As such, there are a good amount of people who actually prefer a shorter game that can be beaten in a few days, or even hours, so they can get on with more urgent aspects of their lives, or at least move on to the next game (or the New Game+, or whatever post-game content is available in the present one).Īdditionally, long games tend to satiate the player after a single playthrough, leading to the mentality of oh, I'll put this game away or sell it. In comparison, shorter, arcade-like games, due to being designed specifically around having high replay value, are less likely to do this. Secondly, as gamers grow older and chose to continue the hobby, they find that adulthood has more time-consuming responsibilities and complications than childhood: college/university, work, family life, and paying for your own necessities of food, water and shelter leaves you with less time to play games, to say nothing of leaving you with less money to buy them. A shorter game of consistent, concentrated quality is ultimately going to be more preferable to games that were artificially stretched out with padding and other forms of fake longevity in response to this trope, but would otherwise be just as short. First of all, a game being short doesn't mean it's of poor quality. Truth is, there is nothing (inherently) wrong with a short game.

If you can beat the game in a day or two, or worse, in one sitting, expect review sites to, at best, cut off a whole point or letter grade. In other words, it's short, so it sucks: it doesn't matter what genre the game being targeted is: first person shooters, shoot 'em ups, RPGs, Action-Adventure, you name it. The mentality developed that a game's length must be directly proportional to its price, and it's a mindset that has only gotten stronger as we enter the present day. Now games were expected to last dozens of hours, with hour-long games quickly becoming regarded as short, budget titles to be avoided at all costs. As such, unless you were very skilled, you probably aren't beating that game the same day - or in some case, the same weekend - you picked it up, meaning gamers were still more or less satisfied.įast-forward to the 1990s and 2000s, where more arcade-style genres began to take a backseat in popularity to adventure and role-playing games. Sure, the ending probably wasn't much, but an arcade mentality still existed for most genres, meaning there was very little saving and a whole lot of soul-crushing difficulty. Suddenly you had games with a definite length, lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Then came home consoles and personal computers. Games in the 1970s and early 1980s usually had no fixed ending if you survived, you kept going.

Burn the rope trophy difficulty vita