This week, Critical Distance has posted an article written
by Chris Bateman about the forty hour benchmark of a game's 'replayability'. In
the past, the majority of video games were often created on the assumption that
they would be played for roughly forty hours. Nowadays, games are being made to
be played for longer and we are seeing a decline in the forty hour model for
making games.
During the early time of consoles with polygonal 3D
rendering such as Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn in the mid-1990s, the
context of video games were designed to be played for 8- 12 hours or a total of
40 hours. The forty hour play window became the norm so developers aimed for
forty hour content, possibly fearing
negative reviews if the game fell short of the mark. Players that weren't
employed full time could easily play forty hours in one week and with the
greater number of games being produced, the arrangement of the market for games
meant that gamers who played as a hobby could play different games every week
if they wanted to.
With the arrival of World of Warcraft, the forty hour model
was being challenged in major ways by its increasing popularity. Forty hours
meant nothing to World of Warcraft players, which is a game that is played as a
hobby on its own.
Nowadays, the forty
hour model seems to decline. Every major commercial game now attempts to
capture audiences for at least 200 hours, with the addition of multiplayer
modes being the core method of maintaining players to constantly play the same
game. Chris Bateman states that...
"The forty hour
model was a consequence of selling games-as-products, as boxed content that
would be played then thrown onto a pile of completed games (although it turns
out that the minority of players finish games). The 200 hour model is a
consequence of selling games-as-services, with monetization now an on-going
process throughout the time the players are engaged with the title in question."
Chris Bateman suggests that the consequence of longer play windows
for games makes it difficult for large game studios to break even than ever
before, even though more money than ever before is coming into the game
industry. World of Warcraft has forced competitors to give their games away for
free due to not being able to compete directly with its critical mass of players
and content. Call of Duty requires three large developers working on it to
deliver content at a rate that would mean it is not vulnerable for competitors to
threaten its dominance. Chris Bateman points out that...
"The big money is no longer out to hold a player’s
attention for forty hours, but to hold a player’s attention long enough to get
the next game out, or to hold on to groups of players in the hope to pull in a
few big spenders, or to hold the player’s attention throughout the year with
events crafted to maintain appeal and bring back those who are slipping away
into other games. Hobby players – those who commit to a game service over the
long term – often play other games on the side, which is a tiny crumb of good
news for indies making smaller games. Indeed, at the bottom of the market,
there are perhaps greater opportunities for those who make games than ever
before, but the lower market is competing for the scraps left over from the
gorging behemoths above them, like crabs scuttling about for the tiny morsels
that fall to the seabed after the giant sharks have fed."
This week in video game blogging:
Chris Bateman's article Forty Hours:
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