Why most people don't finish video games
articles.cnn.com
articles.cnn.com
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't the fault of the game, it's a problem with not matching you with players near your skill level.
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.
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.
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.
Public perception is certainly different.
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.
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.
There's very little correlation between content completion percentage and overall game enjoyment / purchase satisfaction.
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.
Today's younger gamers probably make up a large percentage of the minority of all gamers who actually finish games.
(But the title would make for a good article in the Onion.)