Gamers put far too much value in the hours they spend in their games

Recently, I was thinking about Steam's review criteria, thanks to the controversy around Paddle Paddle Paddle, a game that saw many people refunding it after beating it in an hour and a bit. Realistically, I thought, you can't expect people to pay for a game that doesn't even last two hours. Then I remember Mixtape, a game that costs a lot more than Paddle Paddle Paddle, but will take you around three hours to beat start to finish. Then I think on Dota 2, a game that's free, and yet eats hundreds if not thousands of hours of time out of a dedicated player.

Games are a weird, unique form of entertainment for many reasons, one of them being the amount of importance we put on the time spent in a game. Titles still sell themselves on being expansive adventures we can spend hundreds of hours in, even if an aging audience is struggling to put 40 hours into your average RPG. We don't finish games, yet the internet bubble always requires us to get value out of what we play through eking out as much time as possible. There's an old rule, of a game being good value if you spend around $1 per hour you put in. That rule works on occasion, but in the severe age of bloating budgets and development timelines we're in right now, I think it might be an idea to not have so much pressure put on giving a player "endless" hours of fun.

You don't judge a movie by its runtime. You don't judge a book by the amount of pages you'll read. If anything, movies, books, and other media can be judged more favourably if they're a bit shorter, because it feels like they've accomplished a lot under time constraints. We don't judge games the same way, largely because they're not just a storytelling medium, but it still feels like critiquing a game based on its length can be a fruitless, without the correct relevancy. Beyond Galaxyland, an indie RPG I reviewed back in 2024, felt short, not because of the amount of hours I'd spent on the game, but because its ending comes out of nowhere just when it seems the story is heating up for a more satisfying conclusion. Hellboy Web of Wyrd, while a brilliantly stylistic game, felt a little long even though it took me around 6 hours to beat, because the combat just got so samey after a while.

When you judge a game by the hours you get out of it rather than the value gathered, you're treating yourself like a resource. A battery that'll be fully drained after all 100 hours of gaming have been used. With more games than any one of us could ever hope to play in our lifetimes released by now, it's more important than ever to shift our perspective, so we're not just worried about the amount of hours. It's worth remembering that we're coming off a big phase of game studios thinking bigger was automatically better. Larger maps, more hours, those things can sound great on paper, but if the map is full of nothing interesting, and the hours you spend are wasted on bloated, repetitive quests, then have you really got value from your purchase? Or are you left wishing you'd been able to get at the core of the experience quicker, and enjoyed it without needless distractions just to fill the time quota?

For some games, time spent is part of that core experience. I'm not even just talking about games where you've got to grind for the biggest rewards, but RPGs like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II feel like they just give you a world that's worth spending time in, with little regard to what you're meant to be up to. Even so, the enjoyment of those games, those RPGs you get utterly lost in, is not about the amount of hours you spend in them, but how you're gripped throughout it all. That sense of emptiness you feel when you leave the world, characters, and story you've grown so attached to can come from a 10-hour or a 100-hour game. Sure, chances are you'll feel a deeper sense of loss the more time you've put in, but that also then multiplies the challenge for a developer in making that experience worthwhile throughout. Even masters at their craft can't do that all the time. To me, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a better game than Elden Ring, largely because despite Elden Ring's open world being nothing short of majestic throughout the majority of the game, there are points where it falls off, and leaves you with hours that feel like dredging through a swamp (not surprising from Miyazaki).

I think it's fair to want more from a video game. A few hours in Mixtape, a hundred minutes or so in Paddle Paddle Paddle, they're not quite what we're used to when we think of a memorable gaming experience. At the same time, the length of a game reminds us of one of the key creative decisions in the making of a title. 007: First Light is 20 hours not because the developers wanted to skimp out on making more content, but because that was the length of the story they wanted to tell. Anything after that wouldn't have been as impressive or as engaging. It would be the same if Baldur's Gate III was condensed into a ten-hour experience. A lot of people may feel it is that short, considering they just replay Act I over and over, but you can be sure it wouldn't have nearly as many GOTY trophies without its epic, lengthy story.

The more we judge and critique a game based solely on the time we spend with it, the less we're treating video games as art. We're not doing ourselves any favours as consumers, either, encouraging the bloat that has plagued the games and industry we love for so long. It sounds like a copout, but there really is no "perfect" length of time for a game that suits everyone. Some want high-octane experiences that last for a maximum of 10 hours. Others will tell you if you only spent 10 hours with a game you didn't give it enough of a go. Video games are an incredibly subjective medium, but if we reduce them to the hours we get out of them, then we risk dampening the creativity that sees titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and Dispatch all give us a tremendous time within the same year, despite offering vastly different play times.