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[LRKD]

I don't care too much if it is 'long' or not. I care if it is fun to replay. And most games no longer are. I'd love to see a return of unapologetically video game-y games, most (AAA games) want to be movies, and are boring walkie talkie slogs to replay, or they want to be live service gacha hell games. I think the newest game I find myself regularly replaying is Dragon's Dogma it's sucha freaking fun game to play. Over 100 hours on it on both steam and ps4, and probably over 100 on the 360 version as well, but not sure. Need more games that are just fun to play, and then fun to replay even after 100%ing it.

 

[rofif]

you can play through elden ring easily withing 10 hours or less without speedrunning it.
if you know where to go and you only want to do certain builds, you can get through elden ring just as fast as any other souls game

What am I a twitch streamer ?!
That’s not playing playing the game

 

[mxbison]

A long game that is well paced and full of unique content would obviously be great, but that just isn't cost effective for developers.

If you have an 80+ hours long game it's pretty much guaranteed to have a bunch of boring filler content, which is what many people don't want and why they prefer shorter games.

 

[Ar¢tos]

A long game that is well paced and full of unique content would obviously be great, but that just isn't cost effective for developers.

If you have an 80+ hours long game it's pretty much guaranteed to have a bunch of boring filler content, which is what many people don't want and why they prefer shorter games.

Unless it is something like Stardew Valley. After 90h I still feel like I'm only scratching the surface of it, there is always something new to do/explore/make preparations for, and I'm far from bored!
At the same time it's a game that allows the player to relax and drop and continue (nearly) whenever they want with the sleep mechanic.

But shorter games don't need as much emotional engagement, which is a precious commodity nowadays giving them an advantage.

I have TLOU2 sitting in my library for 5 months and I haven't found the "energy" to even download it.
I downloaded RDR2 about 2 months ago and haven't found the "energy" to even run it the first time.

Just knowing that those games will require me to engage in a long story and needing to keep track of events is a turn off, but I still would like to play them one day.

 

[Silentium]

OP you are a kid, right?

Give me a tight 7–20-hour game anytime.

The $ per hour argument doesn't hold much weight either, either get a job or realise that even at $70/7 hours, $10 per hour is cheap entertainment.

 

[Lyrical]

I absolutely hate games that are too long. I usually get bored before finishing them. 20 hours is the sweet spot for me.

 

[StueyDuck]

i have a job, i don't need another, games need to be reasonably sized, 500+ hours of the same repetitive shit over and over is not a good game.

20-40 hrs is the sweet spot for Open Worlds
8-12 hrs for FPS/TPS/Action
12-30 hrs for RPG/Adventure

 

[Lord Panda]

I prefer sub 20 hour myself but have no issue with 6-8 hours. Most game ideas aren't worthy of 40 hours IMO.

Price should reflect play time.

I owe the devs of Vampire Survivors at least a thousand bucks then.

 

[nkarafo]

This is a modern times phenomenon. Back in the 90s i never heard a single soul saying they wished for games to be shorter. We had fewer games then and we wanted more play time out of them.

Today we have too many games to play. Everyone has huge backlogs that they need to get rid of. People buy games just to add them to their digital store account and never play them. If you told me this 30 years ago, i wouldn't believe it. So now we have huge collections of games we don't even really like. When you play a game you don't really like that much, just because you feel like you have to finish it, you wish it doesn't last long so you can clear the next one and so on.

Achievements/trophies and other stupid OCD bait crap also makes people want to do less enjoyable things in games just for the score. If you only want that score, you hope for whatever you need to do to earn it to last as less time as possible because you don't really enjoy it.

Modern gaming is also a much larger industry than before and there are a lot of non-gaming, casual people now playing them. A lot more people with shorter attention spans. A lot who see games as "interactive movies" and prefer cinematic games. And since movies are generally tiresome beyond the 2h mark, games can only hold their attention for a few more hours at best.

Modern gaming also has more adults who have jobs, kids, etc so they don't have enough free time to play games, meaning they prefer shorter games. But the best case scenario for them would be to be able to work less and have more free time to spend to things they actually enjoy, not to make those things shorter lived.

Personally, i wish for my job to be shorter and my favorite games to be longer. When i play a game that i enjoy, i want that enjoyment to last as long as possible. Who enjoys something and wishes "ok, i really love this, but i wish it would end now". Nobody really, unless they stop enjoying it. And that's not because it has more content, it's because the game itself stops being enjoyable so the extra content feels like padding.

 

[Madjaba]

Why can't we have both ?

I like to play very long games (currently have more than 40 hours on Octopath 2) but yeah I love to balance that with shorter games in quick sessions also

 

[Banjo64]

Lost Legacy might be my favourite Uncharted game (I love every one of them).

Uncharted 4 wasn’t a better game by virtue of being 25 hours long.

There’s amazing short games, and amazing long games.

My preference is shorter stuff (sub 20 hours) like Ori, A Plague Tale, Tinykin, Metroid Dread but who doesn’t love an epic from From Software or a game like The Witcher 3, Zelda or Skyrim?

Longer games have to be truly special to keep me engaged.

 

[DareDaniel]

The Witcher 3 is great with all the side-quests and Mafia: Definitive Edition is great without any.

 

[Lucifers Beard]

I agree with what you’re saying OP but the problem is that most 40+ hour games I’ve played just don’t hold my interest for that long and so I would have preferred that the experience was shorter so that I could finish it.

6-8 hours is way too short. The sweet spot for me is 15-20 hours for the main story, any longer than that and I probably won’t pick the game up. There are of course exceptions, such as Elden Ring but they are few and far between.

 

[Robb]

I don’t really care about the length of the game as long as it’s fun all the way through.

A lot of really long games I’ve played could’ve been cut down by 20-30h and would have been better because of it. Zelda: Skyward Sword comes to mind, for example.

 

[OmegaSupreme]

 

[mcjmetroid]

It's not so much the length for me it's just that it's almost impossible for certain types of games to hold your attention for this long.
Elden Ring did the best it could but after 30 or so hours I was starting to feel it.

 

[KungFucius]

I want shorter games. Shorter than 40 hours in most cases. This does not mean 5 hours ffs. For story driven games, 25 hours is fine. 40+ hours means that it is hard to commit 40+ hours, a fucking work week +, to playing one game and that the enjoyment extracted from games that are much, much longer than 40 hours decreases dramatically with time required to beat. Some games that are long are still fun over 40 hours, but become hard to give fucks about if they drag on past 60, 80, 100 fucking hours.

To the OPs potato chip analogy, 100 hour games is like a pickup truck filled with chips. The chips are fine when fresh, but you can't eat them all before they start to become stale, and you become sick of chips. You need to eat something different.

 

[KungFucius]

It's not so much the length for me it's just that it's almost impossible for certain types of games to hold your attention for this long.
Elden Ring did the best it could but after 30 or so hours I was starting to feel it.

Me too, and moreso after 60 and by 90 I was basically disgusted with it. And disgusted with myself.

 

[Mr Branding]

Can’t do 20+ hours games as I don’t have that time anymore and 8-10 is my sweet spot anyway.

 

[consoul]

It's not about length, it's about what you do with it.

 

[Kokoloko85]

Depends on the game but heck 99% of the time I want the game to be longer. Cant believe people complained GOW R, RDR2 or TLOU2 were too long.
More good gameplay and story =win. If TLOU2 ended where Ellie and Abbey first fight I would of been pissed. The whole California part made it much better.

Longer MGS = Better, Resident Evil longer = Better. Halo longer = Better. Souls game, the longer the better

Some games over stay there welcome. Some Final Fantasies and JRPG’s just drag, I mostly dislike the one more last boss form. Like fuck sake, I just killed you a hundred times already.
Megaman X games can be included in those. Sigma over and over again….

 

[Kokoloko85]

it depends on the game.

I think there is an argument that Assassins creed, horizon FW and GOW Ragnarok could have been better games if they were half as long.

I agree with AC and Horizon to some extent. But Gow R was great and I could of played in that world another few bosses and hours

 

[gamerEMdoc]

I want quality game for my time. If a 40 hour game carries the same quality throughout its 40 hrs as a 6 hr game, then of course, the 40-hr game has more value. But the reality is, many longer games (especially open world games) are just short games with hours and hours of boring filler added in. I don't need thousands of question marks on a map. A game like Horizon Forbidden West took the Ubisoft route of just a ridiculous amount of boring side content and just absolutely ruined that game for me. Yeah, it was really long. But I didn't enjoy playing it because it was a bloated mess of boring side quests.

Give me a game like TLOU 1/2, Bioshock, etc... something that holds my attention throughout the entire game without feeling like I'm just checking off boxes. Regardless of length.

 

[Sethbacca]

This is a modern times phenomenon. Back in the 90s i never heard a single soul saying they wished for games to be shorter. We had fewer games then and we wanted more play time out of them.

When we were all kids without disposable income we had to make the most of the games that we had, or that were given to us, because you never knew when you'd get another. It's a situation where you're forced to seek out time quantity than time quality. As adults the situation gets reversed unless your disposable income situation remains pretty poor.

The idea of replayability is really only a thing in gaming. Books and movies and tv shows CAN be re-watchable, but the desired effect is to make something that's fantastic you watch or read it and move on to the next thing. In other media prequels and sequels exist to create the "replayability" aspect and give you more of the world you're craving. There are some things we obviously re-watch and re-read but we're content with the same experience over and over again. The push for everything to be forever replayable just leads to the cookie cutter copy and paste open world bullshit that everyone in this thread has been complaining about.

I'd be kind of curious what these poll results look like distributed by age.

 

[DaGwaphics]

This is a modern times phenomenon. Back in the 90s i never heard a single soul saying they wished for games to be shorter. We had fewer games then and we wanted more play time out of them.

Early 90s the average game was as small as a postage stamp, a bit of an unfair comparison there. It's hilarious how little content people were paying $60 for back then, with most games relying on the loop of always starting from the beginning with no save option to pad playtime. PS1 - PS360 was the sweet spot with game length. The games were the length they needed to be to tell the story without grinding.

 

[New Mombasa]

Depends on the game tbh, but sub 25 is the sweet spot.

 

[KXVXII9X]

Yeah for me story driven games with a beginning, middle and end I prefer to be 8-12 hours long. I picked up Miles Morales over Spiderman for exactly this reason and was happy with the choice.
And 8-12 hour game will take me a month or two to finish. That is a long time to commit to one story - I might watch a TV show over that length of time but it wouldn't be the only show I watched for those months whereas for games it will be the only story driven game I play.

Same for me. I don't know how some people finish these 40+ hour games in a week and then say there is nothing to play. I want to grab Miles Morales sometime when it goes on sale.

 

[Teletraan1]

I mostly play 1000 hour games like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld etc. For the 30ish dollars I spent on each of these games they have far exceeded any value expectation. Contrast that to the AAA games I have spent $90+ CAD and dropped after a few hours out of boredom or speed hate finished because I felt ripped off. The only AAA game I played the shit out of recently was Elden Ring at 200+ hours.

 

[justiceiro]

Wanting shorter games IS wanting better games.

Did you never sit through a presentation thinking "holy shit, just get to the point already"? It's the same thing with games. It is fun, until you have to starting repeating yourself to fill air.

 

[MH3M3D]

Quality > Quantity

 

[Fuz]

Most AAA games overstay their welcome.

 

[nkarafo]

The games were the length they needed to be to tell the story without grinding.

That's the thing though. I couldn't give a shit about the story tbh. Give me some world building and atmosphere but i don't need the game to be like a movie.

 

[01011001]

What am I a twitch streamer ?!
That’s not playing playing the game

well, it is tho. most of the game is optional, it's there for a sense of exploration when you play it for the first time.

but if you already explored everything and just want to do a run through the main quest line, maybe with some detours to get specific items, it's really not that different from the Dark Souls games.

 

[DaGwaphics]

That's the thing though. I couldn't give a shit about the story tbh. Give me some world building and atmosphere but i don't need the game to be like a movie.

I'm not super big on the overall stories either. Honestly, I think people are a little touched that buy into all that, just because even the most expensive and well produced games are serving you B movie/Netflix Original level quality in comparison to an actual movie. The 360 TR trilogy and SC/Hitman and games like that worked the balance well of giving you a little story to provide some structure/purpose to player actions without over doing it (Though SC got a bit too story heavy in the last two).

 

[Beastclaw Raider]

I'm in my 40s, two kids.. I prefer shorter games but not 6-8 hours either, 15-20 hours is like the sweet spot.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

I’ve played several games where you could easily shave at least a good 5 hours away and you wouldn’t feel the difference.
The problem is usually that the story bits may even be worth the added time, but they come at the price of repetitive gameplay.
Persona 5 for example is a great game, but if you say you wish it was longer, you need professional help. And a job.

30+ hours games really need to be able to shake things up in their later parts. Either introduce new mechanics, or really make full use of everything you’ve learned until then (which doesn‘t mean to just throw in stronger bullet sponge enemies, or setpieces that last 10+ minutes just so you can use every move at least once). Otherwise, just finish the damn thing off already. FromSoft games usually fall apart towards the end because of this.

 

[The_Mike]

Games over 8 to ten hours are grind games with collectibles and repeatable content.

There's plenty of games I've played that got worse by being too long for its own good.

Pretty much compared to the other way around

 

[CGNoire]

I hear this said a lot now. "I wish they'd make more 6 - 8 hour games so I could actually get through them. I just don't have the time to play these 40+ hour epics."

Math Fact: Six 6 - 8 hour games = one 40 hour game.

This is Stockholm Syndrome right? These people have identified poor game design (gets boring/uninteresting by hour 6) and instead of wanting better made games, they want more, short, crappy games with no depth.

Who buys a $5.00 bag of Lays potato chips and says "I wish they made these bags 1/5th the size and priced each bag at basically the same price."

Here's a crazy idea...what about a 40+ hour game that's entertaining the whole way through? What if we wanted more of those?

Can we collectively (metaphorically) beat these people back into the dark corners they lurked from? It was a better time when people held these thoughts but were too afraid to voice their insanity.

Dude you totally misunderstood.
What people "actually" want is a 8-15hr game thats Higher Quality in Graphics, Physics, Ambition, and most importantly far better pacing. Shits worth way more than 40hrs of mediocraty.

Id rather play a 10 hr game like that thats paced well 4x over than play once through what gets shovelled to us at 40hrs.

 

[Satansblade]

People don't want to take 3-4 months to buy a game. You're on an enthusiast forum. Very few people have hours a day to spend on video games. 6-10 hour games are perfect for them, they can finish it without having felt like they've played nothing but that for as long as they can remember. People have lives, most of my friends game an hour or two a week. I only do more because I fly (Pilot) with a gaming laptop and Steamdeck/switch. I have two months off for knee reconstruction, and i've played more console games than I have in the two years previous.

I can't imagine how this was ever a difficult question, or that you thought you were saying something profound, right?

 

[Sethbacca]

People don't want to take 3-4 months to buy a game. You're on an enthusiast forum.

Its pretty telling that even on an enthusiast forum most people don’t want long games. Makes me curious how the casuals see this argument, I’d suspect even fewer of them want ultra long games.

 

[WoJ]

I put 50 hours into the Crisis Core remaster doing all the side content and Stat grinding and had zero problem doing it. I paid full price for it.

I was one of the people that liked The Order 1886 and Callisto Protocol. I paid close to full price for TCP and got The Order on deep discount. I would have been okay paying full price for it and felt it was a great experience.

My point is that it isn't just about length for me. I want games that give worthwhile experiences and I'll pay for that. Whether it's short or long. I don't like bloated crap that overstays it's welcome for the sake of being able to say "100 hours of gameplay!" I'd rather pay $70 for a shorter game that offers a tight, great experience and maybe even some replayability than $70 for a bloated uninteresting slog.

 

[Games of Today]

Anyone saying that are the same people that complained about The Order 1886. So they can blow me for killing that IP.

 

[Hydroxy]

As others have said it depends on the genre but in general yes i prefer shorter games. 6-8 hrs is enough for fps, 10-15 hrs for third person action game like tomb raider/resident evil, 20-30 hrs for wrpg/jrpg. The problem is even great games that long have some amount of padding to extend the playtime unnecessarily. Games like Persona don't need to be 100 hrs for the main story when you can do it in 60hrs and not lose much. Games should learn to respect the time of the player which many games ignore.

 

[Games of Today]

I put 50 hours into the Crisis Core remaster doing all the side content and Stat grinding and had zero problem doing it. I paid full price for it.

I was one of the people that liked The Order 1886 and Callisto Protocol. I paid close to full price for TCP and got The Order on deep discount. I would have been okay paying full price for it and felt it was a great experience.

My point is that it isn't just about length for me. I want games that give worthwhile experiences and I'll pay for that. Whether it's short or long. I don't like bloated crap that overstays it's welcome for the sake of being able to say "100 hours of gameplay!" I'd rather pay $70 for a shorter game that offers a tight, great experience and maybe even some replayability than $70 for a bloated uninteresting slog.

Exactly I bought The Order 1886 at full price and can't tell you how many times I've replayed it. Somewhere between 5 to 10 times I think. It was so worth it for me paying full price for that. Ready at Dawn deserved all of the money I could give for that effort.

I also bought Callisto at full price. And while I think it could have been a little better, I'll replay it more than once. That dev team also deserves my money for making their own new game that wasn't just a shitty cash grab.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Dude you totally misunderstood.
What people "actually" want is a 8-15hr game thats Higher Quality in Graphics, Physics, Ambition, and most importantly far better pacing. Shits worth way more than 40hrs of mediocraty.

Id rather play a 10 hr game like that thats paced well 4x over than play once through what get shovelled to us at 40hrs.

Oh yeah! I'd rather play a great 40 hour game that is awesome throughout than a boring 10 hour game! You ever think about that?!

 

[Laieon]

15-30 hours is the sweet spot for me outside of a few exceptions like WoW.

On top of the "I'm older and have more responsibilities now" point that others have brought up, I'm older and... just have more hobbies now. I like to set time aside for those too.

If a game is more than 30 hours, there's a pretty big chance I'll put it down at some point, pick it up later, forgot what the controls, plot, etc... were, and then never touch it again. A 30 hour game though is manageable. I'm also significantly more likely to replay a shorter game than I am something that's long, which historically speaking has been a one and done experience for me.

Its pretty telling that even on an enthusiast forum most people don’t want long games. Makes me curious how the casuals see this argument, I’d suspect even fewer of them want ultra long games.

Most of the casuals I know aren't engaging with single player, story based games at all. Maybe something like Spiderman or Hogwarts every few years, but in general they tend to play a single, usually multiplayer focused game that lasts them awhile, but also allows them to play in short bursts - 2K, Madden, Rocket League, Warzone, etc...

 

[coffinbirth]

I swear there was an article in either EGM or Gamepro back when the OG Xbox was getting ready to drop warning exactly what microtransactions and achievements would lead to, and we're living it. I really wish I could find that article, because it was 20+ years ahead of its time.

This sounds familiar. Possibly NextGen magazine? I know I read every single one of those along with EGM.

Fair enough.

I was actually agreeing with you.

By missing my point entirely and calling me a publisher?

 

[Taddypole]

I have a busy schedule I rather have a short game then a game that's more then 30 hours.

 

[Sethbacca]

This sounds familiar. Possibly NextGen magazine? I know I read every single one of those along with EGM.

Could be? I read all that shit in the pre-internet days and even well into the waning hardcopy publication years as youtube and online gaming resources became more the norm.

 

[Johnny Concrete]

By missing my point entirely and calling me a publisher?

No, I got your point. I just for some reason thought the OP commented on my post.

My bad.