Given the recent controversy over the length of the Resident Evil 3 remake, I thought now might be a good time to discuss the ideal video game length. As you might imagine, there is a lot to take into account here from how different genres inherently have different playtimes, the cost of said product and, obviously, personal opinion.
When I was a kid, the length of a video game was pretty much irrelevant to me. I would spend so much time messing about that the game lengths would become inflated. I can remember talking to a girl in college about our favourite Final Fantasy games. I brought up Final Fantasy IV and she responded that it wasn’t one of her favourites. I asked why and she said that the game was too short. I was stunned as I recalled how I could spend 50-80 hours on it as a kid. Soon after I got the opportunity to replay Final Fantasy IV on Steam and was taken aback by how comparatively short the game was, now that I was playing it in an efficient manner.
As I grew older, I began to seek value in games. In my mind, I created a rule that I would only buy a game if I could extract at least 1 hour of gameplay for every euro I spent on it. However, I soon realized that my view of the ideal video game length had been distorted by my obsession with RPGs in my youth. While this rule worked very well for RPGs which are naturally lengthy, most other genres struggled to keep up with this ratio with most platformers, horror titles, FPS games etc having much shorter lengths on average (taken at full price of course).
Of course, one must take the quality of the game into account as well. A short but brilliant experience is worth more than a long, uninteresting one. It is also worth noting that the quality of the game becomes more important the longer one plays it. As I mentioned before, I play a lot of RPGs and the extended length of RPGs means that mediocrity becomes increasingly more painful the longer you play it. In contrast, a brief playtime might allow a game to remain fun even if it’s average.
Taking that into account it can still be difficult to recommend short games at full price. The releases of Resident Evil 3, The Order: 1866 and Vanquish all called into question how long a $60 game should be. Even if the game is great, is it worth essentially spending $10-12 an hour for the experience?
That is not to mention that your ideal video game length is likely to be determined by your lifestyle. Just as there are many people who love games with a long playtime, many people are becoming increasingly drawn to shorter video game experiences as time commitments such as jobs or family impact how much time they can allot to leisure (although it is also possible that people simply want to finish video games and are more likely to do so with a shorter one).
In conclusion, the answer is that the ideal length of a video game varies from title to title and person to person. What is ideal for one person might be painfully long or short for another. Nonetheless, I think it’s important that we continue to ask this question and come up with our own answers. Let me know your thoughts on the ideal length of a video game and how the idea of value factors into it.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.