shorter game should not be cheaper

[Don]

I thought of this from the 7 commendent thing Sine posted. One of the thing it said was don't make your game longer just because you can, and it's okay to have short games if they're priced cheaper. By this I assume they mean like if a game lasts only 5 hours it should sell for $20. This is exactly why games cram in all the meaningless stuff to extend the *play time* because people think they're entitled to a cheaper price tag because a game is shorter. World of Warcraft *only* needs about 10 days (240 hours) to hit level 70 and let's say it costs $100 (regular + expansion). Chrono Trigger sold for $100 if you got it when it was new, and you can potentially blitz through the game in about 10 hours, so I guess by this logic World of Warcraft should either cost $2400 or CT should've cost about $4.

I'm no longer convinced it is possible to sustain greatness over extended amount of time. In light of that I'd rather have something that just have short-lived goodness and be done, then having the same short-lived goodness dispersed intermittently in 50 hours of blandness.

[Zeus]

One of the best RPGs - or game, period - ever made was Panzer Saga. That was only about 15 hours long but what a spectacular 15 hours it was. Didn't feel short, didn't feel like there should have been more. It just ruled.

I'm perfectly happy paying full price for a game like that

[SineSwiper]

Yeah, well, the prime example most people use in this case is Portal. It's a 4 hour game. If I paid $50 for a 4 hour game, even Portal, I would have some serious issues with it. Since it comes in a bundle with 3 games I haven't played yet, and an awesome multiplayer game, it's worth more than $50.

BTW, Don, you have horrible examples for your argument. WoW is a MMO, and has a completely different pricing model. (Yes, they are pricing you per month because it's longer than a set period of time. Also, by definition of a MMO, there is less content per hour than a standard RPG.) Chrono Trigger is a 10 hour game, but it also had incredible replay value, since it was the first game to have a concept of New Game+. So, your play time was not exactly 10 hours total. Same with C:SotN.

[Don]

Grandia 1 takes about 70 hours to beat. You can do all the New Game+ in about 20 hours in CT, and WoW can be played like a single player until you hit level 70 anyway, which makes it perfectly valid as a single player game. This is why emulator servers are pretty popular for WoW even though half of the scripts don't even work, because they don't have to if you just play it like a single player game.

Anyway it's because you say "$50 for 4 hours = bad" that's why you get games that has only 4 hours of content stretched arbitrarily long. It is very easy to drag things out without actually expanding any meaningful effort. I took 45 minutes to beat Proto Dora in Xenosaga just because the pace of the combat engine is very slow.

[SineSwiper]

Well, the more you try to stretch out the game, the less content you have in each of those hours. This is why MMOs are so cheap in comparison to how many hours of gameplay they have. A game like Portal has 4 hours of nothing but gameplay, which gives it high marks. If the game had 10 hours of nothing but gameplay, and was a standalone, it might make it as a well-reviewed game for 40 or 50 bucks.

You really have to choose your length of time, amount of content, and price carefully. If any of those is not enough (or too expensive), it could really drag down the enjoyment of the game.

[Don]

Let's say I can only have 4 hours of awesomeness, and you know that can only sell for $20 because it's 4 hours. But I can easily inject 46 hours of boredom, stretching the game out to 50 hours, and sell it for $60. I do not see how this new game would be any better than the old one. In all likelihood it's going to be worse.

If you subtract the time you game over, Super Mario Brothers 3 certainly doesn't take more than 4 hours to beat. That didn't seem to bother people. The MMZ/ZX series seems to take about 1 hour to beat after subtracting the time you die (which can be a lot), those still sold relatively okay (around the 100K range).

Now that I think about it, perhaps RPGs have so much filler because it is actually very hard to die in. You can certainly spend 10 hours just dying in a Megaman game even though the game takes less than an hour to beat. But assuming the challenge is reasonable, time spent due to dying is fine. In Shining Force Neo you could be dying every 10 seconds once the Shining Force trials start but it's not really time wasted. The dungeon layout is basically equivalent of a mega boss every 10 seconds so even if you've to save every 5 seconds, it's fine. When's the last time anyone died in a RPG game that didn't involve being way too under level, or an obviously cheap gimmick that you cannot deal with unless you see it at least once?

[SineSwiper]

Let's say I can only have 4 hours of awesomeness, and you know that can only sell for $20 because it's 4 hours. But I can easily inject 46 hours of boredom, stretching the game out to 50 hours, and sell it for $60. I do not see how this new game would be any better than the old one. In all likelihood it's going to be worse.

That's precisely what people DON'T want: 4 hours of actual content in a 60-hour game.

[Don]

Let's say I can only have 4 hours of awesomeness, and you know that can only sell for $20 because it's 4 hours. But I can easily inject 46 hours of boredom, stretching the game out to 50 hours, and sell it for $60. I do not see how this new game would be any better than the old one. In all likelihood it's going to be worse.

That's precisely what people DON'T want: 4 hours of actual content in a 60-hour game.

But that's all that is going to happen if you're going to say you're not willing to pay the full price for a short game. The amount of good content is limited and generally very small. On the other hand time consuming stuff is usually the easiest to implement. Take an RPG, you can simply make your worlds bigger. You can slow down the pace of combat. You can force people to go through some stupid mini games. You can make the enemies really hard so you got to go around in circles to level up. The possibilities are endless and quite easy to add.

[Tessian]

The article was never suggesting to price games based on their length; it simply said don't destroy the quality of the game by adding gametime to it just so you can justify the $60 price tag.

Don, you're arguing that this would be a BAD thing, but really it's already in practice to great success. Portal is the first obvious example, but the most recent example would be Penny Arcade's "On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness" game. It's $20 for about 4 hours of solid gameplay and as far as I can tell it's been pretty fucking popular. Many companies may still be afraid to try such a thing, but we are seeing it become more and more popular.

You're also not considering the throngs of gamers who jump at the opportunity to buy a $20 game instead of a $60 one. These days even I have to spend a day or two debating whether a $60 game is worth buying, but when PA's game came out for $20 I picked that puppy up after trying the demo for 10 minutes. When the price tag's easier to swallow you'll have more people willing to buy it. Hell this is the whole basis behind the idea for XBLA.