How many hours is worth the money?

[procne]

It's not about the number of hours. What a miserable metric for fun and value that would be. Is a movie better just because it's longer?

Arguably yes. Of course there are many factors, and you can't use only one. It's miserable to pretend the thread is about using length as the only factor. So if a movie is good, then more of it will be better. Assuming it's not artificially prolonged (by adding useless side plots for example) and quality doesn't suffer because of it. You can flesh out characters better, add more depth to the whole plot, some cool action etc.. And if it gets too long then you can turn it into great series.

[Accendor]

A few things i follow in these stupid times:
- never buy cosmetics/pets/mounts/cards or whatever
- do not trust kickstarter bullshit promises
- wait until first players opinions (not reviewers that can be paid)
- never preorder anything
- i usually wait until some dicounts unless it is a game i really want to play asap (now it is probably only BG3)
- more trust to indie developers than AAA

Another bit, big tip: If you wait for discounts either way, try to buy a used version of the game as a physical copy and just resell it, after you are done. Its like 3 minutes of work on ebay and it will sell 99% of the time.
I am not playing that much AA titles, but when I do I usually really only "pay" like 5 Euro for it.

[Morgaith]

I expect 100 hours of quality game time from a full priced game.

[mojusk]

i wouldnt measure the value of a game purely on how long it takes. there are other factors, like is it fun and interesting?
wow has almost infinite gameplay, but it does get boring for most after some time. it depends on the individual how long new content is fun.

I think games should be shorter and cheaper. Who wants to stick with the same thing for 100 hours?

couldnt disagree more.
if the game is really good and you enjoy yourself, why play another?

[Mumba]

The hours per dollars reasoning is why games are filled with unnecessary busywork, crafting and sidequests which has no place being there in the first place. The idea of replayability is also debatable since you can replay every game, that's the whole idea of speed running.

A good 8+ hours game, 30-60€, will always be better than almost any Ubisoft-formula game nowadays.

[Kumorii]

There's more to it than just game length though. For most people if they get immersed in a game the length just means they get to enjoy it longer. It's why many of those games have additional content we can keep playing even after the long campaign. I contend that if you think the witcher 3 or persona 5 are "padded" then you didn't enjoy them as games - which is fine, but hardly an argument against their length. It just means you don't like rpgs.
Video games are by definition a waste of time, so what's the difference between wasting your time playing one game for 100 hours or 10 games for 10 hours?

Eh, I enjoyed Witcher 3... but saying it's not padded is just dishonest tbh.
All of those marks of interests which is just a treasure or a slightly stronger monster etc etc is just padding. That's what it is. Some padding IS good and required because it gives players something to do instead of just blazing through the main content but then there are too much of it as well. I think Witcher 3 has too much of it. The marks of interests aren't exactly quality content. I have yet to hear praise about Witcher 3's padded content. The praise comes from general gameplay, main quest, characters and side quests.

And not sure what your last argument about time is tbh. All video games are waste of time, yes... I haven't really contested that idea. I honestly have no idea what that last line is about in relation to what I said. Care to elaborate? What was your interpretation of my comment to warrant that question of yours? Because I don't know.

[Azerate]

I mostly enjoy open world games, and rpg games, or both at the same time, so I don't often struggle with having to pay too much for short games as they usually last for at least 50 hours. Also, not a very rich person in real life so I value my money greatly. I rarely buy full priced games and very rarely buy anything on release. Thankfully, steam has recently introduced prices in our currency for my country, so even the releases are a little bit cheaper than 60$. Usually I don't buy games over 40-50zł (about 10$) but if it's a franchise I know and enjoy, I might go up to 100-150zł (about 20-35$). On a very rare occassion I will buy something for like 40-50$ but that's incredibly rare for me.

And yes, for me it is very much about length. I just can't afford to pay 50$ for something that will only provide me with entertainment for 2 days. I also play the games for gameplay first, and then story, so I disagree with all that drivel about padding and busywork. The more stuff to do in the game the better, that's why I play games. That's why I love wow so much because I pay the box price and a sub and I have thousands of hours out of that. Even more than that, I prefer what people call "busywork" over the scripted and animated, movie-ridden gameplay of the main story. In most games with some kind of open world based gameplay I usually get through the main story quickly to get it out of the way and then enjoy my time doing other stuff to max everything out.

[Easo]

Difficult to say, but depends on a genre. For a shooter? Definitely 10 or more (8 for a really great one). RPG, RTS? 40-50 aka the 1-2 EUR/USD hour.

There's more to it than just game length though. For most people if they get immersed in a game the length just means they get to enjoy it longer. It's why many of those games have additional content we can keep playing even after the long campaign. I contend that if you think the witcher 3 or persona 5 are "padded" then you didn't enjoy them as games - which is fine, but hardly an argument against their length. It just means you don't like rpgs.
Video games are by definition a waste of time, so what's the difference between wasting your time playing one game for 100 hours or 10 games for 10 hours?

Witcher 3 is definitely padded. Smuggler's caches somewhere out in the sea is padding.

[zealo]

This thread is a good showcase of why there's lots of padding in "big games". It's a shame tbh...

Or people who don't like how story-heavy games like Persona 5 are could just play other games instead? That game isn't trying to please everyone, and there's not an issue with that.

Trying to cut Persona 5 down to 30-40 hours or so as posited would necessitate removing a hell of a lot more than just the occasional superfluous story moment outside the dungeons.

Atlus makes SMT games for people who want that, there's no reason to try to force Persona to slim down it's lifesim elements.

[KrayZ33]

I kinda sort this by genre.

A shooter: Doesn't need to be longer than 6-8 hours

A strategy game/building up game with a campaign: Is a let down if it's less than 15-20 for me. For example, Frost Punk was great, until I realized that it's basically just one map. The replayability of that map was basically 0 for me too, because hardly anything is randomized and "different".

4x games: Have to give me like 50-100hours of fun before I think "okay, I've done it all now

RPGs: Should also take like 20-30 hours, otherwise I doubt it's enough time to get "into character" and tell a good story with proper world building.
Most RPGs however are clustered with "open-world shit" to extend playtime and stuff you pick up just for the sake of picking it up and gathering it. It's tedious. If it's not involved in a story, don't fucking include it and more importantly, don't make it a hazzle. Picking up 99 feathers or whatever to unlock a side-story cutscene just isn't fun. Since that stuff however unlocks certain things, it's hard to ignore as well.
The worst offender was Phantom Pain in that regard. Other than that, the game felt great, didn't feel repetitive at all, but they just *had* to include these random ass side-mission thingies that you can/have to farm.

What other genres are there...

Idle games and games where you grind (D3/PoE etc.): I guess these are the games that should and can have repetitive stuff so you can gear up.
Hard to put a time there. I'd say ~50h would be great before I have to wait for the next patch/addon.


F2P-games: 0-10000 F2P is F2P, I can enjoy them if they are 30m long or if they take quite a while to finish and grind up.

[Super Kami Dende]

$1/hr has always been my go to Worth factor.

- - - Updated - - -

Witcher 3 is definitely padded. Smuggler's caches somewhere out in the sea is padding.

by that definition literally any game with something optional off a completely linear path is "padding"

[Blackmist]

Dollars per hour is the single stupidest metric in gaming. It's like judging a movie by the runtime, or a book by the number of pages.

It gives you games like AC Odyssey, where it shows you all the gameplay in the first two hours, and then just pads the rest of the game out with the same shit.

How good is the gameplay? New and innovative, or the same tired old shit?

How memorable is it? Are you still going to be thinking about it in a week, a month, 20 years?

[Kolvarg]

a game that's $60+ and only 4 hours of game play is a really good example of a fool and their money being soon parted. And of course, it still needs to be a *good* game and people who are thinking that we just want time gated bullshitery are either being disingenuous or have never actually played a long game that was good.

Well, the thing is that games are not priced based on game length, but rather on development time and costs (generally). And development time/cost does not necessarily correlate directly with game length. Also game length is very subjective, with some people enjoying a certain game for 100s of hours, and others not wanting to spend more than a few.

I like to compare it to food: Does anyone expect a $60 meal to have 6x the food as a $10 meal? Is a $10 meal necessarily better than a $60 meal just because it has a bigger portion for less money?

Of course if you're paying for a meal, regardless if it's $60 or $10, you still want/expect the portion to be enough to satisfy you, sure - and a $60 game with 4 hours of gameplay is a very extreme example. But there's a reason why sometimes you might be ok with a $60 meal rather than a $10 one, even if the portions are similar - because there are far more variables than just portion size, from food quality, to freshness, to recipe, to ambience and atmosphere of the restaurant, to service, etc.

What people are saying when they talk about "time gating" is that just "portion size" does not make the value of a meal, and they're right! And we have a lot of recent examples, particularly with open-world AAA games, of games that are fairly inflated in game length by content that in a lot of ways exists for the sake of existing. That doesn't mean of course that there aren't long games that are good, it just means that games don't need to be long to be good even if they are pricy, and that developers should be concerned with making good games, not long games.

It also depends a lot on genre and the specific game. Do you really want a game like Uncharted to last 100s of hours? I think it would vastly overstay its welcome if it was much longer.

[Azerate]

Dollars per hour is the single stupidest metric in gaming. It's like judging a movie by the runtime, or a book by the number of pages.

It gives you games like AC Odyssey, where it shows you all the gameplay in the first two hours, and then just pads the rest of the game out with the same shit.

How good is the gameplay? New and innovative, or the same tired old shit?

How memorable is it? Are you still going to be thinking about it in a week, a month, 20 years?

Like it or not, a lot of people in the world don't have infinite funds and the price (and thus price per time) will be a very important metric for many people. I feel like "the length of a game doesn't matter" comes from a very privileged perspective of not having to worry about the money you spend at all. Imagine having only 30$ to spend a month on games. Do you still prefer to spend it on a "memorable and innovative" 3 hour game rather than a 100 hours of fun gameplay time?

Movies are all close to the same length, and even the longest movies are only longer by so much in comparison. Same with books actually, though you have some outliers with like 1000 pages but usually you can expect like 200-400. With games you can literally get a 100 times more gameplay out of some of them than others, for a lower price. The difference here is significant.

I also think it goes without saying that people do enjoy gameplay that is called "padding" by you or others, or they wouldn't be doing it at all. It's part of another annoying phenomenon, namely people thinking their opinions are objective truths. Some people want gameplay, not watching a movie.

Well, the thing is that games are not priced based on game length, but rather on development time and costs (generally). And development time/cost does not necessarily correlate directly with game length. Also game length is very subjective, with some people enjoying a certain game for 100s of hours, and others not wanting to spend more than a few.

I like to compare it to food: Does anyone expect a $60 meal to have 6x the food as a $10 meal? Is a $10 meal necessarily better than a $60 meal just because it has a bigger portion for less money?

I understand that making a short game may cost a lot, or even as much as a different game that lasts 100 hours. I don't expect all games to be priced by length. I understand there are people who are fine paying a lot for short games, I'm just not in that audience.

[Kumorii]

Or people who don't like how story-heavy games like Persona 5 are could just play other games instead? That game isn't trying to please everyone, and there's not an issue with that.

Trying to cut Persona 5 down to 30-40 hours or so as posited would necessitate removing a hell of a lot more than just the occasional superfluous story moment outside the dungeons.

Atlus makes SMT games for people who want that, there's no reason to try to force Persona to slim down it's lifesim elements.

Not sure I have even mentioned Persona 5. Haven't played it so I refrain from comment on its content...

[Poppincaps]

I would expect the game to have at least 10 hours of content for a 60 dollar game. You could argue quality is more important, but some of the highest quality games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Super Mario Odyssey, and The Last of Us were all at least 10 hour games, so your game would have to be even better than those.

On the flip side, unless your game is really fucking good, then don't make it over 30 hours. I will probably not play it.

[xenogear3]

I used to think that way.

However, the multiplayer games (such as LoL, CoD) are not applicable.
Especially WoW's daily, the daily has a negative worth.
The daily is a chore. It is not enjoyable.

[Azerate]

Uh-oh, guys. Not valuing "dollars per hour" in your video games is a microaggression now.

Dunno about microagression, but telling people they are wrong for valuing something that you do not, is a full out, regular agression. Refusing to understand the reasons behind it is closed-mindedness, on the other hand.

[jcf190]

I definitely value more hours per dollar, but their are rare gems that I don't mind paying a premium for. God of War (the latest) I loved and it renewed my interest in console gaming. I didn't get hundreds of hours out of it, but it was definitely worth the price tag. My own personal take on games now is that you shouldn't buy them at release and it's objectively foolish to do so. MK11 was the last game I'll be buying at retail price, especially after all the nonsense they pulled with sales and DLC.

[Edge-]

The quality of the time I spend in a game means much, much more to me than the amount of time. I'm around 15 hours into Technomancer, a game I picked up for $5 and it's...fine. Big improvement from Mars: War Logs, but it's not great. Arguably, I'm getting some pretty fantastic value outta this as I've still likely got at least 2-5 more hours of the game left (if not more).

Comparatively, I think I picked up Lollipop Chainsaw back in the day for like...$20? $40? I dunno, a lot more than $5. Think I played through it once and it took like 6-8 hours and while it's a bit janky at times it was an absolute delight from start to finish.

Between the game where I'm averaging about 4 hours per $1 and the game where I averaged (assuming the lower end) around 30 minutes per $1, I got way more value outta the latter.