[JansjoFromIkea]

RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out."

For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional you have to bloat it in a way to minimise people abusing that.

[pc86]

This is very much personal opinion but if you can blast through all of a games content within 2 hours of purchase it wasn't finished / big enough to justify a financial transaction in the first place.

[wjnc]

Two hours is about movie or novella worth of content. Both are priced at about the same rate. Not all games have to have 10s or 100s of hours of content. Today, I expect a big(ger) part of gamers are like me: older people who like games, but can only game a few hours a week. Last non-4X game I fully played was CoD2. That was 2005.

[mikepurvis]

Honestly, that could go both ways. Like I'll happily pay cost-of-small-game to watch a movie that will be over in two hours, and there's a whole category now of single-sitting games like Journey, Minit, A Short Hike, etc, that are easily able to be completed in that timeframe but are obviously worth their modest purchase price.

To some of us adult gamers with actual lives and commitments, having something that can be completed in 1-4 sittings is a huge boon, like okay this is a thing I can do without abandoning my family for the next two weeks.

[michaelgburton]

I literally started a company on that thesis. It failed, but I still believe in that mission.

[mikepurvis]

Were you trying to make short games or offer some kind of abridging service?

Because I've wondered about that too. Like, right now there's a pretty big dichotomy between "purchase and play a game myself" and "watch someone else play it on youtube/twitch". But it would be interesting if there was a market for a kind of interactive guided tour, like for $10 let me play the best 4-6 hours of AC:Odyssey, and that's delivered as a mod that just trims all the fat, levels me up quickly enough to hustle through the main story beats and see the good boss encounters and action set pieces.

(Ubisoft themselves sort of do this with their paid XP boosters, but that doesn't actually cut content, it just lets you skip a few hours of grinding over what is otherwise still a 40hr+ experience for most people)

[rlpb]

Perhaps I'm an outlier. I expect to pay for my personal gaming experience. But if there's some necessary part of gameplay I don't like, that's negative experience that makes the game worse for me, reducing the value of the game to me. To skip that gameplay seems like something that shouldn't cost me anything, or even get me a discount because I'm not getting some of the experience I paid for. Like say if a side dish is so bad I send it back at a restaurant. I neither expect to pay for that nor a premium for someone else to eat it for me!

So I'm not willing to pay a premium for such a thing. I don't see why the game with the bad part missing should be worth more than with the bad part present. Rather, the inverse! I'll more likely skip the game entirely and find a different one that doesn't have such mandatory grinding.

As I say maybe that's an outlying opinion since making money from this kind of thing apparently works. It it helps, I'm in the adult with family demographic and my time (rather than game purchase levels of money) is what is at a premium.

[mikepurvis]

I've never bought an XP booster myself, and I feel some of the same conflict. Although I can obviously afford it, I don't think I could stomach doing this for new releases. So at most it would be something where I'd be interested after 2-3 years when all the patches are in, bugs are fixed, and review consensus has settled.

So rather than pay US$70 today for a buggy, grindy new release experience, I pay $20 in two years for the base game + $10 for the "player's digest" mod.

I expect even then it would be a tough sell, particularly having to be on PC— a lot of the market for this kind of thing would more casual console/mobile/streaming players.

[albumen]

I love this idea; I can no longer justify 40-100 hour playthroughs. Lots of people rave about Elden Ring but the time investment is just really offputting. I'd buy a version of it at half the price and one quarter of the playtime.

That said, I'd imagine a fair chunk of the impact of major set pieces and end bosses is that you've spent many hours to get to that point. An abridged version would have to leave bough in to allow emotional investment in the story. This is still possible.

Gamers Digest? (For those of you who remember Reader's Digest).

[michaelgburton]

I was making short games. Specifically I was trying to make games that packed the same density of concentrated entertainment as other media.

The abridgement thing sounds like a smart approach, but ultimately I've gotten more enjoyment from shorter games that don't pack the fat in to begin with.

[Sohcahtoa82]

I'll happily spend $5 on a 2 hour game. That's a better return than a movie theater ticket.

[tristor]

My PM perspective on this is that games are dominating the media market primarily because they are a good value proposition in our tightening economy. I think a good thing to shoot for is around 2 hours of game play per dollar spent, e.g. make it so that it's an absolute no-brainer for a customer to buy your game vs going to a movie. Replayability is a major aspect of this, look at how many hours people spent on LBAL and Vampire Survivors despite both having relatively simple mechanics.

[xvector]

How many people really would abuse the return policy like that? I can't imagine it's that many.

[JansjoFromIkea]

I can't find the source now but I recall reading about some game that was heavily impacted by it. I don't think it was this one but here's an example I found just now https://kotaku.com/steams-two-hour-refund-policy-forces-horr...

A big part of the issue is that a lot of people do not consider it abuse. The value of games is so heavily burned into a lot of people's minds as being a dollars to hours ratio and Steam having this blanket policy could be perceived to be endorsing that perspective.