What is wrong with 10 hour single player AAA games? These generally offer the most refined interactive story type experiences. I much prefer one of these to most movies.
It seems like a sign of shallow gameplay/mechanics. Supreme Commander, Master of Orion 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age (kinda), Mass Effect... Homeworld 2. You could spend - I'd guess at least a hundred hours or so - playing each of those games to see all their content and play around with all the options they offered you.
Story seems to have become a sort of distraction from the things that make a good game. So the story can be told in ten hours - what about the fun potential of the rest of the game? How many times am I going to play the thing? How much enjoyment can I extract?
Even RPGs, where a good story is important, most of the time is spent on quests and character interactions and on playing around with equipment and stats and so on. If you're just speedrunning an RPG's story, it doesn't generally take long. It's the game around it that takes the time.
At the end of the day, I'm not that interested in being passively entertained with the story. Maybe if the stories were better it would make sense as a form of passive entertainment. But games are like movies these days, and movies these days tend to have stories that aren't worth watching. If I wanted a good story, I'd go read a book or fish out some DVDs or something. I largely buy games for the stuff that goes on around the story, the game part of the thing.
Heck, at £3 an hour I could go and sit in a cinema for 10 hours at a comparable cost. £30 is like - I could buy 6+ hours martial arts practice, or go and do some archery, or go canoeing, or buy the materials to make myself a new desk, or.... £30 is not an insignificant amount of resources. It's not clear to me that the pay-off even makes sense anymore - though it did for things that you could play with for longer.
10 hours strikes me as ... there's probably not a lot there to play with. How many toys of any complexity are your bored of a mere 10 hours later? It may be a very polished experience but, how inventive can you be? ... I like finding tricky combinations of things and actually playing with stuff.
Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range.
That might not seem so troublesome on the surface, but there's generally little motivation to replay such games most of the time. Also, the knowledge that there have been many games with much more single player time as well as re-playability for a comparable or lesser price now or in the past. The more those 10 hour games become popular, the more it's considered acceptable and even normal for games in general.
The problem compounds when a new generation plays such games and never realizes how games were in the past. I've already noticed it with PC gamers and that many use controllers now even for typically keyboard/mouse games like FPSs. Companies end up failing to user test for keyboard/mouse players and things like custom key bindings or keyboard/mouse UX get ignored. Probably the worst example I've seen recently was Sleeping Dogs on PC. No custom key bindings (except for keys you didn't care about changing). Things like exiting a vehicle were set to the right mouse button without a way to change. I ended up accidentally pressing it at least 40-50 times throughout the game and had to repeat at least a few missions.
Typically, these type of games are bought for the multiplayer aspect (which is why I assume the single player game is so short and limited). I'm not much for multiplayer gaming unless it's with friends and not random people. Co-op gaming can be especially fun if done right (Saints Row 3, Terraria, Borderlands, etc).
In the end though, it's all about preferences. You might like such games yourself (and many others), but not everyone does. I think such games fill a niche for those that like them, but I loathe seeing them become the majority of PC/Console games as they're not the type of game that usually interests me.
>"Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range."
As an adult, paying $6-8 per hour for "AAA" interactive entertainment isn't terribly expensive, it's quite cheap even.
> Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range.
You pay for the graphics and the voice acting. If you can handle having more limited graphics and simpler/no voice acting, you will get games that are better in other aspects (balance, story, development, replayability) for way less.
True and I agree, but those games aren't considered AAA (since the definition of AAA is based on money spent as the sole criteria). Plenty of games have been AAA, of above average quality, and longer than 10 hours in the past 4-5 years (though I don't rush through games and like to enjoy the little details). When they are, I gladly pay for them[1] (probably more than I will ever be able to play lol). As I get older, I find time is harder to come by so I maybe I'm just more picky about what games I'll buy and then invest time in than I was when I was a kid.
While there are some $60 titles that are so good you can justify paying that much for a mere 10 hours of play, most are not worth nearly that much due to lack of replayability. If everyone keeps buying lousy games for full price the companies will keep producing lousy games because they don't need to be creative. I think many gamers have realized this and that is why indie games have been cropping up everywhere lately. I paid $10 for minecraft and have gotten hundreds of hours out of it so the cost is small per hour.
