How Live Service Video Games Are Poisoning The Industry

Not every game has to have a 10-year plan.

By Josh Brown /

EA

If there's one prevalent, unanswerable philosophical question in the video game world, it's: "How long should should a game actually be?" By their very nature and depending on the genre, a title can be anywhere from a couple hours long to a couple hundred, and debates have raged over how much of a time return you should be guaranteed for a full-priced purchase.

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Unlike other mainstream art forms, gaming is expensive, and for $60 a pop, customers expect to come away satisfied that they've gotten the most out of their money, which more often than not is measured in time spent in a game, rather than actual enjoyment of the package. Obviously, a game's failure or success is more complex than that, but the perception that a short game is worse because it provides less content, has hurt many major games over the past few decades.

In response, publishers and developers - at least in the mainstream, AAA space - have all but eradicated the once-standard 8-10 hour (or less) video game, in favour of expansive live-service releases that are designed to provided content, well, forever. Or at least until the inevitable sequel comes around to replace it.

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But, as the saying goes, bigger isn't always better, and we might have dug ourselves into a hole where, as critics and fans, we've put far too much emphasis on how many hours a video game holds, over the quality of those hours, which has had a negative effect on the industry at large.