The Jimquisition 15: The Old 'How Long Should A Game Be?" Debate

I love "You Have to Burn the Rope" and would happily have paid 50 cents for it. If I had paid $50 I would have felt like it was bad value for money. Outside of that rather extreme case, when I complain about a games short length I am usually complaining about a lack of enjoyable content, shallow mechanics that I master too quickly, or an incomplete story that needs a few more hours to come to a proper conclusion instead of just a low number of play hours. There are gamers on really limited budgets who do really want longer cheaper experiences and although I don't share that desire I do respect their desire that reviews include that sort of information so that they can make an informed choice. If a game is bad, I don't really care how long it is since I'll quit playing it pretty quickly, but a short length can hold back decent game from being great. A complex game system needs to be introduced slowly and if a game ends too quickly then their may be no time to include more complex and difficult challenges that force the player to really explore the gameplay. Take a game you love and cut out the worst 50% of it (assume it remains coherent). In most cases the game would be much worse off for the cuts. Part of the greatness of the game probably came from variety, learning then applying skills, and getting time to connect with characters and the world through slow exposition. There are great short games and games that a great because they compacted all their strengths into a short time or didn't drive a fun but limited mechanic into the ground. There are also plenty of long RPG's that I wish had cut 40+ hours and some shooters that would have been better if they had cut 5 hours (Doom 3) and used the resources to put more cool parts into the remaining levels. When busy reviewers are giving us their opinion I hope they don't just hand a game a high score since it includes a few flashy set pieces and makes it easy for them to finish by the embargo time. If I buy a game and invest the time (and mental energy) to play it I hope that there is some real substance to it and that early promise will pay of later in the game.

Satisfyingly smooth, with an oaky finish. ...but does next episode come with a season pass? Perhaps on disc dlc?? I'll preorder I swear!

Fucking lost it when the music was played slower

Haha, the ONLY thing that's value drops with the Australian dollar. How fucking ridiculous is that?

Truthfully, we have already hit that point. AAA games cost ridiculous amounts to make, and even more to market [Most of GTA Vs 500 million budget will be in marketing]. And we already see the results. Lets use the Order as an example. It'll have cost a pretty penny to make. As a $60 game for 5 hours, how many sales do you think will be expected of it to receive a sequel? 5 to 10 million probably. If it gets less, it'll probably be axed, because its development cost is so astronomically high that it needs to sell stupidly well in order to even survive. Is this actually the case with the order? Who knows. However, think of any game you've seen released in semi-recent years, and that hasn't received a sequel. That'll be why. Jim's addressed it before in some of his older episodes. I think it was Tomb Raider he focused on, but I could be wrong. We hit that crescendo a while ago. We're just waiting for the industry to deflate, and hopefully be replaced by Kickstarter. God knows I've spent 400+ on some Kickstarters, 'cause I've got faith in them. Its not worth spending that money on 4 AAA games [Thankyou Australia tax] that I'll play for an hour or two, then leave disappointed. That's the state the industry is getting to. Its better value spending a fortune on the hope that developers can make a good game, than it is to spend less money on an established and "trusted" AAA studio and hope they make several good games. That's kind of sad.

"$US60 is an unreasonable price for a game for a video game" Meanwhile in Australia new games are $US80.

Veronica Jane

I actually like the slower pace of the outro music

Elberik

Jim you satisfy me every week!

Joshua Chap

I look at a video game purchase like any other purchase in my life. What "value" does it provide me. In the sense of video games that value boils down to entertainment. Sometimes that entertain is defined by 100's of hours of enjoyable replayability and sometimes its a few hours of an absolutely amazingly epic story. I feel you get tremendously more value in Indie titles lately than AAA.

No, I just felt like going orange today. :-)

Jim Sterling

I was pleased to hear you talk about length, and then overjoyed when it morphed into a talk about PRICE. The huge inflation of AAA game price from $30 to $60 has been, for me, the great rip-off of this industry. I remember when, for example, a Total War game was $30 and an expansion was $20. The company made good money, the game quality was great, and the customer could afford more than just a single AAA game every few months. Having the base game at such a price meant that we could give the game a chance and then decide if additional content was worth our time, and still be able to buy another game from another company. And everything was shipped complete and relatively stable. Nowadays on launch, it is $60 for the base game, $60 for the inevitable three expansions, and $20 - $40 for additional bits and bobs that used to be included in updates (and this continues to inflate). The content ranges from alpha to beta (the latter if you are lucky) quality, the content is starved, and the publisher is harassing us to by the DLC and sometimes even inserts adware into the games themselves to harass us to by the DLC (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft). The customer, unless blinded by fanboyism, is frustrated instead of entertained and can barely afford what they purchased, and is unlikely to be able to afford another game in a given timeframe. The publisher's sales fall short due to inevitable backlash (not always, but increasingly often) and puts more inane constraints on developers, worsening the problem. Everyone suffers, even the publishers. This is nothing unsaid, of course, but it needs to be louder. The 2nd Games Crash is HAPPENING.

In the case of The Order: 1886 I think length is a side issue. What differentiates games from other forms of entertainment is player agency, and that has been severely compromised in that game. That, I think, is the real issue there. As to the general subject of length in games, I don't think it matters so much. Not to me, anyhow. Others will undoubtedly have different opinions.

Alien Isolation was one game that I felt dragged on a bit too long(mainly because of all the backtracking you had to do later on), I don't mind shorter games, but I don't think there's ever been a more barebones 60 dollar game, no multiplayer or anything(I don't really care about MP, but the thought is always appreciated).

LifeIsStrange

I'm still waiting for us to hit that beautiful crescendo where the price of games is still locked around $60 but the costs are just too astronomically high. I don't rightly know what will happen, possibly it has already hit this point? The Order feels like the first death rattle shakes as people are itching for that juicy beautiful game to play and feel like yes it was worth it to buy that new pricey console but continue to see that everything beautiful is also potentially short and corridor like. I find it amusing that large AAA publishers throw gobs of money at games and then want to nickel and dime us as if we too have all the money in the world to spend on gaming.. whereas indie dev's have to scrimp and squeeze their budget dollars and then put out their game at a fair and reasonable price because they know how hard it is to survive right now. This might be why I have been doing almost all my games purchases on kickstarter and looking at indie's on steam. I'd rather pay $80 for a limited run boxed copy of an indie game than $60 for a AAA release, no matter the length (though short games usually relegate to my "buy it on sale on steam for $10 or less) bin). I still buy AAA games but rare is it to buy them new and straight out of the gate.

Sterling Treadwell

Why is your tie orange? Did I miss some important tie-announcement?

Kass Fireborn

Anybody needs to know themself what they want for there Money. You care about the lenght of a Game when you have to put some of your hard earned Money on the Table then thats fine. You can care about the Colors used for the Cover if you want, its your Money. I don't care that much about the lenght, altough there could of course be a point where I do (to make a extrem example: 100 Bucks for a Game that lasts 5 Minutes. No matter how good that 5 Minutes are, I'm not gonna pay 100 Bucks for it).

I loved the slowed down outro credits/song. Stay classy, you saucy man.

Chip Self