparnatly they didnt want a "good" game, a "fun" game or an "original game" or even a "game with depth", they just wanted one with a bigger filesize. I played Elite for most of my childhood. it was 48k. Was I ripped off?
whats the time to complete for Chess anyway? I'm still working on that one.
One day maybe game reviewers and publishers will shut up about how much bump mapping the game has, shut up about what hollywood actor did the voiceover, shut up about how long they *think* it takes to complete it, and just sell their game on the basis of it being a GOOD game.
King Kong is a long movie. Its also shit (in my opinion, YMMV). Applying the metric to books and movies is clearly nonsense, so why apply it to games?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Perhaps if the editor played fewer video games, then he wouldn't have made such a classic ass of himself by writing: "fails to jive..."
I suggest you read Slashdot
First, I've found that while working on any problem, given sufficient time to focus (maybe an hour), I can often improve my productivity by taking a break of a few hours or a few days. True, the longer I leave it, the longer it takes to get back in the groove, but if it's just, say, an hour a day, I'd still be better than ever by the end of the hour.
But more than that, he mentions a long list of unfinished games. Sounds like a quitter to me. Two thirds of the way through Tomb Raider: Legends, halfway through Kingdom Hearts II. I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider.
This person has made a conscious choice to play more games and leave them half-finished, rather than playing fewer games and finishing them. I'd certainly take a few good games (the Half-Lives, the Halos, the Final Fantasies) over many, many bad ones (the Dooms, the Quakes, Final Fantasy X-2). So, he has two related, possibly valid complaints: It's hard to actually find a really good game, so he wishes he could play more games, in order to find that one -- except that games take a long time to complete, so he can't actually beat as many as he'd like to.
That, or it's a problem of attention span. But he mentions finishing War and Peace, and a Tomb Raider game is too much?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's because you're old and you suck. I can state that with confidence because I also am old and suck. It's a young person's world, guy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This guy is just angry that he is bad at the video games
As a former EB Games employee, I remember being frustrated at the large number of customers who would purchase the strategy guide along with the game at release, and then have the nerve to complain that the game was "too short". It's since been my opinion that the growing strategy guide market has encouraged developers to use "cheap" methods to increase the average gameplay time.
Games were much more satisfying before the popularity explosion of guides and cheats =/
I have the same deal the article author does: too many games, not enough time, never finish anything. I don't see what the problem is, though. Knowing that there is more to do in a game, if I ever had time to do it, doesn't make me enjoy playing it any less. If I was really obsessed with completionism, I'd buy fewer games, but I've never felt a strong need to get every medal or unlock everything or whatever. I just enjoy the game until I'm not enjoying it anymore, and then I switch to something else.
Of course, these days I have money for games but not enough time to play everything as much as I'd like. In my college days, I had plenty of time but no money, so I played fewer games for longer. I think I get more out of gaming now, though.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I see a lot of people saying, effectively, that long=good but I don't think that they've missed the real problem. There are many games that simply lack a way to intuit what should be done. Things like ladders in pitch black corners have huge potential to make the game boring and even frustrating. A good game should be like a good GUI where to go and what to do next should be easy to deduce. When one has paced all the corners of the room, investigated every item and used all your ammo shooting boxes, grills and barrels one only hopes explodes and no means of exit has presented itself, it not only makes the game long, but very boring as well.
Effectively what I'm saying is that long may be good, but also, long can easily be bad.
What's he complaining about? Long games = good.
This is only true if you have loads and loads of free time on your hands like a high school or college student might. Otherwise, when you get out into the real world and get a job or start dating someone, you find out that free time disappears and a game that gives lots of goodies for little effort or that can be dropped for weeks and months before being picked back up without losing you is a great thing.
Long games are good for certain people and bad for others. However, the problem isn't really that the game is giving him a lot of gameplay so much as it's making it's gameplay so hard that it's unnaturally prolonged by failure. That's another split between the hardcore and casual gamer markets.
As a fan of console RPGs, I run into this all the time. Some games keep the fun continuous. Others require a lot of old-school level grinding to wring out the rewards. Some games make it easy to pick the game up and remember where you were if work intervenes for a week or two. Others leave you feeling like you need to start over.
It should be pretty easy to guess which type I prefer.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Part of the appeal of an MMORPG is that there is no specific end-game per-se. Hardcore uber players have turned the raid instances into the 'end game', but its not necessarily what Blizzard intended. What can a L60 do in Wow?
Rep grind with various factions.
Battlegrounds -- faction rep, PvP rank/honour.
Raid instances.
Crafting professions (aka "The Auction House game").
And of course, you can skip all of those like I did and start another alt -- different race, different faction, different zones. IMHO the tiered questing is Wow's greatest strenght, coupled with rest bonus for inactive characters.
I played Baldur's Gate II to finish the game. I play WoW for the experience, knowing there's always going to be something new around the corner. The online social aspect is a huge benefit too.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
RTFA. The very least thing he complains about is length. So some cliffnotes are in order.
His points (as a person with a job, life, kids) are:
- puzzles many times take him much longer than kids in the 6-17 range he compares himself to.
- he compares in-depth games to his job, dumping information in and out of his mental RAM doesn't get him very far. See: late-night or off-shift coders who work to avoid users/meetings/interruptions.
- he understands the hardcore vs casual design problem.
TFA isn't even that long but his really good point (imho) aren't in the title (which is Gamer not Game). But if you just read the title, then you miss the point. Great read, critical hit close to home.
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Well, take into consideration I'm talking console RPG's and you're talking PC style RPG's. It's like comparing apples and oranges. I think I put over 200 hours on Morrowind and I'm not sure if I ever beat the game?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Never. 40 hours of gameplay means that there is 40 hours of content in it. Meaning that if you explore everything and follow every side quest you might get close to 40 hours of playtime. I generally take their claim and halve it for an accurate assessment.
Yeah ... but as a long time Console and PC gamer I can honestly say that I would much rather have 16 hours of great gameplay than 40 (or 200) hours of mindless repetition.
That comment reminded me of Unreal 2. It was slated quite a bit by reviewers as I recall, but I really enjoyed it, yet it was one of the shortest games of it's type I've ever played because it wasn't repetitive and threw up new enemies, new weapons, new environments and provided a showcase of challenges that kept me entertained all the way through. It was slated for all of those reasons.
It took me maybe 12-14 hours where as most games take me 40 or more - typically I finish few of them - I often play about 70-90% of the way through, then come back a few months later and god mode my way through the final stages, if a game gets too difficult or is tediously repetitive early on (Rising Dead I'm looking at you) I am likely to ignore it and play something else entirely, because I just don't have that much free time that I want games to feel like 'work'.
In case of this happening 'literally', I gave up on Shenmue (one of the best games I've ever played, and I regret not finishing it now) after it got to the stage where your character gets a job and has to move crates around the dock every day to make money to get through to the next stage of the story. While it had some really innovative gameplay and I appreciate that it did add to the telling of the story (like a lull in a movie, between the high action sequences) I just lost interest because it was too tediously repetitive.
Perhaps one way to satisfy more users is to make games shorter but cheaper, with episodic content (I guess this is what Valve are trying to do now). It certainly seems a logical approach, particularly with the ability to deliver content electronically. I can see publishers not being so keen on this though as they'd have to release and promote each title separately which would eat into profits, and they'd run the risk of people spotting the turkeys more easily (I can't see many people playing the first half of Doom 3 and going "ooh I've got to get more some more of that stumbling around in the dark action!").
I have been playing video games for as long as they have existed. Never have I timed my usage of a game, never have I looked for some magic number of hours of gameplay.
Certainly we remember the people who could run through single player Quake in 24 seconds: does that mean Quake sucked (or, was that fact WHY Quake sucked?)
I am older now, and have a stack of unfinished games like the author of the article. I have had to become more discriminating in my choice of game to purchase; I just can't invest the time or mental energy to complete a Final Fantasy anymore. I did get through Star Wars Lego with my 6 year old daughter.....
First off, the article is about the myth of the "40 hour gamer" not the 40 hour game". The author is not complaining that the games take longer than 40 hours, but that it takes him months to find 40 hours in which to play solitary games - a problem for those games who suddenly find themselves with the trappings of what is commonly called "a life".
Most of the posts here are completely missing the point ("You suck D00D!"). As someone who's put down more than one game that I was enjoying partway through, I can tell you the main reason why: because something new comes along. Humans enjoy novelty, and many long-play games are long play because of a continual repetition of the basic game mechanic. After your fourth session sitting down doing essentially the same thing you've been doing for the last month, you get intrigued by the latest & greatest. Add to this the fact that you may have multiple irons in the fire (I'm currrently in the middle of 3 different books and 4 different single-player games)
Why is this a problem? Because there are a lot more "soft" gamers out there than hardcore ones, and they make a lot more money. As a developer, what would you prefer you market to be: 3% of the population or 30%? If you're spending tons of effort to produce a narrative game that can only be reached by 3% of the population, why are you bothering with a narrative? Hard games are fine, but perhaps they should be restricted to genres that are inherently more repetitive (e.g. classic arcade games), allowing people that bail on the title to go away feeling they had fun, as opposed to abandoning the narrative.
Ultimately, there are many more people out there that only want to commit 6 hours to some interactive entertainment as opposed to 40.
-BbT
Ok everyone is gonna have their own opinions on this. Let me put this into the light of how I perceive games and time to play.
OK, figure a movie by yourself in my area is going to run you roughly $9 for a 1.5 hour movie (granted you pay the same for a 60 min or 300 min movie). Then you buy soda ($5), popcorn ($3 for a small), and maybe candy ($3) and your out another $11. So for roughtly 1.5 hours of entertainment which may or may not be good, you're willing to pay $20. All bases on my area, market, and personal tastes to spend at movies. Now add a date to that, and cost goes up roughly 2x.
So you paid $50 for a 40 hour game which, again may or may not be entertaining, typically is interactive, can be saved, and played multiple times. Add in a MMO, ranging from $5-20 a month for how ever many hours you invest in it. Figure a full time gamer addict plays 16+ hours a day for a month, they get around 480 hours (guestimation not accounting for non play days and what not). Or the gamers that are casual that get maybe 5 hours a week for about 20 hours a month.
I really don't understand how people will pay approximately $20 for a 1.5 hour entertainment that doesn't involve you directly, typically walking away happy, and yet complain about paying $50 for 40 hours of entertainment that does interact and make you part of that world.
Well thats my 2 cents.
The problem isn't that the game has given him MORE time than the box listed. The problem is he doesn't have 40 hours to devote to the game.
However on the other hand the 40 hours game claim are almost always wrong. I now work in the game industry but still found a way to play 40 hours into disgaea. I have about 24 hours in Samurai warriors (only been out a week).
I believe the real myth is "40 hours" games or games like Xenosaga that promise 100 hours where they hardly deliver half to people who ACTUALLY play the game. If you pick it up and drop it over and over and keep dying then yeah 100 hours is possible. However if a game can be completed 100 percent in 20 hours by knowing what to do in it, then it's a 20 hour game.
What the industry needs is games like Katamari damacy, or multiple non-forced (suikoden 3 way? bad) story lines. Imagine if you could change your character, and get a different story. Imagine playing through games that have "good" and "evil" story lines. They might be 20 hour games that you play through once, but if it's fun the first time and good the second time that's fine. Kotor started on this path but how you acted never really effected future gameplay too much until you get to the final temple. This allows the "hard core" gamer to get two unique experiences, and the casual gamer to get one solid experience that they decide.
Some game companies are making "40 hour games" by making the game so obscure you won't know what to do in it for the first 30 hours, or giving you puzzles that will make you work on them 5 hours to find a little dot. I'm all for hard games, or difficult achievements but pretending obscurity makes your game longer is a joke.
I've put at least 100 hours into FFX when I was able to devote that time to it just because I loved the level grid/capture system. But it's not a 100 hour game. It's a 30-40 hour game which a few people could put 100 hours in.
The problem we are running into is game companies who won't or can't make scaleable games. Lego Star wars 2 has a good start, on the 360 there's the regular game, and then "never die" achievements which is quite hard for the player. They are completely optional but everyone is willing to try for them. If more games used "achievements" systems like the 360 to give optional quests like so it would enhance the length of most games.
What can a L60 do in Wow?
Rep grind with various factions.
Battlegrounds -- faction rep, PvP rank/honour.
Raid instances.
Crafting professions (aka "The Auction House game").
I read this as:
Grind for faction points (which can get you cheaper/special loot).
Grind for honor (which can be traded for loot).
Grind for loot.
Grind for crafting materials (whch can be turned into loot).
It's really no wonder that WoW is far and away the most popular MMORPG ever created. Purple items--gotta catch 'em all!
I'm up to
1. f3 e5 ...
2. g4
Then the damn thing keeps killing me instantly, before I can make another move. Why do they make the bosses battles so hard this early in the game?
I have this problem - I work long hours and have a pretty busy life outside of that, so I struggle to find time to play games even though I love them. I tend to pick up a game for a few hours but then have to leave it for weeks at a time. It's especially hard in games like Civilization IV and Deus Ex (or System Shock II and Freespace 2, which I'm trying to play through at the moment), in other words, games which either present an extremely high level of complexity or a very detailed storyline.
I have always thought it would be super-cool if such games provided a sort of "last week, in Civilization IV" recap option when you load your game. For instance, Civ could give you a little potted history of the last hundred years or so - "After the Greek attack on the Germans, Japan and Russia entered into a mutual protection pact, while the Americans began stockpiling arms..." and so on. It could even be presented as a history lecture or news bulletin to fit into the game world. A game like Deus Ex could give you a more story-driven update - "You've just returned to Hell's Kitchen, and your brother Paul is nowhere to be found..."
I can't imagine this would be hard to implement.
Read Pynchon.
Games are entertainment. I really can't see how you can complain about getting, say, 60 hours of entertainment for the price of 40 hours.
Perhaps the packages could make the point a little clearer: "This game should provide you with at least 40 hours of entertainment."
Of course, if the game takes you 60 hours to complete because it's badly designed, then you can legitimately complain about the game. But the problem there isn't the 60 hours, it's the design.