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[DragonNCM]

Perfect length for games for me is 15-25h. After that game needs to be something special to invest my time in it.
Only games I finish with playtime more then 30h is Elden ring(fucking 120h) Days gone( about 45h) & AC odyssey (50h).

 

[reforen]

not everyone is a completionist gamer, most of people get their single player game, finish the story and goes for the next game. there are a bunch of games out there to spend a lot of time trying to get 100% that means nothing at the end of the day

 

[Danjin44]

I my opinion gamers these days have become little too impatient, little push back all it takes for them to hard quit the game.

 

[killatopak]

I my opinion gamers these days have become little too impatient, little push back all it takes for them to hard quit the game.

Tbf I don’t blame them. There’s too many games nowadays. There’s so much wealth of choice, it’s easy to drop the one you‘re playing to move on to the next one.

 

[Danjin44]

Tbf I don’t blame them. There’s too many games nowadays. There’s so much wealth of choice, it’s easy to drop the one you‘re playing to move on to the next one.

That also true, this year has been crazy.

 

[poppabk]

To be fair it's the gamers fault. Won't buy if it is under 40 hours, but won't actually play 40 hours. I generally decide to 'take a break' about the 15 hour mark but then when I come back I have forgotten all the mechanics and most of the story so never actually properly restart.
Guess this could be solved by having the ability to recap the story so far, and play a training level of mechanics you should have learned by this point in the game.

 

[Calverz]

100% yes. If you were a shareholder, why would you want the company wasting time and resources on making a campaign when hardly any fucker bothers to finish it. And then you look across the street and you see the fortnite guys downing champagne, snorting coke off breasts of some whores, and eating lobster and caviar?

 

[Knightime_X]

Is there a list of completed games?
Could compare the 2 and see if there is anything in common or differences.

 

[Minsc]

If games were under 10 seconds long, they'd all be at 100% completion rates (for anyone who plays them). Problem is length. The longer the game is made the less people will see it through to the end.

So if you want more games completed just keep cutting the length in half until you're happy.

 

[SHA]

I read comments from everywhere, some people just have concentration more than the others , many of them distracted for many reasons, not just video games, basically every media you'll find both of these people and they normally disagree with each others without addressing their differences.

 

[Hugare]

Too many option is part of the problem, I think

Stuff like Game Pass. I've installed so many games, have finished only 1: Atomic Heart.

Same with PS Plus: many games that I want to play, play for a bit then drop them.

Back when games cost a fortune, even if the game sucked, you could bet that I was gonna finish it.

And when I rented games, I had 2 days to finish a JRPG. It was madness.

I still have to finish Elden Ring because other games launched and I gave them priority.

But now having to go back and learn everything again, about how it controls and etc ... seems daunting

 

[Laptop1991]

Some games i don't want to finish, i like the journey so i play to near the end then do a another playthrough, also i might play more than 1 game at a time and decide to play other ones instead.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Unfortunately we don’t have data for pre-cheevos generations, but it’s easy to think completion rates were even lower then.
The amount of kids who never completed their NES games without a Game Genie is reportedly very high (Battletoads, anyone?), and when the PlayStation expanded the market to adult casuals the rate possibly dropped even lower. A lot of popular PS1 games were brutal. Tomb Raider was immensely popular and pretty much everyone I knew with a PS had a copy, original or not. I can safely say I was the only one I knew who beat the game, and even I had to use a guide for the later levels.

Unsurprisingly, highly spectacular cinematic games with different difficulty levels and extensive accessibility options seem to have better completion rates. Not everyone will appreciate a harder challenge, but most people will want to see how the movie part ends.

 

[The artful mincer]

they have high completion rates because they are extremely simple, there's not much to them and every single thing is basically dumbed down to a point where the player literally doesn't have to think.

if you then play these games on anything below normal, you don't even really have to put effort into combat, it's just braindead button mashing at that point.

that's why the completion rate is so high.
you don't need skill, you don't need to think for a second, it's like watching a movie, you just go through them. you don't "beat" them, you play them long enough to reach the credits.

many other games are more taxing to the player. you have to think, you have to have a certain level of skill, they might be less linear etc.


Spider-Man's platinum throphy rate is as high as it is because you literally need zero skill to get it, it's just marking something on the map, going to waypoint, finish extremely easy task, repeat until you have the trophy.

The salt is strong with this one

 

[01011001]

The salt is strong with this one

 

[Beechos]

Theres too many damn good games to play. These numbers will get even worse as gamepass/psn prem get bigger. In a span of a little more than a month I think, I bought dead space then harry potter then resident evil 4 remake. Just finished dead space not too long ago. This is not counting the games I play on gamepass and ps premium. Next game I'm closest to completing is atomic heart.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Thats normal. How many books you've picked up or bought in your life you never finished reading (or even begun)? TV series you never saw to the end? Thats what these games are for all these +60% players.

 

[Thirty7ven]

Sony is clearly doing something right with their single player games. Completion rate on games like TLoU2 and Ghost of Tsushima is way way above average.

 

[The artful mincer]

Breaking news only Sony games have easy mode!

 

[Gexxy1]

It’s all about the audience. If your audience has mountain dew adderall infused in their veins, I wouldn’t expect them to have an attention span higher than a goldfish.

Elden Ring

And people wanted easy mode.

I'm guessing you got this off of the online site psnprofiles, in which case these numbers aren't accurate.

If you go by the network's percentages, these numbers are around 15-25%.

 

[01011001]

Breaking news only Sony games have easy mode!

it's the combination of an easy mode and the generally really dumbed down gamedesign, where the game literally tells you the solution to puzzles and makes super sure that not even the dumbest player will ever get stuck for a second by constantly telling you what to do through UI elements and NPC dialogue

so if you play a game like that on easy you don't need any skill to progress and you don't need to use any brainpower to progress.
it's basically autopilot at that point.

 

[The artful mincer]

Sony is clearly doing something right with their single player games. Completion rate on games like TLoU2 and Ghost of Tsushima is way way above average.

Well if you belive posters on this forum it's because there both easier and shitter than other games!!!

 

[The artful mincer]

it's the combination of an easy mode and the generally really dumbed down gamedesign, where the game literally tells you the solution to puzzles and makes super sure that not even the dumbest player will ever get stuck for a second by constantly telling you what to do through UI elements and NPC dialogue

so if you play a game like that on easy you don't need any skill to progress and you don't need to use any brainpower to progress.
it's basically autopilot at that point.

 

[AMSCD]

Games should be shorter and less expensive. Extra chapters should be released as DLC for those who want it.

 

[01011001]

it's that you when your brain is used to hard?
better lay down for a while and let it cool off, I bet it will stop hurting.

play a Uncharted for a while, give your brain a break

 

[The artful mincer]

it's that you when your brain is used to hard?
better lay down for a while and let it cool off, I bet it will stop hurting.

play a Uncharted for a while, give your brain a break

Well I certainly lost a few brain cells reading your arguments I guess I better

 

[killatopak]

I'm guessing you got this off of the online site psnprofiles, in which case these numbers aren't accurate.

If you go by the network's percentages, these numbers are around 15-25%.

I checked mine it's around 37.4 at the lowest. The endings aren't really an indicator since one can only do one ending per playthrough unless you back up your save in the cloud. Hoarah Loux is a better indicator since it's basically the final boss. There's no trophy for Elden Beast.

 

[Killer8]

I will always champion the need for games to start being made shorter.

Part of that is because of the low completion rates, but it's not the only case for cutting length. As the OP said, development times and costs are ballooning out of control. It is now the norm for AAA projects to take 4-5 years to complete, sometimes even longer, and have budgets which rival a Hollywood movie.

The worry to me is that AAA titles will become too big to fail. AAA developers are already quite risk averse. Game design is in danger of just becoming all about chasing safe, guaranteed hits. That means innovation gets thrown out the window because no sane publisher is willing to put $200 million and years of manpower into a wildcard. As a result, you end up with a Hollywood-ization of the industry, where everything is about sequels, remakes, and the thing you saw before only shinier.

I would guess this may explain the high player drop-off for most AAA games - the games just aren't particularly interesting. There is little to set them apart from their predecessors and the game mechanics end up wearing out their welcome over their massive runtimes. No amount of RPG-lite, games-as-service features, loot systems and whatnot will sustain a boring underlying design for 50 hours.

It is in most gamers' best interests to want a shorter experience. Cheaper to make, faster to make, more room to take risks, and chances are you'll actually finish it. It also pairs relatively well with the new paradigm in gaming: the à la carte subscription services like Game Pass and PS+ Extra. There is little point (and it's a waste of money) to say you have 200 games to play on Game Pass, if you'll only actually have enough time to play one or two.

The only people I really see pushing back on the idea of shorter games so vehemently are extremely young students with no money but a ton of free time. The "muh value" types (even though with inflation gaming is cheaper than at any point in history). Their tune inevitably changes once they actually join the workforce and start families and then realize how little free time the average person really has.

 

[ReBurn]

Story campaigns perhaps. But I remember playing RPGs and other genres for weeks with up to twelve hour sessions on my Amiga back in the days, and I wasn't the only one.. So people had at least nuanced expectations already a long time ago. Which I guess is why this is already an old topic of discussion.

It was different for computer games back then. The longer the game the more disks you got. But even then something that took more than 16 hours to complete the main quest was rare. Exploring and collecting everything took muck longer, but there weren't many computer games that had weeks of content when playing for 12 hours a day unless the player replayed it or was really just bad at it. On console the arcade ports and most action games were pretty much arcade game length for the modern equivalent of about $100. Legend of Zelda on NES released for $50, which is like $140 of today's money, and the main quest can be finished in about 10 hours. Maybe 16 if you collect everything. Most RPG's of the time were similar.

 

[adamsapple]

I don't think companies care if 1% of people beat the campaign as long as they meet their sales criteria.

 

[simpatico]

Means nothing since we have so little to compare it to historically. Wonder what SNES completion rates were.