Game length, and, I guess, price?

(Originally penned May 2016)

When we're talking about what a game 'should' cost to purchase, what, qualitatively, are we really asking?

It's the length of the game, right? That's what the most common responses to this question will probably tell you, or at least lean towards. We get angry if we pay 'full price', as we call it, for a game that takes less than some arbitrary length of time to play through to completion. Logically, it is then incredible value when we're surprised with a cheap game that has a longer average playtime.

But I don't know (and this isn't an opinion piece, I really do not know) if this is the metric that we should be using. In my eyes at least, there are a number of relevant and interesting instances which invite us to poke holes in the system.

Portal (the first one) is one of my favourite games of all time. I don't think there's been a period of a year or so since its initial release as part of The Orange Box collection that I haven't played it through to completion at least once. As a player, the game is fun, it looks sleek and exciting, it invites me to test my own reaction and coordination skills, and it tells a good story. The game is structured in a way that on every playthrough I still feel like I'm getting a little better at using the game's mechanics and figuring out more efficient ways to beat each puzzle. As a game designer, my enjoyment is almost doubled. Portal is designed so well that I would need to write a whole separate piece to even really touch on the tip of the iceberg, and playing through it over and over helps me appreciate those design elements as well as try to better understand them for the purpose of my own works. But I did not pay, and could not have ever legally paid, 'full price' for Portal. When I picked it up, it was as a part of The Orange Box collection, which also included Half Life 2 (a "FULL" game) and Team Fortress 2. I can apparently grab a standalone copy on Steam for 10 dollars (and I encourage you to do so if you haven't played Portal before!)

Portal 2, on the other hand, I paid "FULL" price for. This was ostensibly a reasonable thing to do because it was "2 or 3 times longer than the original Portal" which "wasn't a full game on its own". I've played through Portal 2 one and a half times since it released over five years ago, and I'm not particularly interested in incrementing that any further. The 'half' was because I got bored at a certain point on my second playthrough. Again, the difference in quality between the two Portal games is something that warrants its own (actually directional and opinionated) article, but suffice to say, the things I liked about Portal, and the things I like about games in general, are much less prominent in Portal 2.

At the end of the day;
The reason I paid more for Portal 2 was because it took me longer to see the ending credits the first time I played it than it took me to see the ending credits of Portal the first time I played it.

And doesn't that seem kind of… Arbitrary?
Portal being short wasn't a design flaw.
It wasn't a mistake or a lack of foresight on the part of the developers.
It had a specific, concentrated amount of 'game' to show me, and that amount of 'game' fit into a relatively short amount of time.

I hear people arguing already, so I'll play devil's advocate with myself for a moment. I know you want to tell me that Portal 2 wasn't more expensive than Portal because it was longer. It was more expensive because it cost more for Valve to produce it. And even now that production costs are well and truly covered for both games, it just doesn't make financial sense for Valve to lower the cost of Portal 2 to the point where it matches Portal. It eventually comes down to the idea that regardless of anything else, we are looking at A Company selling A Product and making A Profit. This is a reasonable statement, and I don't disagree with you! But this view still does not account for the fact that when the general public reacts to a short game released at full price, it is with contempt. You don't really ever hear large scale cases of people crying out about a game because it was or wasn't expensive to develop compared to the cost price. So I think it's still fair to say that the scale the CONSUMERS are using is based on game length.

Can we value games on their quality? No, not realistically. At least not at the time of release. Enjoyment of a game is a subjective matter as it is and the industry is currently already having an entirely different debate about whether or not there's even a good way to garner the audience's AVERAGE OVERALL views on "how good" a game is. After a game has been out for a while it becomes a little easier to use things like sales history and average recorded playtimes to figure out if it's a game that could or should keep being sold at a "FULL" price or something a little lower, but that still doesn't do us much good when we're trying to find an initial value to work with.

Could our issue be then that we aren't judging game length correctly? I think this is certainly part of it. In the example of Portal, I'd describe the original as being 'deceptively long', while Portal 2 is 'conventionally long'. In more useful terminology, we talk about this in terms of 'replayability'. A lot of the time, replayability is, like the ever elusive 'game quality', something that can't easily be quantified until well after a game's release. As well designed as Portal is, it's hard to know for sure whether or not the developers realised at the time the extent to which people were going to want to play it over and over. But what about a game that is SPECIFICALLY designed to be played over and over again, at the detriment of how long it takes to complete a single playthrough? This brings me to the next example I wanted to touch on, Star Fox Zero.

Star Fox Zero is closely based on Star Fox 64, which is in turn based on the original Star Fox for SNES. Not a creatively named series of games. Regardless, the format and structure of these games is something I'm actually a big fan of. For the unaware, the game (all three more or less function this same way) starts on a certain planet (or level), and ends on a certain other planet (Corneria and Venom respectively), and there are several planets (levels) that take place in between those two points. All up each level is only around 10 minutes long. It doesn't take a huge amount of time to make it all the way to the end credits and beat Venom, and in fact, in Star Fox and Star Fox 64, you're actually intended to beat the whole thing in one sitting. There's not even a save and continue feature in those games. What keeps them fresh is that the list of planets visited between Corneria and Venom are NOT the same on each run through the game. You'll go through the same AMOUNT of levels, so each run is relatively consistent in length, but the route you take through the galaxy is altered based on your actions and decisions on any given stage. It's a great formula for a lot of reasons and it's used in really interesting ways. The planets that are more challenging to discover and travel to are generally also harder themselves to complete. You end up with this difficulty curve that spans across several playthroughs without ever actually changing what happens in the game or how it works. So, like Portal, Star Fox is 'deceptively long'. You can see the credits within a couple of hours of turning on the game for the first time, but it's going to take a lot longer for you to find all the game has to offer.

Star Fox Zero hit shelves very recently after almost a twenty year gap since Star Fox 64 came out, and it is NOT being well received by any means. I've seen a couple of reviewers who liked it, but it's no exaggeration to say that most of the people talking about the game are not particularly pleased. What's interesting here is that negative comments are falling into mostly two categories. Either A, the game is not fun to play because of the controls, or B, the game cost FULL PRICE but was not long enough for what that should entail. It's an unfortunate situation if we're trying to critically examine the ideas of a game's ideal length for price ratio. Personally I believe that given the format of the game, category B is unfair, and I think it's easy to show that from every point of view. The game is structured such that you will play it over and over again, well after you see the credits for the first time. This enforces the idea of 'deceptive length' at the cost of 'conventional length', and in a more deliberate way even than the linear Portal. The game is absolutely a high budget production, following the school of thought some would use to justify worse but more technically impressive games like Portal 2.

It's almost a really good case study for what we should be pricing a game based on…. Except for the fact that the game didn't end up being fun to play. That was category A, if you're keeping track. We don't know if the game is actually secretly hours and hours of gameplay longer than it looks to be, like Portal or Star Fox 64, because we don't WANT to keep playing it after we see the credits roll. So there's an interesting relationship to be observed. Would we see people stop complaining about the length of the game if the controls were more manageable? Surely that would encourage the multiple playthroughs the developers were aiming towards, and in turn reveal the hidden depths the game has to offer.

There are a lot of other games that invite us to consider these questions in interesting ways, and I'm sure you can think of a few. Games like Nuclear Throne and Binding of Isaac rely on randomness and low consequence for failure to entertain players with hundreds of bite sized but varied playthroughs in a single play session. Older games like the original Castlevania were deliberately structured in a way that required you to practice and hone your skills on each new, increasingly difficult task, multiplying each level's playtime by several factors, increasing the length of the game in a somewhat unconventional way. MANY games now exclude a linear a->z gameplay progression entirely, in favour of a more richly detailed and in-depth multiplayer experience, and almost all of those seem to have a different idea regarding how pricing should work as a consequence. There's the ever-present consensus that for some reason AAA games are allowed to cost a lot regardless of their content, but Indie games are 'meant' to be cheaper.

Honestly there's no obvious or consistent answer that works in every scenario, as far as I can see. I think we'll always be finding new ways as game designers to justify to our consumers the price of admission. I think the important take away, if there is one, is that maybe we as players need to rethink our views a little. We don't need to be willing to pay extra for garbage just because the developer wants us to think that's how it works. And maybe a game isn't "too short to be worth my money" just because of how quickly you can get to the end credits screen. I don't know! Think about it!