Are video games getting too damn long? The people over at r/TrueGaming seem to think so. A quick look at Steam’s most played games also seems to indicate that gamers are not keen on investing their time on titles with long hours. Who’s to blame? The average gamer and their decreasing attention span or the developers’ competitive need to add more content at any cost?
This is a strange question to consider. Typically, video games have been the media’s go-to culprit for the decline of attention spans, second only to jeggings. It’s a magic-turns-on-the-magician situation if you choose take this side. The problem concerning this premise is that, according the aforementioned Steam chart, gamers continue to clock insane hours for games like Dota2, Counter Strike, Football Manager, Civilization , and GTA V . With the exception of GTA V and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain , almost every game in the top 10 most played titles list is a match/turn based game. The experience is so short that someone can replay these games every one to two hours. Features like character development, world building and environment exploration, which require dozens of hours to feel rewarding, don’t cut it anymore.
The “game experience” has almost lost all its value in today’s climate. The freemium model has managed to successfully replace rewarding experience with the dangling carrots that are virtual goods and in-game economy. The average gamer thinks: Why would I waste 10 hours feeling lost in the Witcher 3’s Novigrad when I clock in just enough hours in LoL to afford a Tahm Kench skin? Investing significant hours into a game before feeling rewarded is pretty much a rip-off compared to what other mediums like podcasts and mobile games offer. Economically speaking, the opportunity cost of lengthy games is significantly higher than that of shorter ones. Developers now have the responsibility to reconsider game-length as an imperative for good releases.
When it comes to these expansive games, Is how big you make your open world into still that impressive? We get it already! It’s 10x bigger than Skyrim and 20x bigger than Just Cause . Role playing games content has been going downhill. The whole who can whip out the biggest world contest has come at the cost of original storylines and revolutionary mechanics. If I play one more Nordic-Celtic-Germanic inspired RPG, I will hunt every garden gnome on this land and burn them in a fire effigy bound to make my backyard the next Burning Man.
There’s also a possibility that I’m trying to repress. I’m getting old. Well, we’re all getting old! The generation that witnessed the golden age of RPGs, titles like Chrono Trigger, Fallout 1&2 and Neverwinter Nights , have grown up. These were revolutionary and immersive games with dozens of hours of content that we had no trouble consuming. Alas, personal and professional responsibilities now stand in the way between us and the game experiences we once craved.
Truth is: I want someone to blame but I can’t really point any fingers. Either the “the bigger the better” is now an insubstantial game-de paradigm or worse: developers are turning gamers into middle-aged moms. Last year’s hit statistic about the demographic every game developer should be aware of might have finally caught up with videogames, especially that console‘s marketplaces and stores have blown the quick-download quick-reward market wide open.