Every gamer is sure to know this: you've been sitting on the same game for weeks or months and have the feeling that you can't get to anything else because quests and storylines drag on so long that they take up a lot of your free time and are always feel more like work.
And even if you like the game in question, at some point you have the feeling that you've been playing it for too long. In addition, the industry does not sleep and continues to continuously pump new games onto the market, which sooner or later accumulate in the hated backlog.
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Over time it becomes so overwhelmingly large that you completely lose track of it and it becomes a mammoth task to complete all the games in it.
The criticism that video games are getting longer and bigger and literally stuffing the player with more and more content is widespread. It's no longer uncommon for games to take 50 or even 100 hours just to play through.
You don't need to look far into the past for examples: players who plan to release the game in 2022 Elden Ring to play can be loud the website “How Long To Beat” set to 59 game hours for the story and 132 game hours for complete completion.
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2023 came along Baldur's Gate 3 also an enormous time waster on the market, because 100% gamers can expect 157 hours of play, while the story alone takes an estimated 64 hours.
And believe it or not, gamers actually have a life outside of gaming. Many of us have a job, are studying or going to school. Some have other hobbies or play sports. How are you supposed to find the time to finish all these never-ending games?
But wait: Is the claim that games are getting longer and longer really true, or is the alleged reality misleading us? Is it just because we're getting older and therefore have less free time, or are video games actually taking more and more time to complete?
Would technical progress be the only reason for this or is there more to it? Today we will get to the bottom of these questions as part of a comprehensive comparison.
Source: Nintendo
Comparison 1: This is how it works
For this overview, we'll look at the main titles of 15 different game series. These are the 40 best-selling franchises in video game history with a manageable number of games, excluding all franchises for which it is debatable when they are considered to have been completed or whether they even have an end. These include, for example Fifa, Animal Crossing and The Sims.
The data on how long a game takes to finish all comes from the aforementioned website “How Long To Beat”, where gamers from all over the world enter their playing hours and an average is then calculated. We will look at the hours required for the main story and 100% respectively.
Of course, the hours of play do not count as a sure guarantee here, because everyone has their own style of play and therefore of course a different pace. This is just a rough comparison. We also only look at the base games without DLCs. If additional content were available for the games, this would extend the playing time even further.
We will look at the following 15 franchises: the Mario franchise (specifically the Super Mario, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi games), the Pokémon franchise, the GTA franchise, the Assassin's Creed franchise, the Final Fantasy franchise, the Red Dead franchise, the Halo franchise, the God of War franchise, the Tomb Raider franchise, the Resident Evil franchise, the The Legend of Zelda franchise, the Dragon Quest franchise and The Witcher franchise.
Of course, this data from selected franchises does not represent the entire video game industry, but it is intended to provide an overview of how the most successful game series are developing.
Now that we have the terms clarified, let's take a closer look at these developments.
The comparison 2: Main story 1: Here the main stories become longer
In six of our 15 franchises, the player is required to spend more and more time on the main story in the current parts. What's interesting is that all six are game series with open worlds. No wonder: This genre of video games in particular is known for being particularly time-consuming. Open-world games are therefore often criticized for being full of content that offers no added value.
Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 are good examples of how even time-consuming games can be excellent. In both the Red Dead and The Witcher series, the playing time of the latest part has more than doubled compared to the parts before it.
And even if the slow pace of Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't appeal to everyone and the more extensive quests of The Witcher 3 might make some impatient, both are among the best games of all time.
Source: PC Games
Source: PC Games
God of War has from the realignment of the series published in 2018 increased game length enormously. The additional hours are justified by the extensively told father-son story between Kratos and Atreus, cinematic cutscenes and a more open map. Ragnarök, released in 2022 Even exceeds the average playing time of its predecessor by six hours.