Does video game length matter?

Well the big discussion happening this week centers around Ready at Dawn's new Playstation-exclusive release, The Order 1886. It's been getting a lot of flack from critics for being dull and poorly-paced, while another debate is being had by players about the game's supposed short length. Some rumors have spread around that the game only clocks in at about 5 hours of content, and there is no multiplayer mode or additional content to keep you coming back. On the other hand, I've heard some counter-arguments that this is only true if you play through the game as fast as you can while skipping side quests and other additional content within the campaign, but regardless of the game's actual length, I think this is a good segue into a more general discussion about what should and shouldn't be an acceptable length for gameplay time.

I want to start off by saying though that overall I think too much emphasis is placed on game length nowadays; though it also doesn't help that there now exists exploitative DLC schemes that might have exacerbated this issue. In the old days, when a game was released, it was generally considered complete as-is. There was no Internet, no patches to fix bugs, and no DLC to expand the amount of content in the game, so developers couldn't just get away with cutting corners and fixing problems with their games months later down the road while charging you extra for it. Now it seems like everyone has to be on high alert about the amount of content they're getting because it is so easy for developers to just cut something out of the game that would have been in it at release if it weren't for the fact that they can now just cut it out instead and charge extra for it as DLC. As a quick aside, this is one of the reasons why I just hate the concept of DLC in general and I don't think it should exist as a content delivery method at all. If developers want to release more content for a game, it should come in the form of a worthwhile expansion pack that adds a significant amount of gameplay, like Blizzard Entertainment's expansion release paradigm.

But getting back to the topic at hand, when it comes right down to it, I would much rather pay $60 for a game that is a 5-hour blast to play as opposed to a 30-hour generally mediocre experience. Quality of content is far more important than quantity, but at the same time I would be lying if I said that quantity doesn't matter at all. At the end of the day, if a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy for example turned out to be only half an hour long and I went to the movie theater to watch it, I would come out of that theater feeling a bit cheated out of my money, as I'm sure many other people would. So length of content does matter, but I think there's a lot of factors we should consider before writing something off as too short. When it comes to video games in particular, one of the first things I consider is the genre. Video games unlike movies don't have a consistent standard where they almost all fall into a typical length of 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours regardless of genre. With video games the experience can range anywhere from 5 minutes to literally 200 hours of content. Simple puzzle-solving games meant to be played in short bursts like Tetris for example are only going to be 5 minutes on average, while an MMORPG like World of Warcraft can easily surpass 200 hours. It would be completely unreasonable to expect a game like Tetris to offer the same amount of content as World of Warcraft; the genre just doesn't lend itself to offering that much to the player.

But with that being said, this is also where pricing should come into play. Since Tetris is such a short game, it would also be unreasonable to charge the same $60 price tag as a full-fledged AAA title. So as long as developers are properly scaling their prices to the experience you're getting, it's OK to trim the length. As another example, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes was priced cheaper at launch than a typical AAA game despite offering AAA production values because the campaign only clocked in at around roughly 2 hours. This makes sense given that you're getting less content than normal for a game of that particular genre. But at some point there is a cutoff for me that usually falls at around 4-5 hours of gameplay, and at that point the amount of content in proportion to the price tag starts to matter far less than the quality of content. Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner is a mecha action game that I'd say probably only clocks in around 4 hours, but in that 4 hours you will experience some of the most intense and satisfying mecha combat ever, along with an interesting story that has a large sweeping scope and climactic conclusion. By the time I got to the end of the game, even though I knew it was short, I didn't feel cheated out of my money in the slightest, even though the game was given a full AAA price tag at the time. When it comes right down to it, quality ultimately trumps quantity. So I think the issue is a bit more complicated than just boiling down to a simple price-per-hour formula.

However, I think experimenting with different price points is something that more developers should consider looking into, as there's technically no law that says your game must hit that $60 gold standard, and this could help alleviate problems with many modern games too. A common bad trend I've noticed with the industry is a formula where the game starts out very engaging and story-driven; the developers really try hard to suck you into it, but then after the first couple of hours or so, the gameplay quickly drops off a cliff and is padded out with tons of repetition; usually in the form of performing pointless mundane tasks or grinding out armies of baddies that you have to kill. Eventually the gameplay might start to pick up some steam again towards the end if you're lucky. But generally speaking, all this filler and padding adds up to greatly damaging the overall gameplay experience if it is overused enough, and in no franchise can I think of a better example of this than Assassin's Creed. This is particularly noticeable in the first game, where it starts off incredibly engaging and story-driven; full of mystery and intrigue, interesting characters, and well-paced gameplay, but then about a couple hours into the game the story just evaporates and it mostly leaves you to your own devices. All you can do is travel from city-to-city performing lots of mundane tasks for people around town until you acquire enough information to track your real assassination target. It's all very repetitious and predictable, and not particularly engaging. Because of this, the game really went from a day-one purchase to maybe a rental at best in terms of its value. And the franchise has never really been able to pull itself out of this rut. Even when the series was at its best in Assassin's Creed II, there was still a large segment throughout the middle of the game that eventually devolved into needless tedium. This was most likely done because there is an established precedent and expectation that these games must reach a certain amount of content length in order for the purchase to be "justified". But that's just it; how about instead of filling these games up with boring padding, just adjust the price tag according to the amount of worthwhile content in the game. Cut all the padding out of Assassin's Creed II and make it several hours shorter, but then charge $20-30 less for it. I think this would have been a much better alternative than what we got, and it would have been a stronger game for it. Adding content purely for the sake of having more content doesn't necessarily make a better game.

But jumping back to The Order 1886 for a moment, I think it's rather interesting that people are making a big deal out of this game's length in particular, as there's been plenty of single player games before it that offer similar amounts of content. I think perhaps what is going on is that people are mistaking lack of quality content for lack of quantity, because if the game were as consistently exciting as something like Zone of the Enders 2, I'm sure there would be a lot less complaint about the game's length. But who knows, I haven't actually had a chance to play the game yet myself.

So what do you think? Does game length matter? And if it does, how does it factor into your purchasing decisions? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Nintendo's new YouTube Creators Program: Still problematic

Nintendo just recently launched their new "Creators Program", which now allows YouTubers to share ad revenue with Nintendo. To quote directly from their website, "In the past, advertising proceeds that could be received for videos that included Nintendo-copyrighted content (such as gameplay videos) went to Nintendo, according to YouTube rules. Now, through this service, Nintendo will send you a share of these advertising proceeds for any YouTube videos or channels containing Nintendo-copyrighted content that you register."

Am I not merciful?

So first of all, you gotta love that sly wording in Nintendo's statement there. They make it sound as if it's because of YouTube's policies that they were just forced against their own will to take your money and pocket it for themselves. Poor Nintendo, we really feel for you. I know I just get filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness too whenever piles of money are funneled to my PayPal account for content that I didn't even create. Please Nintendo, you're not fooling anyone. We all know it was precisely because you went out of your way to demand that YouTube enforces strict copyright policies on your gameplay footage, which is why everyone keeps getting flagged for it. Your hands aren't tied; it's YouTube that is getting tied, and yet Nintendo is acting like they're offering this program out of the generosity of their hearts, as if no one else would be so considerate as to share ad revenue with content creators... except for Activision, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, Valve, SEGA; hell, even EA. And mind you, all of these companies don't just share revenue, they give all of it to content creators, because these companies understand that YouTube videos already serve as a form of free advertisement for all their games.

This is what drives me nuts about this whole situation with Nintendo. What they're doing here is only hurting them by denying free advertisement for their games, and at a time when they so desperately need it. Angry Joe is a video game critic on YouTube with nearly two million subscribers. He's garnered most of his audience through reviewing games like Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, DragonAge, Titanfall, and essentially a whole lot of games that are very different in tone and feel from Nintendo's, so this is a potential new market of gamers for Nintendo to reach, but Joe also just recently picked up a Wii U and has expressed a lot of positive things about it, and yet unfortunately he can't really review any games for it because it will get flagged for copyrighted content. So because of Nintendo's YouTube copyright policy, they're actually denying exposure to a potentially whole new audience of over a million people that might have otherwise ignored their games. And that's the most frustrating thing about this; if Nintendo would just let YouTube critics do their job, they don't need all this censorship and control. They would get great glowing reviews on their games anyway. It's not like they need to be hiding opinions about Mario Kart 8 or Super Smash Brothers; pretty much everyone who's played these games will tell you that they've had a blast with them, so it just doesn't make sense that they're discouraging content creators from critiquing them.

Then again, Mario does have a hobby of coin collection.

Even putting aside now that they're at least offering some revenue sharing instead of none, there's still a lot wrong with Nintendo's new policies. First, it's an opt-in program that you have to sign up for before the revenue can apply, and this comes with its own set of rules and caveats too, including stipulations like needing to wait for approval on each video even after you've already signed up for the program. For reviews, this can be especially crippling because many critics aim to have them out before game releases, which is when they can expect to get the most traffic on their viewership. Not to mention that this sets an incredibly bad precedent where Nintendo has free rein to disapprove whatever videos they personally don't like, which could easily result in abuses like denying approval of game reviews simply because they don't agree with the critic's score or opinion.

On top of this, the whole program has potential to get much more insidious, and this partially gets into why I've always had problems with Steam even in spite of all its love and success. I know I'm the bad guy for always hating on Steam, but this is the double-edged sword that is part of how capitalism works. When a company proves that a certain market is viable, you can bet other companies will follow suit, which is why we've now seen the rise of DRM clients like Origin, Uplay, and Battle.net. Valve proved that Steam could work, and now we have a slew of copy-cats each with their own annoying platform that you have to install and load up on your machine every time you want to play a different game. It's annoying, and we shouldn't have to tolerate it. But much like how DRM clients have taken over the PC gaming scene, you can bet that once these other companies see that what Nintendo is doing is actually successful, then they're going to want a slice of that money pie too, and you can expect that you'll find yourself having to sign up for and agree to all sorts of varying different terms and rules from a bunch of different companies every time you want to post gameplay footage of any game on YouTube. This would of course become a figurative paperwork nightmare for the Let's Play scene, so let's just hope this program doesn't succeed.

Now some defenders have argued that they can see why game companies might feel entitled to this money at least for certain games like perhaps RPGs that are heavily story-driven, or a game like Metal Gear Solid where there are long cutscenes and cinematics that make up a large part of the game. I am not in this camp however. As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo is not entitled to this ad revenue at all. It doesn't matter what kind of game we're talking about here. If your gameplay is so poor that someone would go out of their way to only watch videos of it on YouTube to the point that they no longer feel compelled to buy the game, then that's a fundamental problem with your game design, not YouTube content creators. Mass Effect is a story-driven game. I could have just gone on YouTube and watched someone else play it, but I didn't, because it turns out the game is actually fun to play too, and I would only be robbing myself of the full experience if I had skipped out on it. Furthermore, the idea that watching someone else play a video game constitutes as copyright infringement is as silly as suggesting that it should be copyright infringement to showcase your movie collection in spite of not actually showing the video content itself; only the physical DVDs. Watching a game just isn't the same as playing it, and they can't be equivocated. So I'm sorry, but I'm not giving Nintendo a break here. Content creators put a lot of work into their videos outside of just including gameplay footage, and for most YouTubers, the main focus of the video isn't even the gameplay but their commentary over it, which brings me to my next point.

Still some other defenders say who are we to complain; YouTubers should get a real job, which really just exposes how bitter some people are that they couldn't make it doing something they enjoy. It's not the content creator's fault that you chose the profession that you did, and it's not like they didn't put any effort into reaching the status that they have either. Do people really know how hard it is to pick up subscribers? It's not like you can just up and release your first video one day and instantly expect to hit a million views. This rarely happens, and more often than not it can take years of dedication and hard work for someone to build up a subscriber-base to the point that they can actually depend on it for their livelihood. Even for videos as simple as the commentaries I do, between writing the script for them, recording the gameplay footage, recording my voice commentary, designing the graphics for them, editing the footage together in Adobe Premiere, and rendering the video out in Adobe Media Encoder, you're easily looking at 5-10 hours of work for about 5-10 minutes of footage. It's not as simple as it looks, and why shouldn't people be allowed to work jobs that they also happen to enjoy? This is no different from people who make a living off of any other entertainment medium. YouTube has opened up a whole new marketplace of entertainment that has created lots of new jobs for people, many of whom previously had no other reasonable way of earning a living like boogie2988 for example, and I personally think that's fantastic, not something that should be frowned upon.

I want to go on record though and emphasize that while I do find this whole Creators Program petty and stupid on the part of Nintendo, I certainly don't hate them overall as a company, and this is one of the most irritating things about whenever I have to do commentaries like this, because Nintendo already gets such undeserved hate as it is, and the hecklers always take opportunities like this to try and spell doom and gloom for Nintendo, as if this is the last nail in the coffin for them; their glory days have long gone by and they're out of touch with the industry. Never mind that just last generation the Wii outsold both its competitors by over 20 million units, never mind that the 3DS is currently far outselling the PS Vita, never mind that they're now the only company of the Big Three that offers free online play, never mind that they just came out with several critically acclaimed titles that all worked on release; the Nintendo hate wagon prefers to ignore all of this and pretend like Nintendo is somehow going the way of SEGA. The reality is though, Nintendo isn't going anywhere soon, and they've otherwise done a good job with a lot of other things, so let's ground our criticisms with some proper perspective. There's no question that what Nintendo is doing here is bad, but I'm criticizing Nintendo right now because I want them to succeed as a company, not because I want them to fail. Make the right choice, Nintendo. YouTube videos can be free advertisement for your games, and letting content creators post gameplay unrestricted will make your fanbase happier too.