So how many hours of play should a game have? Somebody asked me this question and it's not all that easy to answer. It seems to me there are a lot of confounding variables like...

1) Is the game replayable?
2) What sort of game is it? What Genre?
3) How much does it cost?

... and I'm sure many other things that I can't think of. So how do you all go about deciding how many levels, how much variety, How many dungeons, etc... is enough?

Personally as a player I far prefer a short high quality game to a medium length pretty fun game. I'd rather have a night of outstanding play than 2 weeks of pretty good play, but generally speaking I decide on the amount of content for my games as a gut feel. Would I pay 20$ for this? and so on...

I'm interested to hear how everyone else approaches this.

In the age of short attention spans I'd go with less content...at least on my angle...

The last deep content game I played was Baldur's Gate. It is possibly my favorite game of all time. However, I have not bought the sequel b/c it took me 8 months to get through the first one. I play somewhat sporadically. I learned years ago that after being married, my days of playing MOO2 all day long were over. Instead I've learned to enjoy sitting down for 20minutes to an hour and playing a sport game or some other game that I can get into and out of easily without getting a)upset b/c I've lost my skills b)immersed so far that I lose track of life around me.

So that is the angle of an adult with kids and a life. I think the question must return to who the targeted audience is. 14 years ago I would have played Ultima all day long every day...and I did. I think that doing so now would be irresponsible...to say the least.

Longer answer than you likely wanted, however, I think my opinion without a small bit of background is even more convulded and difficult to understand than my normal ramblings.

The last FF has what ? 100 hours of gameplay ?? RPG fanatics use this as a selling point, i see this as 100 hours of long, tedious, unbearable, annoying, find enemy-kill enemy action. I don't mind long games, if they diversify and show me new stuff, but prolonging a game just making the user walk 5 times as much or just randomly change the monster generation variable from 10 to 5 every 3 minutes doesn't cut it. It SUCKS.

I've played games that made me go "ohh when is it going to end" and then when it does I fell great and say "ohh I wish there was more into it" and I've played games that made me go "ohh when is it going to end" and then I throw the keyboard out of the window and kick the monitor.

My own personal measure is that if there's at least an hour of gameplay for each dollar spent, it was worth it. But that measure really has nothing to do with the amount of content, unless the game is not replayable. But I think, regardless of the price, the more good content you can put in, the better. It makes people feel like they're getting a deal, even if they never see all of it.

I'd sort of thinking of it like mark was saying, but i'd take it a step further... Compare games to motion pictures, how much do you spend on a movie, and how long does a movie usually last. Well nowadays you can spend upwards of 6-8 dollars for a 2 hour movie, at it's lowest it's about 3 bucks per hour, at the highest it can be about 5 bucks per hour. Here's another way to look at it. Graphic adventure games of the late 80's to early 90's had anywhere from 6-8 hours of gameplay, if you knew everything and played it straight through. When they were commercial they usually charged about 50 bucks. Let's make it easy on ourself and say you had 10 hours of gameplay (a few did), straight through where you knew all the puzzles. 50/10 = 5, and there you're back at the 5 bucks per hour thing. So my mind if you're charging 10 bucks you should have at least 2 hours of playtime, not including replays.

Keith

ps. I know people are going to argue with me about this, but i just wanted to note this is merely my opinion, but at least it's a slightly educated opinion :-)

How do you measure hours of gameplay? I can ask a player how long it took them to finish my puzzle game and I get a large variety of responses. Some found it easy, some hard, some took their time, and some cheated. :) I can come up with a number that's an average of my tester responses, but it's a dubious figure. Most of my testers have played earlier versions so it's not a fair estimate, seeing as they'll naturally skip over some levels they've played before.

Regarding replayability -- with a game like Bejeweled, Collapse or Dynomite how could you possibly attach a measurement to it? Those games are infinitely replayable until you get bored, so at best you're measuring how long it takes for your players to get bored. I agree, it's confounding and subjective. I don't see how you could estimate this without surveying your users/testers.

I do think hours of gameplay can be a selling point, so I've made efforts to drum up a number. My last attempt involved a WAG (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=WAG) at how long an average player would take to solve an average level, and then multiplied that by the number of levels in my game. So I currently have 80 non-training levels done, at 10 minutes per level that's about 13 hours. Doesn't take me anywhere near that amount of time, but I know all the solutions by heart. ;-)

I agree with Keith about comparing it to a movie, but I expect higher production value from a movie than from a game. Depending on the type of game, I'd be happy with paying somewhere around $1-2 per hour of gameplay. I'll pay a higher rate for retail games because I expect an inordinate amount of mindless eye candy to make up for it. A highly replayable game like Strange Adventures in Outer Space seems like a bargain to me.

I'm not so picky about length as I am about quality. I do not want any filler material. If it is short and sweet so be it. Don't wreck it with filler material. Good examples: Metal Gear Solid ( easy to beat in under 10 hours on first time), MechWarrior 4 Mercs ( beat it in 10 or 15 hours ) Bad examples: Almost any RPG. I don't want to waste hours of my life on mindless repetive tasks.

That said I think a game should be at least long enough to not be beat by a hard-core gamer in the first sitting. 6-7 hours is probably enough.

Jack

I think myself as somewhat "casual" player - I play sometimes and quite short periods (well... anything from 30min to 2 hours per session)

I don't count the hours I spend - I measure the "fun" rate the game gives to me.

Example: I just can't help it - but playing BF1942 is just pure fun for me. The content itself is "repeated" all the time, it could be said that it's always the "same pattern" but it isn't about that - the team playing will determine the rate of "successful gaming experience" and usually it's just like that.

Same thing with single player games: SIMS was fun game and it was fun to play the game and build my own house... no hours counted - it was simply fun.

Here are a few more ways of thinking about the content worth:

intensity - How much fun is the game: is it like having an orgasm, or watching reality tv?

saturation - Is the player constantly experiencing this amount of enjoyment, or does it come in brief stints at the end of every 15minute level?

perceived/actual time - Since time usually flies when you're having fun the actual time is usually less than the perceived. It would be cool if a game could make you feel like you were gone for hours, while really only sucking an order of minutes out of your day. The tv show Alias is is a good example (for me) of quality entertainment that seems to last longer than it actually does.

replay novelty - How much variety is presented upon replay?

replay decay - How does enjoyment decrease with each play, or does it even go up (if so how often, and by how much)?

It seems clear that a lot of interesting factors are at work here. Anyone familiar with any research attempting to quantify any of these kinds of factors. It seems like this would make a great project for one of the budding academic/industry gameplay labs. It also seems like this would be very valuable information for publishers/developers.