Games that are too long are killing the video game industry

[Jamie McKane]

Games that are too long are killing the video game industry

One of the biggest problems with new triple-A games is that they are too long, according to industry analyst Rob Fahey.

 

[Solitude]

Well for the prices that they are going for these days the game better be long!

 

[Ser_Bunnylot]

I don't mind 3-6 hour long games, they certainly have their place - but you can't charge full price.

 

[czc]

I doubt thats the case. Call of Duty has a growing movement against it. Watchdogs 2 had to deal with the PR disaster that was Watchdogs 1. Dishonored 2 had that review embargo, then people learned it has performance issues, only the most dedicated will buy it. Titanfall I have no comment.

 

[Flex]

People that are lazy and don't want to complete long games are killing the video game industry rather

 

[Hiro]

generally, i much prefer if a game is 6-8 hours and no more. There are some exceptions (like sandbox and RPG's) but if its a linear story type game, then anything longer than 8 hours begins to grind my gears. but thats mainly coz i have an insane backlog.

 

[czc]

And then you also get this.

 

[DieGrootHammer]

So, I read through the article written by Rob Fahey, and I am a little bit disappointing in the MyGaming version of his views. Reading through his article I can't help but feel like we're missing his point if we just say that "games are too long and that's bad for business". That is not 100% his viewpoint.

What he is saying is that games that are more engrossing, addictive and played much longer than any normal AAA title, his so-called AAA+ titles, are the games that can partly be blamed for weaker sales. He argues that these AAA+ titles, such as Call Of Duty, Battlefield, Dota, Lol, WoW, Destiny, Overwatch, these are the particular games that is hampering sales of newer AAA titles.

You see, his viewpoint is that people are more engrossed into playing these titles over and over and over, for months, if not years, and spending money on these games. And the truth of the matter is, he isn't wrong at all. Looking at Steamspy data, more than half of all time spent on Steam playing games are played by a handful of the same games, not one of them being a game released in the last few months. This trend has been going of for years, and the vast majority of gamers rather spend time within these behemoths of games rather than playing newer titles.

The tipping point that we are potentially seeing, is the economic pressure that gamers all face. It again is no secret that economically the world is rather stagnant, and overall economic growth is very limited. Yet, despite this, game budgets keep on rising and rising, as they fight a marketing battle against all the other games for, what is in truth, a small percentage of games that will buy a new IP AAA game. Now, seeing as these gamers are less inclined to buy games due to them still spending 1000 of hours in the AAA+ games, and with additional economic pressure, why would people buy new games?

So, it is not the actual lenght of titles that are killing the industry, it is these bloated behemoth titles annexing gamer time and money, and making them less inclined to buy more interesting titles that get's released.