Why We Find So Many Games LESS Fun...

Hint: it's not just microtransactions...

[Tayzter]

Support indie devs or small studios. They produce some of the most creative and fun games I have played and challenge new ideas.

[gantech]

When Ubisoft was talking about wanting to average $200 per game sale is when I walked away from AAA games. I'm sick of the games trying to sell us a full price game, passes, and microtransactions to maximize profits. It has changed how they design and piece meal the game into parts to charge for. Once the financial people came in and took over AAA it turned to shit since they don't respect gamers just the money they can fork over.

[Interrobang]

We said in the xbox360/ ps3 era that "casual" game design was creeping into and ruining gaming. I think the terminology was off, but the sentiment was spot on. They want the cheap but infinite engagement experience to rope you in. Waste more time, have less fun, spend more money.

[ragmanx]

They don't just feel worse, they feel absolutely WRONG. Very few AAA games are remotely appealing to me these days, but I just keep finding awesome and truly wholesome stuff in the indie market since years. Play time is very relative as well. I'd rather have a game with a limited time investment that's actually memorable than a game that just relies on repetition to artificially overstay it's welcome. For grindy games it's a tricky situation, given how easily they lend themselves to endless money pits. The best case scenario for me would be something like Monster Hunter. Very grindy, but with a gameplay loop that feels both compelling AND rewarding without the dubious incentive of excess monetization fueling the whole thing like most grind-based games do. The problem isn't grinding itself, but the negative motivation behind it and how unethical companies have weaponized it to squeeze as much money as possible from players by deliberately frustrating them into coughing out more cash. The fact companies like Ubisoft have managed to screw up even single player games so comically by bolting crap like this to them may be one of the best examples of how messed up the industry truly is.

[whyjnot]

This might be a little long but please bear with me, I promise it won't take a thousand

Back in the 90s and I was a teenager working for McDonalds at $4.25 an hour (5 cents over minimum wage), I wanted to get at least 10 hours of fun out of a game, since that meant at the $40 most games were, I literally got my moneys worth based on what I was being paid. It was a quick and easy to understand metric.

It worked back then in a time when a "long" game might be an rpg that ran 20 hours, more likely a game was something I could beat 5 times over in 10 hours. The second reason that it worked was that I had an objective dollar amount per hour, my hourly wage, instead of an arbitrary value I assigned myself. The wage value was not totally arbitrary as it was the same as other people hired at the same time I was. The third reason it worked as a quick and dirty metric was due to how low minimum wage was (which was reflected in how little McDonalds would pay, usually just a few cents over minimum, so they could say "above minimum wage" legally).

This was never a great metric to use, but back in the 90s, it wasn't bad either, it was quick, it was dirty, and it worked for a simple answer to "did you get your moneys worth?" If a more detailed answer was appropriate, say when there was the time to make one, a more detailed answer would be given.

Needless to say, this is a crap metric to use today due to how different wages are and how games are commonly padded to hell and back for extra playtime.


As for time played, there is still definitely something to be said here. Two things really.

1) I still find it interesting to make note of how much time a game takes with the following criteria; first time through, completionist, no guides, no cheats (which have been my criteria from the time I first started doing this 25+ years ago), but this is for my own amusement these days, in the past it was an informal competition between friends over who beat what quicker. And I always thought it interesting to see which games took me longer personally in the past, when the kinds of games I was keeping track of (RPGs) didn't have the type of padding you get in games these maybe you had to spend some time level building but it wouldn't be anything described as grinding (which I ONLY use as a pejorative, when you start describing _gaming_ with terms used to describe work, something is wrong).

2) Total time played can be really important, but not to the point where padding a game for time is ok. If a game can naturally say "yeah I held your attention for hundreds of hours even though you can beat me in 40 hours" such as Final Fantasy Tactics did for me back in the 90s (as just one example) it is a great thing. That "naturally" bit is what devs and publishers forget these days. They have this laser focus on huge playtimes while completely forgetting what makes a game fun to play for a godawful amount of time. Not to mention they forget that not all games need huge playtimes. It truly is a case of missing the forest for the trees.

A game that is truly exceptionally fun to play doesn't care about time, it makes you FORGET HOW MUCH TIME you have played. I still remember the first time I lost 5-6 hours of a night playing a game without noticing the time going by, it was Dune II on the Genesis (yeah, rts with a gamepad and still it was awesome). Which I played so damned much on a rental, that my mother refused to buy it for me (this was back when I was 12 or so).

Sure I played Suikoden a lot as I loved the game, but it didn't need 100 hours for a playthrough, 12 was perfect, 45 hours was perfect for Suikoden II, 76 hours for Suikoden III was pushing it, I remember finishing that game and thinking "damn that was a long time" but not in a good way, (those were the times by the criteria I gave flash to more modern times and I see about 140 hours for Dragon Age Inquisition and even though I still really liked the game, I think "did this game really need half of those hours?"


The only reason I remember how long these games took are due to the play time on save files. Which was a feature that used to simply be used to keep track of what save was what in a time when we had first moved from 1-3 saved games via battery backup and onto memory cards that could do upwards of 15 saves (sounds trite now, but this was the way things were back in the day).



caveat: with the criteria I listed above sometimes it could be first time completionist, no guides, no cheats, meaning the first completionist run, instead of first time playing a game, but I only did this when guides and cheats were not part of earlier playthroughs. Also, it was harder to judge what "complete" meant then with a lot of games, since you had no counter telling you what percentage of the game was done for most games that took a fair bit of time. For example with the Suikoden games, complete means to me, getting all of the 108 stars of destiny. Also, back in the day I would simply say something like "completing everything" not "completionist", this is a term I have adopted post 2005 or so.

now lets see how many people read

[OldManInternet]

Matt's analogy about being "low level engaged" with a game sounds like my Shadowlands experience, except I was reading the 9.1 patch notes, while dreading all the crap I was going to have to do, and had that "what the hell am I doing here" moment.

[hkoizumi]

Calling it AAA seems so self serving at this point for them. I even claimed it as a type of undeserving hype. Now, it is a form of stigmata that I often temper my expectations to.

[Ttempleman]

If a game is long and never feels like a chore, I'm all for it.
I love getting lost in giant worlds with a variety of stuff to do.
The great thing is you can put it down and come back.

[phoenix]

It’s the MMO-ification of all titles. When they realized free to play MMO’s were their own personal ATM, they tried to get the same output in all their games. The result is what is so ably described in the video. It feels like the entire industry is so obsessed with making money they refuse to put out a good product. I am somewhat hopeful a second video game crash is coming which will clean this behavior out.

[jaylenharris]

Greed, it's no longer about "how do we make a good game the player will enjoy". It's about "how much money can we squeeze out of these players before they had enough". Everything changed when the suits and ties got evolved.

[SteveWhipp]

I stopped caring about big studio games a good number of years ago. Small studio or single developer games can take more risks, change direction, open up to modders and "feel" more value for money. MTX and Grind/Padding are terrible additions from a consumer point of view and a money printing machine for publishers.

[CataclysmDM]

It seems quite obvious to me, AAA devs have switched from designing games with the question "how can we make this fun and engaging for players" to designing games with the question "how can we maximize return on investment and how far can we push monetization?"

[vitacilina]

Spot on. I grew up with Gaming, Gaming is a huge part of my life and that shaped who I am. I'm now a Father and a Husband, finding less and less time to devote to my hobbies, and there's nothing I hate more than games that do not respect my time. It's the reason I primarily only play and buy indie games. My time is important and I REFUSE to support developers and games that design their experiences to take away, rather than enrich my life.

[fallofcamelot]

I played through Horizon Zero Dawn last year and absolutely loved it. From start to 100% completion in just over 100 hours.

Then I searched around for other games that could provide a similar experience and bought Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. The difference was night and day. In HZD everything was built to immerse you in the experience. Systems and gameplay were dedicated to making you feel like a hunter in a post apocalyptic world.

In AC:O there was none of that. Everything was a chore to get you to drop real money. It was utterly disgusting. I didn't just rage quit the game, I rage quit the game, rage uninstalled the game and then rage uninstalled the Ubisoft Store.

[Lancefer]

The weird part is I remember everyone I’ve ever know, that also play games has known and talked about this since like ten or twelve years ago. When it slowly started going from a little interesting change to decrease quality for a money grub.

Yet no matter how many multitudes of people have talked about it or keep bringing it up as it’s still getting worse, at the same time no one has ever had any kind of answer or way to assist in reverting the issues.

Also anyone who hasn’t always been into games for most of there life has no frame of reference and thinks these current methods are the norm, with no idea of the older customer friendly developing of the past.

[Daniel_M]

This might be the new norm for gaming. Only indie developers will actually release good games that don't care as much for quarterly earnings or micro transaction. There are several games that released between 5 to 10 years ago, and I still play those games because I don't care to play those big games from big corporate companies.

[Ghost_Text]

It really points back to Under The Mayo's "Challenge Matters" video.

Creating systems to be mastered is not the endgoal for some companies. Converting a AAA game slowly over time into a digital amusement park ride at best and a casino table at worst appears to be more so the objective.

[sechran]

It's not about money... it's about MORE money. They have to make MORE money than the last fiscal quarter/semester/year for the sake of their shareholders. The harder and more egregiously they game the system now means the *worse* they have to game it tomorrow to keep up that growth. Endless, all consuming, wholly destructive growth. You know, like cancer.

[SimonBarnes]

Honestly, working full time and studying after hours, I often don't start playing games I really want to, because I know they're too long. At the stage of life I'm at, I long for quick, short campaigns I can finish on a Saturday and have a good time doing so.

[galacticwarlock]

I started seeing games being ruined once the companies started being traded on the stock market.