Should all games try to be around 20 hours long? Is that the sweet spot for quality and value?
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
A modder has added multiplayer to Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC, giving us the closest thing to the canceled The Great Web project.
A Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered multiplayer mod is in development by the community, and there's even early gameplay footage.
Uhhh... This site again....
Can't you guys just let the developers make what they want? Be 20 or 120, if quality is there then there's no issue.
I rarely concern myself with how long a game is. I'll play an 8 hour linear game or I'll put in 100 hours in an open world. But only IF the game is worth the time investment. Who cares if a game has 40+ hours if those 40 hours are a miserable ride? Give me a game with less than 10 hours that is actually fun every time. And this is a silly metric to judge a game by regardless. Publishers like EA would take crap like this serious and have their devs pad in hours of bullshit just so they can hit X number of hours. Focusing on number of hours is not in a gamer's self-interest.
There shouldn't be any mandate on how long a game is. But there should be a mandate on making the game fun based off of an interesting game mechanic before creating the game.
Too many games are released today that forget the "FUN" part. Fun can be subjective. But each game that comes out should draw from over 40 years of game design. Not saying plagiarize. Make any game your own twist on the genre. But if your new game can't beat the fun factor of say, a 20 year old game, then I suggest not making that game or starting over.
Myself, I don't care for excessively long games that are filled with too many fetch quests,convoy protects and grinding that takes forever to level up. I care for games that have a random element with good A.I. that never plays the same twice. HZD had enemies in the same areas, but they never acted the exact same way. Like a human does. I get more value in random.
Could be a 5-30 minute game. But if it never plays the exact same way, I could play it for 100s of hours easy without artificial length.
For me personally I prefer short games, unfortunately my time is limited so can’t commit to time intensive games. I’m happy with games that play out in ten hours or less. And I think a lot of games are fleshed out for the sake of it, boring fetch quests or side quests don’t interest me that much.