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| 12.05.2006Response to responses to Does Size Matter?
This seems a bit extreme, but I found issues brought up by some of the responses to the last Question of the week (Does Size Matter?) even more interesting the original question itself:
1. A lot of the respondents seem to be playing the wrong kinds of games; they sound as if they should stop playing full-price console games (stop even considering playing them) and just immerse themselves in casual games. Casual games are usually specifically designed to not demand much time and yet to be completable by *everyone*.
2. Oblivion was mentioned several times as offputting for being too long, or for being an exceptional game that people would play even though they don't normally play long games. Since everyone's personal experience is being cited, mine is that Oblivion I played as a normal game, then moved on to other games having only experienced a fraction of the content. And I was happy. But ... a couple of months later I picked it up and started all over again and got a complete new play experience out of it, almost the same as buying a whole new game again. And I expect that next time I upgrade my GFX card and decide to try it out with all effects maxed and the custom INI-file hacks to put reflections back into the game etc, that I'll play it a third time (for weeks or months).
If the comments in the question of the week inspire people to stop making games with that much replayability, or to start charging $200 per game because of it, I'll probably lose the will to play most non-casual games. A great game is a great game, and a great game tends to sell well. Being great is often about making a complete experience: for instance, if I'd never played oblivion again, I'd still have had the experience that I *knew* there was tonnes of content I'd not seen, and that is something intricately bound up with the fact that Oblivion immerses you in a world. If you get to the end having done most of the content, and know it, just by playing roughly through the plot line, then your sense of immersion is strictly limited in a way you cannot wriggle out of.
It is not that putting X hours of content in the world let you sell at $Y per unit, it is that putting in "more content that someone is going to reasonably encounter unless spending all their time exploring the world" made the game more than just a story, rather a constellation of stories set within a believable world, and "a believable world filled with stories" sells Z million copies at $Y each.
Really, this is a completely genre-specific discussion, since the extent to which gameplay can be measured in linear hours varies enormously from genre to genre (for instance a shoot-em-up versus a world-game). To phrase it any other way ultimately undermines attempts to draw serious conclusions from the discussion.
3. Some people might be interested to read the Economics research and theories on the subject of pricing, there's plenty of interesting stuff out there. One easy to read starting point would be Joel Spolsky's brief look at the topic.
5. Once and for all I would like to see the term "$60 for 10 hours entertainment is a better $/hour than you get at the movies" consigned to the trash. When the number of people who buy their movie tickets in advance in blocks of 5-10 different movies at a time is anything more than a small niche, that statement will start to have some meaning and value. Right now, it's a specious line of conversation that bears little relation to the actual purchasing decisions that consumers make.
6. After all that, the thing that struck me most on reading the eight pages of letters was that they underline the extent to which game developers as a whole are not the market that purchases computer games. From reading them it would seem that there's almost no-one who has the time or the inclination to spend more than a dozen hours on any one game, and that if you don't complete a game then it wasn't fun. Sales figures seem to tell a very different story. Given that I'm one of the consumers who doesn't even *expect* to complete a game, let alone demand that as a precondition to enjoying it and in fact actively prefers not to complete it for at least a few years, I'm glad that games continue to be made for the markets and not just for developers.
I also have a suspicion that many people in the industry who complain about games being too long are strongly influenced by their own professionalism, that demands they keep abreast of the advances in their industry. This means they feel they have to play all the important games (or as many as they can manage) and hence "too long" is a serious issue. A lot of my friends who are hardcore gamers never use the terms "need" or "have to" or "I have a list" when talking about the games they're playing or going to play in the future. There's nothing wrong with not completing a game, and many many people feel no sense of loss at having not done so.
Not completing a game means there's always something to go back to, and that's definitely an added value in itself.-Adam Martin
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