For finite session repayable games is there an ideal game duration?

News & General Discussion
1

I enjoy playing games FPS style games and found the Battle Royal games to be very addictive, I was thinking that the game survival mechanics were the main aspect of this…

  • However does the about 20 minute game play time also factor into this?
  • Is there a sweet spot time duration for repayable games?
  • Have you become hooked on a re-playable game and how long was it’s session duration?
  • Or if you put a countdown timer that ends your game at a fixed session time would it boost player rates or reduce them?
2

Answer your own question, based on session duration of:

Sudoku
Flappy birds,
Civilizations series,
Simcity series,
WoW,
WoT/WoWs,
Dota/LoL
CS / Quake / Unreal,
Starcraft / Anno / Total Anhilitaion / Zero-K,
Minecraft,
Second Life,
Diablo series \ NeverWinterNight,

Just to name few.
You can judge time frame of each game session.

3

I’m guessing it’s like Netflix. You do for as long as you can.

Teenagers are binging every weeknight, adults are binging on the weekends.

Nobody eats the recommended serving of potato chips. You eat the whole bag.

My question, why do we want to design games to make people play for longer? Who does that do a favor for?

4

Interesting it looks like the in the top 100 mobile mobile games 91% use some form or game session time restriction…


Article on the subject 3 Things to Know About Session-Length Restriction When Designing a Free2play Game - GameRefinery

5

"Under this new regime of free-to-play, players are often forced to wait (or pay)…"

Top 100 as in, biggest earners? If so, I think the correlation is clear…

Just another trick for the greedy to fuck the gullible.

6

@Arowx are you actually reading links what you are posting? Because usually is not the case, as per your own threads alike, picking often something out of context.

7

I used to eat whole packets of biscuits. No wonder I need fillings.

2 Likes
8

There isn’t one. It depends on the game and the audience the game is targeting.

9

Obviously its 30.

10

What about the arcade era surely arcade machines would have aimed for a difficulty progression rate that ensured a balance between coin flow and replay?

11

As somebody who actually played arcade games?

That has nothing to do with session length.

12

What do you want actually to discuss?

Or
“session repayable games”?

13

Personally I feel boxed in. I like games like DayZ more were a potential fight can take hours

14

What about a SpyHunter-esque style score-time meta? That shit was da bomb on the gameboy. :smile: I had a cartridge with both SpyHunter AND MoonPatrol on it. Man. Those were the days…

15

You need to include the units.

So obviously it’s 30 parsecs.

2 Likes
16

I feels like im being rude to people when pointing out obvious. Its like, would you like a cup of juice… to drink.

1 Like
17

big factor here is losing. The longer a session is the more losing sucks.

A lot of games where you can lose will have like 10-15 minute sessions as ideal (you’re kinda invested so you care, but not so invested that you get really mad). More than 30 minutes for a game you can lose is really pushing it.

Longer session = more investment.
More Investment = More feelsbad when you lose

18

Ehh, maybe I’m the exception, but I don’t really care about losing that much if I had some fun.

I don’t mind losing in FTL for example.

I played Apex for a while, and actually the most annoying part in that game was when I died early, I think above all else that’s what made me stop playing that game.

2 Likes
19

I wonder maybe Neuroscience research could give game developers the ideal game duration.

If you analysed the brains reward chemistry and the ideal cycle time for it to go through a full cycle then you would have the ideal game duration or session duration?

And what about the Flow state, when people get into a game and lose track of time, how does the neuroscience of that work into game session times?

20

You don’t really need brain chem for most of this, you just look at analytics.

“Ideal” also changes depending on what you’re looking for. A lot of games are more interested in building habitual daily behaviours than anything else.