Game Lengths Background
The first part of this project has some important context about how this study was conducted.
Today’s post is all about how long it takes to complete a game, both the main story, and to complete everything, which I will refer to as “game lengths”.
The data is from HowLongToBeat.com which takes user-submitted times which are averaged. This is the smallest data set involved in this study, only about half of the games included in the study had main story times, and about 40% had completionist times. The site also allows users to submit “Main + Extras” times in between Main Story and Completionist, which I found too vague and not very interesting. Most people aren’t submitting “I did the bare minimum” times for Main Story.
I didn’t include games that use the Solo/Co-Op/Vs. categories, which are mainly used for games that are solely PvP. There were a number of games that seem to have been given this designation in error.
There is a quirk with how HowLongToBeat.com displays information. Games under an hour long will display the number of minutes, while games an hour or longer will display X or X.5 hours. I suppose this is to make things look tidy, but it’s an unfortunate loss of detail.
Game Lengths – General
Games have gotten longer over time, but the gap between just beating the game, and doing everything the game has to offer has grown larger over time. Xbox’s achievement system debuted in 2005, while Playstation’s debuted in 2008, which may be responsible for that big completion jump in 2008. Game developers may have started designing their games with an idea in mind of long or difficult it should be to get every achievement and were afraid of making their games too short. A contributing factor may also be that people were less sure when to call a game “completed” when playing games without achievement systems.
Every game with game length data. These scatter plots give you an idea of the overall distribution of game lengths and how far the outliers are from the norm. There are so many types of games, and so many ways to play them. Less than a fourth of games make it beyond the first minor gridline of 25 and 50 hours, respectively.
I know you’re curious about those longest games. The longest main story games were 7 Football Manager games (2010-2016) at 287 to 519 hours. After that are The Secret World (281) , Destiny of Spirits (248), and Final Fantasy XIV (242).
For completion times we have Rock Band 4 on two different systems at 937 hours, followed by Dragon Quest IX (746), Animal Crossing: City Folk (690), and Gran Turismo 5 (636).
As someone that has played a lot of 3DS I never would have guessed it has the longest games on average. Sega was known for arcadey games that emphasized replaying over and over for better scores or times, so it makes sense to see Saturn and Dreamcast so short.
The structure of games can vary quite a bit, beating a fighting game’s campaign mode will almost always take under an hour, so systems with lots of fighting games may be skewed shorter, while people are likely to do many optional side quests in already long RPGs.
With these direct comparisons it we can see that handheld games don’t really have a tendency to be shorter than their console siblings, with the DS, 3DS, and PSP beating their console counterparts.
Although the trend is for games to get longer over time, the Wii is a notable example of games getting shorter compared to its predecessor, though only for main story.
Game Lengths + Metascores
I broke up the lengths of main story and completion into 4 buckets that each have approximately the same number of games.
People like long games. There may also be a correlation between game length, budget, polish and refinement.
Game Lengths + Genre
No surprise that Role-Playing comes out as the longest genre, with a big gap between main story and completion. I might have expected Strategy / Tactics to take second over the grab bag of games that make up Simulation. Despite a fair number of long visual novels Adventure comes in short due Western episodic games. It’s interesting that a Compilation of several games is still on average shorter than an individual game of several genres.
And here is how the genres are distributed in the 4 buckets. Adventure and Puzzle are the only genres that consistently become rarer as we increase time. Role-Playing really has the biggest difference between the shortest and longest bucket.
This post was a bit short, but we’re adding more and more combinations of metrics. Next time is ESRB ratings.
Sources
GameRankings.com for metascores and some release dates. Archives: 1, 2, 3
MobyGames.com for genres, some release dates, some ESRB ratings, and some ESRB content descriptors
HowLongToBeat.com for main story and completionist times.
ESRB.org for ESRB ratings and ESRB content descriptors
Wikipedia for its many lists of games