Players don't finish games because they get bored, or they can't. Not because they don't have time. Because something else is more interesting.
Red Dead Redemption is an excellent example! I love GTA-style games. I fully expected to love RDR. I played about 10 hours and then felt I had done everything that I cared to and quit.
It was boring. The open world was too open, and not enough world. Travel took too long and had nothing interesting along the way. Quests were simple and boring, and didn't require any thought.
It might have gotten better, but I'll never know because I got bored and found something better.
Other games (GTA San An, Oblivion, FO3, FO:NV) held me to the end and then some. They kept me interested the whole time and I kept coming back for more, no matter how busy my schedule got.
"Players don't finish games because they get bored...It was boring...Quests were simple and boring...It might have gotten better, but I'll never know because I got bored..."
You're kind of sending mixed messages here. You say it's not boredom, then you say you quit because you got bored... But I think I understand what you are trying to say. That people stop playing these games because they no longer expect good games, they expect inspired games. If the games just keep repeating the same thing over and over again it's going to start feeling like work.
I think a good example of the problem of repetition is the game reviews for Alice: Madness Returns, where they said the first 5 hours of the game were flawed, yet fun, and then kept going. And going. By the time they reached the end they were just sick of it. If a designer can't make a game that can hold your interest through the entire gameplay they are doing something wrong.
Then I'm glad that, being in my late 20s, I got to experience a bit of the past.
The 2 points I can perceive seem valid to me:
1) Some people were introduced to gaming in an era were 3d graphics were not much to show of, so it was popular for companies to invest in deep scenarios and gameplay -and if a company invests in such things, it makes economic sense to make fewer, longer games, as these things are less reusable than i.e. a 3d graphics engine. Those people are now older and have less time for games in general.
2) Today's teens are introduced to games in an era where 3d graphics have made huge progress and games are more popular to non-geeks (I think popularity always pushes things to an easy, shallow direction), so the current majority tends to value graphics and fast action more than other qualities. Also it makes sense that modern trends such as "social networking" sites might be a distraction, since they can loosely be categorized as "computer entertainment", and there is only so much time "normal" people can sit on their computer.
I'm sorry the game market is driven in that direction. I just hope there are enough of us to justify enough exceptions that won't be lost in the noise. So far I can compromise with games such as Dragon Age -even barely.
> I'm sorry the game market is driven in that direction.
Established companies and the media go in that direction, but there are plenty of indie/underground/weirdo games that stick to the old principles of depth and originality.
37 is not inconceivable if you factor in the massively popular RPG games like WoW. A genre I believe that is dominated by non-conventional gamers like older women.
Actually no, WoW is certainly one of the games that a lot of older people play, in my view that's because if you get addicted to a specific game (which for games like this does genuinely happen), you are less likely to stop and think "what do other people think of me playing this". But certainly WoW is dominated byy younger plays in their teens and 20s.
The real thing that skews these stats is that "gaming" includes angry birds, it includes facebook games, it includes... etc. etc. Those are the games that skew the stats.
People actually in the industry see past it, when marketing WoW, or Call of Duty, or whatever latest big title, the focus is generally described as 18-30 (or sometimes 18-25), with the assumption that despite not saying it, naturally you also want to attract the under 18 market as well. It's just the media who get fooled by the figures into thinking gaming is for the old, now.
Edit: that's not to say that it isn't going to go up (and has already begun), because obviously as the generations move up, they carry with them acceptance for gaming. But it hasn't yet happened nearly as much, for what we think of as big video games at least, as numbers suggest.
WoW has an interesting split. Younger gamers tend to spend more time in game so you see more of them. But, there are a lot of older gamers that play less than 20 hours a week and the average age is fairly high.
Note: I am 100+ person guild where more people are over 50 than under 20. We raid 2 nights a week and are middle of the road when it comes to progression aka top 10,000 ;o guild world wide. http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/malygos/Wasted+Epics
When you say "WoW is dominated" you're probably talking about the median age of a player online. That's a different metric than the median age of all players. Young folks have more time to spend on leisure, and routinely spend 8+ hours at a session. Older people with careers might play much less, but they still play.
And more to the point: as game billing is generally per-seat or per-month, it's these older players that actually dominate the revenue.
I don't think that is so surprising given the marked rise in gaming promoted to people 30+ over the last decade.
Nintendo in particular have done an brilliant job of taking their platforms into older markets. My parent's, in their sixties, both have DS's, share a Wii and play many desktop games (due to my influence, of which I'm very proud).
People in to 30-50 age range have also grown up with the growth of the leisure computing industry, they may well have taken up gaming when the were the correct age (the media expects you to be) to start playing, and never put it down.
Also with the growing size of the 'the old' in relation to 'the young' the 30+ age range is probably (guessing) a bigger and growing market share, bring the average up.
I have a terrible grasp of things like statistics so I'll avoid making any kind of leap of logic here and suggest this means anything, but I just thought it was an interesting coincidence if anything.
Combined with the new style F2P MMORPGS, where cash shops allow people to advance to the end, and old school game play is dead, dead, dead.
Welcome to the world of micro-transactions, where yokels end up spending the price of a car where they used to just fork over $70 to $120 a year subscriptions.
They also pretty much skipped over the whole dumbing down of most games, from open world sandboxes, to fairly narrow tunnel crawls. It's all about cutting costs, and then rationalizing it with all this psycho babble. Korporations simply want to do to games what they have done to most consumer products, water it down as much as possible to maximize profit.
Compare the most recent Duke Nukem to the original and you will see this is true.
A lot of this is probably a function of genre, and the popularity and prevalance of genres has changed substantially over the last 30-odd years.
This observation is based on a sample size of n=1=myself, so take it with a grain of salt. But the games I've finished have usually been the ones that had some sort of tangible or intangible progression dynamics built in. In other words, the further I got in the game, the more powerful my character became, and/or the richer the gameplay became. RPGs, adventure games, open-world games in which the player could grow more powerful or collect items, games where you built or developed something, etc.
Think back to the original Legend of Zelda. I bet that game had a much higher percentage of finishers than many games of its era had. Some of that had to do with novelty, sure. But a lot had to do with the progression of the character, the acquisition of phat lewtz, and the unlocking of secrets. Endgame Link was a substantially different character from n00b Link, and the progress from A to B was remarkably -- if simply and elegantly -- engrossing.
Interestingly enough, you didn't really think of it that way when actually playing the game. You didn't say to yourself, from the outset, "I can't wait to slay the demon and save the princess." Instead, you concentrated on the incremental step ahead of you: finding that next level; upgrading the sword; finding the boomerang, or shield, or wand, or what have you. You were very much in the moment, and not always (if at all) cognizant of the linear movement from beginning to end.
Contrast this with an FPS or platform game. Your character isn't remarkably different from beginning to end. The only thing that really changes is your skill level, and/or the items you collect (but which are usually expendable, or lost upon death and respawn). The gameplay is interesting, but it's self-contained in its satisfaction: you can derive the same amount of enjoyment from endlessly replaying a handful of maps in Modern Warfare that you get from actually finishing the story mode. And then there's multiplayer, which in many cases is so much more satisfactory than single-player that many players never even begin the story mode.
> Contrast this with an FPS or platform game. Your character isn't remarkably different from beginning to end. The only thing that really changes is your skill level, and/or the items you collect (but which are usually expendable, or lost upon death and respawn).
I believe the term you're looking for is "emergent gameplay," where the player's deeper understanding of the game is rewarded with new gameplay mechanics, perhaps forcing them to revisit what they already know. And I'm not simply talking about unlocking new guns. I'm speaking more of new abilities that put new demands on the player. Things may be harder in the short term.
One example would be the portal jumping that the original Portal required. One of the last levels in the game had you peering several stories up in a room and realizing you had to get there, and you had to figure out how to do that. The portal jump could be frustrating to learn, and yet, the game required you to do so on one of the final levels.
IMO, most modern games falter when they require too little of the player. The same basic gameplay is rehashed over and over with tiny tweaks applied each year -- Call of Duty is essentially the Madden strategy applied to FPS games. The skill curve is far too shallow, but if it were deeper, then they may not buy the next version. This is probably because people don't necessarily want to learn some fresh and interesting way to compete, they just want to take what they already know and go at it.
Wikipedia seems to have a different definition: "Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics."
Yep, that states it better. It is similar to how a *NIX CLI gives you a few primitives that can interact with each other in powerful ways. You can see all the primitives individually, but you probably won't grasp the myriad of ways they can be combined until it is required of you.
An interesting hypothesis, but the game used as an example in the article features emergent gameplay. In RDR, you progressively receive more weapons, mounts, and (to some degree) abilities as the game progresses. I think emergent gameplay pulls some players in, but I'm not sure it explains the statistics provided by the article.
I think you really hit on the primary reason in your final sentence. RDR is, again, a great example. Hop in to a multi-player session of RDR and you'll find a very wide variety of gamers. Some people are just there to hang out. Some are there to explore. Some are there to play the free roam missions. Some are there to participate in more traditional PvP game modes. Some are there to grief other players.
When you play the story, you're secluded. Even though the production quality of RDR was great (it won GoTY), single-player lacks the critical human element that you get with online play. Multiplayer gaming is a social event. It's social networking for people who play games, and the draw is undeniable.
Single-player has become a sandbox for you to hone your skills to the point that you can participate competently in online play. Once you reach a threshold where online play isn't completely miserable, there's no turning back.
"An interesting hypothesis, but the game used as an example in the article features emergent gameplay. In RDR, you progressively receive more weapons, mounts, and (to some degree) abilities as the game progresses. I think emergent gameplay pulls some players in, but I'm not sure it explains the statistics provided by the article."
To your point, there's actually a very good argument to be made that emergent gameplay (or the possibility thereof) decreases the desire to finish the game. It increases replayability, and total time played, but it creates incentives to "mess around" within the game and not to play it in a linear fashion.
My overall thesis is that games seem to have shifted away from linearity on aggregate, to the point where "story mode" is now a value-add. Single-player, linear, traditional gameplay is the side option that multiplayer or sandbox used to be in the early days of console gaming. Fewer people are finishing games in the traditional sense, because fewer games are being published that are designed to be finished. [That design choice may not be intentional, as evidenced by the exhorbitant production values and costs being sunk by developers and publishers into "story mode" voice acting, cinematics, art direction, and so forth.]
I don't buy this "time" argument. In my case, I know exactly why I don't finish many games. Because the novelty wears off!
The dopamine hit wears off after a while and unless the game is extremely varied (Minecraft, GTA IV) or can be easily completed within a week (Portal 2), I'm not going to finish it. After that point, it's just like all the other games on the shelf.. interesting to me once but no longer "wow, cool!" Even though I have the time, I'm onto my next "hit", as it were.
Great multiplayer games are immune to this because they require something of you, and reward you for the increased skill. (They dont' generally reward you outright for time investments in the way a heavily behavioral game would.) So you will still have the initial newness hit, but then it settles into a stable relationship where you agree to continue learning the ins and outs of the game, and it reveals more depth to you, much like a relationship.
Such games are rare, but they do exist. Here's a way to spot it: if you hear other gamers complaining a certain game is "elitist" (or similar rhetoric), it might possess those attributes. Examples: Starcraft, Tribes, Marvel vs Capcom (high level play), plenty of others.
I was speaking to one of my students (11yrs old) about the length of video games just yesterday. He explained to me that campaign mode in video games is just for fun and to be replayed, the real game is online. We both agree that most next gen games are short.
Remember the original Ninja Turtles game for nintendo? 20+years later and I still find myself a few weekend nights/year trying to get to another part of the game.
Red Dead redemption is a poor example. The only reason I didn't play the "last mission" is because I didn't know it was a damned mission. Something HUGE and traumatic happens... Then the game sort've feels like it's over and there are no missions on your screen... I only found out about the mission later from a buddy after I'd sold the game that if you just kind of hang out for awhile eventually you get another mission. This is a massive failure on the developers side IMHO.
I don't think it really matters that people don't finish games. The point is that for £40 I can get between 10 and 100 hours of entertainment (Portal to Zelda). That is a bargain and it much better value than many other forms of entertainment (cinema, DVD, Gig, Pub, Theatre). The only thing that beats it is a book.
Although there can be a feeling that you've paid for N levels so you should get to see N levels that just isn't going to apply to some games.
I actually like long games. I don't think I've ever played a game without finishing it. Maybe I'm a bit obsessive, that's why I try to not play video games any more!
Of your production budget for games of yesteryear, ~90% went to creating art/story assets (which can be trivially stolen) and ~10% went to creating the multiplayer mode (which, if you host it on your servers, can't be trivially stolen). Multiplayer programming is more sophisticated these days than it was previously, but hasn't increased in expense by orders of magnitude. Asset budgets have gone up by over an order of magnitude.
Gamers influence the production of future games by voting with their wallets. They overwhelmingly vote for value locked down on servers (or consoles, I suppose) because that is what they actually buy.
Similarly, why do games with persistent characters keep doing well? Is it because gamers are completionist and we are learning how to push their buttons with regards to avatar attachment really well? Yes, true to a point. Is it because persistence is achieved via the server and this acts as DRM-by-stealth? Also yes.
That's a reason why there are more and better online games available now, but that isn't a very satisfying explanation for the initial statistic. There are still plenty of non-multiplayer games and 10 years ago the game completion rate wasn't much better.
Stealing and copying aren't the same thing. The fact that you use the words interchangeably is a testament to the lobbying power of the RIAA/MPAA. Interestingly enough it was those same organizations which brought the word "piracy" into common usage to describe copying a disc rather than raping and murdering and robbing seafaring travelers.
I loathe online multi-player. A good, long single-player campaign is still all I want. While 10 hours of awesome is better than 20 hours of meh, why can't I get 20 hours of awesome? $60 is still a lot of money for a game and I'd appreciate a high time, high awesome ROI.
The problem with online multi-player is that generally, if you're a normal guy with just an hour to spend, you simply get instantly destroyed/swept the floor with your guts by the no-lifers that are spending their whole lives playing the very game you're trying to get into.
If just now learned how to play chess and only played it for an hour every week you'll likely find that people that play it every day (and have been playing it for years) have an advantage over you.
This isn't the fault of the game, it's a problem with not matching you with players near your skill level.
In fact the only MMOG I'm playing regularly only allows people to play two turns a day, preventing actively anyone from spending hours a day on the game, and that's a great idea.
With (great, affordable) packages like Humble Bundle & constant Steam/Amazon/etc sales, my % of started:purchased games has gone way down. Instead, I focus on core games with friends like Starcraft2.
The average age is rising not because young people today aren't becoming gamers, but because people who started gaming, say, 20 years ago, are still gaming.
Today's younger gamers probably make up a large percentage of the minority of all gamers who actually finish games.
1) Lose interest - the game mechanic seems repetitive (puzzle games), I've seen this level before, now it's a little bit tougher or it's a different color.
2) Sudden ramp up in difficulty - I'm enjoying a nice casual game (Terraria comes to mind) and suddenly I have to beat a boss character. As I play on a laptop on the cough, I'm not as agile on WASD keys + mouse, which didn't really matter until it suddenly went from minecraft to a platformer.
3) Needless frustration - either from 2 above or from dumn things. I really hate consoles b/c I can't save when I want. I have limited time so when I need to stop, I _really_ need to stop and save, not when the game designer decides I am allowed to save.
Also glitches.
4) Choice - I've been playing since the NES/Dos days. We've never had so many awesome and fun games. You can get a great game now for a few dollars on sale. If I runt into frustrations (see above) I just quit and switch.
5) Laptop friendly. I can't sit at my desk on Saturday morning like I used to. It's easier to play on a laptop when I have time or while my son is watching a video (after our Obama mandated exercise time). Get home from the pool in the summer slump onto the couch and nice laptop friendly game is nice.
Some recent examples:
Witcher 2:
Man is it tough (for me) to get started. But Normal is too hard and easy is too easy.
(fun game, stopped playing it, can't remember why, probably pick it up again)
Terraria:
Fun game but sudden ramps up in difficulty, plus being a platformer and a "mining" game makes it somewhat frustrating.
God of War (Series):
Made me return my PS3. Again sudden ramp up of difficulty as I had to do some kind of triple crazy jump. I just don't have the patient to practice some stupid arbitrary move.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
I think there is a great niche for casual games (brilliant, right?) that aren't diner dash but are still fun for the "aging" game like myself.
Also,
I have a lot of "distractions." Wife, son, get an email, etc that I really need to take care of.
When a game only tells me something relevant once and then is gone, It's really damn frustrating.
Put in a quest log for zeus's sake. I may have been looking away or talking to someone or doing something else on the side.
This is good advice for a program too.
Young people (man I can't believe I'm saying that) don't understand. You think your app is the center of the universe. You don't understand that someone may get interrupted while filling out your online mortgage application.
The kids may wake up, the wife wants something, you get a phone call. Don't _punish_ people for this. Don't let my session time out, etc.
"Put in a quest log for zeus's sake. I may have been looking away or talking to someone or doing something else on the side."
... or coming back to a save point halfway through the game after two years. My game of Persona 3 spanned three years, I think. Didn't have a reason to finish it until suddenly my evenings were tied down with caring for a new (sometimes colicky) infant, which isn't a literal 100% of your time job, but the shattered remnants of your evening left over certainly aren't useful for much else.
What's the percentage of games that don't even get started? I've got about 30 games in my Steam account, and I've only played about 3 of them more than 1 hour. Most of those games came in through bundles so I probably had no intention of playing some of them, but many of them I purchased with the intention of actually playing them.
Partly it's lack of time but the number of hours I've put into Civilization puts the lie to that. I play on my downtime and it's just easier to play something I already know than learn something new.
Selection is a big reason for this. There are so many good games popping out each and every week, and I have certainly found myself unable to keep up with the supply--I think a lot of people get that, "I've got to play this game because it's hot right now and everybody's talking about" itch, and then drop whatever they are currently playing and never actually revisit it--it's the same with a lot of things not just games.
This article seems to ignore the fact the point of a game isn't about reaching the end, its almost by definition about the journey. Just because someone didn't tick that particular checkbox it doesn't mean that there was too much in the game, just that they didn't tick that checkbox.
Unless the game is single player only and very tightly on rails, completion is really dumb metric of game quality. Even when it is one of those games, is it a bad thing if a game contained enough content to deliver a satisfying enough experience that someone is full before then end? And still has more to go back to if they get hungry again? A game can have an unnecessarily padded length that turns a player off, but thats a separate issue. That case is an issue of level design and game quality, which are not measurable only by completion rates.
I know games are software Skinner Boxes, but if they actually care about player experience, they're optimizing towards the single goal of completion a surprising amount. On this issue they don't, it's the business side thats driving the look at length and completion rates. They care about being able to sell more titles. This article is a showing where the industry (as far as the AAA space) is going, shorter games.
Less in a single package means more sales. If completion rates are low, someone who wants more of game X can just go back to the software they have on the shelf. If the game is designed for a high level of completion, it drives DLC sales. A lower average time per title means that it will be sooner that the next title is bought.
I try very hard to find original games but new, triple-A games are always very similar. I've killed a gazillion of guys with a shotgun in my gamer life, up to a point that it doesn't feel so exciting anymore. So I pick up a game, discover the environment setting (sci-fi, medieval, ancient times,...), learn the quirks of your "game changing engine" then realise I will do exactly the same things for 5 - 10 more hours. No more progression, no more new levels, no more new items, no more new KINDS of quests. Same copy/paste of the past previous 5 hours. This is usually where I quit.
I don't really see that statistic as a problem. It seems to me that shipping slightly more content than most players are expected to finish is actually a good thing, especially in traditional game development where you are selling a more-or-less complete product (where the business plan doesn't involve skimping on the core product to explicitly to sell expansion packs and other add-ons). It means there's enough content for most of the audience.
There's very little correlation between content completion percentage and overall game enjoyment / purchase satisfaction.
Probably the biggest reason I will leave a game unfinished is if it takes too much effort to get back into the game. There are plenty of times I will take a break from a game, even one I really enjoy playing, and more often than not it is easier for me to start the game over than to try and figure out where I left off, what I have to do and even the general gameplay (key-commands, items, etc.)
When I was a kid I could play a game from beginning to end without stopping, and I had a lot fewer games available.
One thing that has helped me is game walkthroughs, I scan up to the point where I'm at and get a good idea of strategies I had previously learned, as well as the story.
One thing that game developers could do is actually provide this information to the player. Basically create a walkthrough based on what the player has done, up until the current point of the game.
51 comments
[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadPlayers don't finish games because they get bored, or they can't. Not because they don't have time. Because something else is more interesting.
Red Dead Redemption is an excellent example! I love GTA-style games. I fully expected to love RDR. I played about 10 hours and then felt I had done everything that I cared to and quit.
It was boring. The open world was too open, and not enough world. Travel took too long and had nothing interesting along the way. Quests were simple and boring, and didn't require any thought.
It might have gotten better, but I'll never know because I got bored and found something better.
Other games (GTA San An, Oblivion, FO3, FO:NV) held me to the end and then some. They kept me interested the whole time and I kept coming back for more, no matter how busy my schedule got.
You're kind of sending mixed messages here. You say it's not boredom, then you say you quit because you got bored... But I think I understand what you are trying to say. That people stop playing these games because they no longer expect good games, they expect inspired games. If the games just keep repeating the same thing over and over again it's going to start feeling like work.
I think a good example of the problem of repetition is the game reviews for Alice: Madness Returns, where they said the first 5 hours of the game were flawed, yet fun, and then kept going. And going. By the time they reached the end they were just sick of it. If a designer can't make a game that can hold your interest through the entire gameplay they are doing something wrong.
Then I'm glad that, being in my late 20s, I got to experience a bit of the past.
The 2 points I can perceive seem valid to me:
1) Some people were introduced to gaming in an era were 3d graphics were not much to show of, so it was popular for companies to invest in deep scenarios and gameplay -and if a company invests in such things, it makes economic sense to make fewer, longer games, as these things are less reusable than i.e. a 3d graphics engine. Those people are now older and have less time for games in general.
2) Today's teens are introduced to games in an era where 3d graphics have made huge progress and games are more popular to non-geeks (I think popularity always pushes things to an easy, shallow direction), so the current majority tends to value graphics and fast action more than other qualities. Also it makes sense that modern trends such as "social networking" sites might be a distraction, since they can loosely be categorized as "computer entertainment", and there is only so much time "normal" people can sit on their computer.
I'm sorry the game market is driven in that direction. I just hope there are enough of us to justify enough exceptions that won't be lost in the noise. So far I can compromise with games such as Dragon Age -even barely.
Established companies and the media go in that direction, but there are plenty of indie/underground/weirdo games that stick to the old principles of depth and originality.
http://www.showmethegames.com/ has a nice index of good non-blockbuster games.
Public perception is certainly different.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game#Social_aspects
The real thing that skews these stats is that "gaming" includes angry birds, it includes facebook games, it includes... etc. etc. Those are the games that skew the stats.
People actually in the industry see past it, when marketing WoW, or Call of Duty, or whatever latest big title, the focus is generally described as 18-30 (or sometimes 18-25), with the assumption that despite not saying it, naturally you also want to attract the under 18 market as well. It's just the media who get fooled by the figures into thinking gaming is for the old, now.
Edit: that's not to say that it isn't going to go up (and has already begun), because obviously as the generations move up, they carry with them acceptance for gaming. But it hasn't yet happened nearly as much, for what we think of as big video games at least, as numbers suggest.
Note: I am 100+ person guild where more people are over 50 than under 20. We raid 2 nights a week and are middle of the road when it comes to progression aka top 10,000 ;o guild world wide. http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/malygos/Wasted+Epics
And more to the point: as game billing is generally per-seat or per-month, it's these older players that actually dominate the revenue.
Nintendo in particular have done an brilliant job of taking their platforms into older markets. My parent's, in their sixties, both have DS's, share a Wii and play many desktop games (due to my influence, of which I'm very proud).
People in to 30-50 age range have also grown up with the growth of the leisure computing industry, they may well have taken up gaming when the were the correct age (the media expects you to be) to start playing, and never put it down.
Also with the growing size of the 'the old' in relation to 'the young' the 30+ age range is probably (guessing) a bigger and growing market share, bring the average up.
I have a terrible grasp of things like statistics so I'll avoid making any kind of leap of logic here and suggest this means anything, but I just thought it was an interesting coincidence if anything.
Welcome to the world of micro-transactions, where yokels end up spending the price of a car where they used to just fork over $70 to $120 a year subscriptions.
They also pretty much skipped over the whole dumbing down of most games, from open world sandboxes, to fairly narrow tunnel crawls. It's all about cutting costs, and then rationalizing it with all this psycho babble. Korporations simply want to do to games what they have done to most consumer products, water it down as much as possible to maximize profit.
Compare the most recent Duke Nukem to the original and you will see this is true.
This observation is based on a sample size of n=1=myself, so take it with a grain of salt. But the games I've finished have usually been the ones that had some sort of tangible or intangible progression dynamics built in. In other words, the further I got in the game, the more powerful my character became, and/or the richer the gameplay became. RPGs, adventure games, open-world games in which the player could grow more powerful or collect items, games where you built or developed something, etc.
Think back to the original Legend of Zelda. I bet that game had a much higher percentage of finishers than many games of its era had. Some of that had to do with novelty, sure. But a lot had to do with the progression of the character, the acquisition of phat lewtz, and the unlocking of secrets. Endgame Link was a substantially different character from n00b Link, and the progress from A to B was remarkably -- if simply and elegantly -- engrossing.
Interestingly enough, you didn't really think of it that way when actually playing the game. You didn't say to yourself, from the outset, "I can't wait to slay the demon and save the princess." Instead, you concentrated on the incremental step ahead of you: finding that next level; upgrading the sword; finding the boomerang, or shield, or wand, or what have you. You were very much in the moment, and not always (if at all) cognizant of the linear movement from beginning to end.
Contrast this with an FPS or platform game. Your character isn't remarkably different from beginning to end. The only thing that really changes is your skill level, and/or the items you collect (but which are usually expendable, or lost upon death and respawn). The gameplay is interesting, but it's self-contained in its satisfaction: you can derive the same amount of enjoyment from endlessly replaying a handful of maps in Modern Warfare that you get from actually finishing the story mode. And then there's multiplayer, which in many cases is so much more satisfactory than single-player that many players never even begin the story mode.
I believe the term you're looking for is "emergent gameplay," where the player's deeper understanding of the game is rewarded with new gameplay mechanics, perhaps forcing them to revisit what they already know. And I'm not simply talking about unlocking new guns. I'm speaking more of new abilities that put new demands on the player. Things may be harder in the short term.
One example would be the portal jumping that the original Portal required. One of the last levels in the game had you peering several stories up in a room and realizing you had to get there, and you had to figure out how to do that. The portal jump could be frustrating to learn, and yet, the game required you to do so on one of the final levels.
IMO, most modern games falter when they require too little of the player. The same basic gameplay is rehashed over and over with tiny tweaks applied each year -- Call of Duty is essentially the Madden strategy applied to FPS games. The skill curve is far too shallow, but if it were deeper, then they may not buy the next version. This is probably because people don't necessarily want to learn some fresh and interesting way to compete, they just want to take what they already know and go at it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_gameplay
I think you really hit on the primary reason in your final sentence. RDR is, again, a great example. Hop in to a multi-player session of RDR and you'll find a very wide variety of gamers. Some people are just there to hang out. Some are there to explore. Some are there to play the free roam missions. Some are there to participate in more traditional PvP game modes. Some are there to grief other players.
When you play the story, you're secluded. Even though the production quality of RDR was great (it won GoTY), single-player lacks the critical human element that you get with online play. Multiplayer gaming is a social event. It's social networking for people who play games, and the draw is undeniable.
Single-player has become a sandbox for you to hone your skills to the point that you can participate competently in online play. Once you reach a threshold where online play isn't completely miserable, there's no turning back.
To your point, there's actually a very good argument to be made that emergent gameplay (or the possibility thereof) decreases the desire to finish the game. It increases replayability, and total time played, but it creates incentives to "mess around" within the game and not to play it in a linear fashion.
My overall thesis is that games seem to have shifted away from linearity on aggregate, to the point where "story mode" is now a value-add. Single-player, linear, traditional gameplay is the side option that multiplayer or sandbox used to be in the early days of console gaming. Fewer people are finishing games in the traditional sense, because fewer games are being published that are designed to be finished. [That design choice may not be intentional, as evidenced by the exhorbitant production values and costs being sunk by developers and publishers into "story mode" voice acting, cinematics, art direction, and so forth.]
The dopamine hit wears off after a while and unless the game is extremely varied (Minecraft, GTA IV) or can be easily completed within a week (Portal 2), I'm not going to finish it. After that point, it's just like all the other games on the shelf.. interesting to me once but no longer "wow, cool!" Even though I have the time, I'm onto my next "hit", as it were.
Such games are rare, but they do exist. Here's a way to spot it: if you hear other gamers complaining a certain game is "elitist" (or similar rhetoric), it might possess those attributes. Examples: Starcraft, Tribes, Marvel vs Capcom (high level play), plenty of others.
Remember the original Ninja Turtles game for nintendo? 20+years later and I still find myself a few weekend nights/year trying to get to another part of the game.
Although there can be a feeling that you've paid for N levels so you should get to see N levels that just isn't going to apply to some games.
Of your production budget for games of yesteryear, ~90% went to creating art/story assets (which can be trivially stolen) and ~10% went to creating the multiplayer mode (which, if you host it on your servers, can't be trivially stolen). Multiplayer programming is more sophisticated these days than it was previously, but hasn't increased in expense by orders of magnitude. Asset budgets have gone up by over an order of magnitude.
Gamers influence the production of future games by voting with their wallets. They overwhelmingly vote for value locked down on servers (or consoles, I suppose) because that is what they actually buy.
Similarly, why do games with persistent characters keep doing well? Is it because gamers are completionist and we are learning how to push their buttons with regards to avatar attachment really well? Yes, true to a point. Is it because persistence is achieved via the server and this acts as DRM-by-stealth? Also yes.
This isn't the fault of the game, it's a problem with not matching you with players near your skill level.
With (great, affordable) packages like Humble Bundle & constant Steam/Amazon/etc sales, my % of started:purchased games has gone way down. Instead, I focus on core games with friends like Starcraft2.
Today's younger gamers probably make up a large percentage of the minority of all gamers who actually finish games.
1) Lose interest - the game mechanic seems repetitive (puzzle games), I've seen this level before, now it's a little bit tougher or it's a different color.
2) Sudden ramp up in difficulty - I'm enjoying a nice casual game (Terraria comes to mind) and suddenly I have to beat a boss character. As I play on a laptop on the cough, I'm not as agile on WASD keys + mouse, which didn't really matter until it suddenly went from minecraft to a platformer.
3) Needless frustration - either from 2 above or from dumn things. I really hate consoles b/c I can't save when I want. I have limited time so when I need to stop, I _really_ need to stop and save, not when the game designer decides I am allowed to save.
Also glitches.
4) Choice - I've been playing since the NES/Dos days. We've never had so many awesome and fun games. You can get a great game now for a few dollars on sale. If I runt into frustrations (see above) I just quit and switch.
5) Laptop friendly. I can't sit at my desk on Saturday morning like I used to. It's easier to play on a laptop when I have time or while my son is watching a video (after our Obama mandated exercise time). Get home from the pool in the summer slump onto the couch and nice laptop friendly game is nice.
Some recent examples:
Witcher 2:
Man is it tough (for me) to get started. But Normal is too hard and easy is too easy.
(fun game, stopped playing it, can't remember why, probably pick it up again)
Terraria:
Fun game but sudden ramps up in difficulty, plus being a platformer and a "mining" game makes it somewhat frustrating.
God of War (Series): Made me return my PS3. Again sudden ramp up of difficulty as I had to do some kind of triple crazy jump. I just don't have the patient to practice some stupid arbitrary move.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
I think there is a great niche for casual games (brilliant, right?) that aren't diner dash but are still fun for the "aging" game like myself.
When a game only tells me something relevant once and then is gone, It's really damn frustrating.
Put in a quest log for zeus's sake. I may have been looking away or talking to someone or doing something else on the side.
This is good advice for a program too.
Young people (man I can't believe I'm saying that) don't understand. You think your app is the center of the universe. You don't understand that someone may get interrupted while filling out your online mortgage application.
The kids may wake up, the wife wants something, you get a phone call. Don't _punish_ people for this. Don't let my session time out, etc.
... or coming back to a save point halfway through the game after two years. My game of Persona 3 spanned three years, I think. Didn't have a reason to finish it until suddenly my evenings were tied down with caring for a new (sometimes colicky) infant, which isn't a literal 100% of your time job, but the shattered remnants of your evening left over certainly aren't useful for much else.
(But the title would make for a good article in the Onion.)
Partly it's lack of time but the number of hours I've put into Civilization puts the lie to that. I play on my downtime and it's just easier to play something I already know than learn something new.
Unless the game is single player only and very tightly on rails, completion is really dumb metric of game quality. Even when it is one of those games, is it a bad thing if a game contained enough content to deliver a satisfying enough experience that someone is full before then end? And still has more to go back to if they get hungry again? A game can have an unnecessarily padded length that turns a player off, but thats a separate issue. That case is an issue of level design and game quality, which are not measurable only by completion rates.
I know games are software Skinner Boxes, but if they actually care about player experience, they're optimizing towards the single goal of completion a surprising amount. On this issue they don't, it's the business side thats driving the look at length and completion rates. They care about being able to sell more titles. This article is a showing where the industry (as far as the AAA space) is going, shorter games.
Less in a single package means more sales. If completion rates are low, someone who wants more of game X can just go back to the software they have on the shelf. If the game is designed for a high level of completion, it drives DLC sales. A lower average time per title means that it will be sooner that the next title is bought.
There's very little correlation between content completion percentage and overall game enjoyment / purchase satisfaction.
When I was a kid I could play a game from beginning to end without stopping, and I had a lot fewer games available.
One thing that has helped me is game walkthroughs, I scan up to the point where I'm at and get a good idea of strategies I had previously learned, as well as the story.
One thing that game developers could do is actually provide this information to the player. Basically create a walkthrough based on what the player has done, up until the current point of the game.