An Editorial on Game Length and Game Price
Former Sony Chairman Shawn Layden has kickstarted an online debate after a recent interview he did with publication Venture Beat.
In the interview, Layden expressed his views on how he thought with the modern-day AAA game development scene had a game model of creating lengthy games and then charging $60 for it, which Layden described as unsustainable.
Just to highlight a few quotes that Layden had given in his interview with VentureBeat that did get some people talking:
Personally, as an older gamer now, I would welcome the return of the 12–15 hour game. I would finish more games, first of all. Just like a well-edited piece of literature or a movie — I’ve been looking at the discipline around that, the containment around that. It could get us tighter, more compelling content. It would be something I’d like to see a return to…
I still remember when games would cost $1 million to make. Those days are long gone. The cost of creating games has increased. Some studies show that’s gone up 2X every time a console generation advances. The problem with that model is it’s just not sustainable. Major triple-A games in the current generation go anywhere from $80 million to $150 million or more to build, and that’s before marketing. It’s a huge up-front cost. Extended over time, it takes three or four or five years to build a game while you’re not getting any return on the investment. You just continue to pay into it looking for the big payoff at the end.
I don’t think, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and expect the industry to continue to grow. The industry as a whole needs to sit back and think, “What are we building? What’s the audience expectation? What is the best way to get our stories across, to say what we need to say?” That’s going to cause the industry to look at the kind of games we’re doing, where we go from there, and what we’re putting into them. It’s hard for every adventure game to shoot for 50 or 60 hours of gameplay. That’s going to be so much more expensive to achieve.
Now I could go onto a lengthy criticism of microtransactions, loot boxes and the such when it comes to the “struggles” that companies have recouping money back, but I have done that prior, which can be read about in a previous write-up I did talking about how Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision was raking in a hefty amount of money from the billions and billions of dollars Activision had been making. Instead, I do want to talk about the topic of game price and game length, as I think that will be more interesting than hearing me go on about microtransactions so frequently.
One common criticism that I have had with namely some of the older Grand Theft Auto games, the original Red Dead Redemption and just a lot of games in Rockstar’s portfolio (I do however think they have improved on this aspect in Grand Theft Auto V and mildly so with Red Dead Redemption 2) is that they feel un-needingly padded. I will say, I love all these games a lot, but that’s probably the only criticism I’d level. There are missions they include that feel very copy-pasted just to add more gameplay into the story and making them feel unnecessarily long. If you take Grand Theft Auto IV for an example, you can probably account for when a great number of missions you’d do felt very similar to past ones you’d done, didn’t progress the story at all and just felt unneeded and unnecessary. Feel free to use it as a side-mission, but putting it in as essential for the story when it really doesn’t add much just reflects the padded nature more. It’s a very similar argument that’s consistently made with Ubisoft open-world games when talking about their sandboxes where the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games are open worlds, and vast ones at that, but are so limited with content where they rely heavily on recycling the same thing over and over where it’s “collect this shard 100 times” and have it be one of the consistent activities you’d intend for your players to do in your open world.
It’s the same thing that applies to game time padding where developers just fill the game with unneeded padding to try and get players playing the game for longer. Now don’t get me wrong, games that are intended for longer play-times can be done right. Personally, even though it is memes about a lot, but I think The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a prominent example of how games can densely populate their open-world with substantial content, can remain fun throughout, and while gameplay elements are recycled, the stories and backgrounds for the activities it has you do consistently maintain player interest. Every dungeon has a history, every person has a personality and is different in their own way. The content and lore of the game is incredibly rich that still has people going back to it 9 years later. The same can’t entirely be said with annual releases of the Assassin’s Creed series or to go towards more of a negative live service transitioned series Call of Duty.
But at the same time, shorter games aren’t to be discarded either. There are many games that I thoroughly enjoyed that aren’t open-world games that have extensive game time. Look to The Walking Dead from Telltale, the first season clocking in at around 11–12 hours long, that won many Game of the Year awards. To me, The Walking Dead was a gem that never felt like it was wasting my time and respected my time. And that’s what it comes down to, how much a game respects the time it gives you rather than how much. I can play a game that’s only 1 hour and enjoy it. I can play a game that’s 100 hours or more and enjoy it. It’s only dependable on how much it’s accommodated towards me and how much it respects me and the time I invest in it. If the game consists of expecting me to run around finding shards for a good chunk of my playtime, I don’t think that’s truly respecting the time that the developers have chose to pad out game content. I will though happily both sit on a game that’s 12 hours that engrossed me into the story of characters that are melting in emotion and personality and their journey in a post-apocalyptic world, and I will happily invest hundreds of hours into a game jam-packed with tons of dungeons, each with a different story waiting to be told.
If you think of games as the embodiment of businessmen each coming at you with different proposals and trying to sell their idea to you and thinking of your time as the investment they want you to put in, which of these would you take?
Businessman 1 offers you a game that’s 4 hours long, requiring 4 hours of invested time, where you play as a young boy running away from men that wish to take him captive that then kickstarts you on a dark, disturbing and macabre.
Businessman 2 offers a game that is slightly longer (just slightly) 40 hours long. It’s a game that aims to tell a story full of time travelling tribulations that has a very enriching and detailed story with characterisation oozing left, right and centre.
Then businessman 3 comes at you asking for 100 hours for a cookie-cutter storyline set in an empty open world, where you can run from one edge of the map to the other and collect some shards if you feel extra adventurous. Oh, and maybe some tailing quest and if you got lucky you got the one about pirates. If you’re extra unlucky, you got a cursed image to haunt your nightmare for many years to come:
In reality, it’s not so much a problem about game length, I don’t there’s a thing of games being too short nor long. It’s more down to how they use the time they give you and expect you to invest.
But then we get to the second form of currency besides time invested, the more literal currency of game price.
There’s a reason why “4 HOURS!?!?!” became an internet meme shortly after the skid mark of IO Interactive, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days came out. A game charging $60 from the get-go and only offering up 4 hours of meaningless and poorly put together and sorry excuse for a co-op shooter experience. It can be seen if you’re charging $60 for a game that uses up just under 2 showings of James Cameron’s Avatar, it can kind of be seen as a huge slap to the wallet. However, it seems playing an Uno reverse card, at least in the ex-Sony boss’s mind, players are having it too well off getting a game with $60 when games are typically packed with content made to last many hours. But at the same time, players aren’t necessarily always on the lookout for these kinds of games. They’re looking for games not necessarily always on a play-time factor (although it is typically considered) but more so how the game respects the player’s time and how the player doesn’t feel the game is wasting their time.
I understand Layden is making a similar point where he’d love to see these shorter games come up more often, but the point where it gets dicey is instead of recommending developers just make shorter and more enjoyable experiences, he recommends increasing the $60 norm of pricing to something higher to recoup the game development costs.
The problem is still the $60 myth in which $60 gets you the base experience but many game companies still include the microtransactions, DLC, season passes, loot boxes etc. that while not all the buyers tap into, a significant enough of people do to rake in, as mentioned earlier, billions of dollars. I’m pretty sure we can all see the reality in even if these companies did get away with charging at a higher base price than $60 as a “norm” they wouldn’t stop with these extra monetised features, again, it’s not about getting enough money. There’s no such thing as enough money to these billionaire CEOs acting as a puppeteer to the inclusion of these monetisation methods, they want as much money as they can get their hands on by any means necessary.
Seeing as how much of the AAA games industry decide to employ these practices continuously, I’m not happy in even entertaining the idea of increasing the base MSRP, because I can already see their direction will not change.
In short: game length isn’t important, it’s how the time is used, and to hell adding extra monetisation to an already over-monetised market and especially so in terms of games with over-monetised in-game economies.
E-mail me: mellowonline1@gmail.com
