I came across a statistic so surprising that I initially dismissed it as a mistake.
Then I double-checked the numbers and realized it was true. Less than 35 per cent of players finish the video games they start.
You probably are thinking, “Well, of course, the average completion rate is low. The industry is overflowing with new content, and many of them are small, relatively inconsequential indie titles. Why are we surprised that only 19 per cent of players completed the main story of ‘Overcooked 2’?”
Well, the situation is more confusing than you realize. Guess how many people finished ‘Arkham Asylum’? 30.7 per cent. Keep in mind that ‘Arkham Asylum,’ which came out in 2009, is often lauded as one of the greatest games ever made.
If you are tempted to argue that 2009 was a long time ago and gaming habits have changed since then, what about ‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’ (22 per cent), ‘Doom Eternal’ (32 per cent), and ‘Dark Souls 3’ (23 per cent)? These titles are certified classics.
They dominate every ‘Best Game Ever’ list online, and yet they have abysmal completion rates. To clarify, completion rate in this situation merely refers to finishing the main story of a video game.
But even games with record-breaking sales figures are severely lacking in this arena; ‘The Last of Us II’ (58 per cent), ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ (38 per cent), ‘God of War: Ragnarok’ (24 per cent), and the question is: why? People have predictably blamed game length, which makes sense.
We all remember a period in the last 10 years where every new video game promised players a digital landscape ten times bigger than whatever they were playing. In fact, titles such as ‘Assassin’s Creed: Valhala’ were repeatedly criticized for being unnecessarily big.
Unnecessary in the sense that the size of the cities and kingdoms did not enhance one’s gaming experience. If anything, players found that games with large maps became exhausting over time.
But what about those players whose enjoyment comes not from navigating the main story, but from exploring digital environments? In that case, large games are even worse, because the expansive maps are a distraction.
Either the player does not have the time to complete a 500-hour video game, or the game in question has given them so much to investigate that the main story takes a back seat. However, guess what is not long and expansive? ‘Resident Evil: Village.’ The 2021 release follows one protagonist in a single location. The story is pretty self-contained.
Even if you complete every objective and explore every nook and cranny, you can still finish the game in 13 hours or less. And yet, roughly 58 per cent of players have completed the game.
So clearly, shorter games are not necessarily the answer. More than likely, the games themselves are not even the problem. Many experts argue that gamers are hoarders. They buy video games, not necessarily to play them, but because they heard the hype and hate the thought of missing out.
You saw this with ‘Elden Ring,’ which attracted so much mainstream attention that even nongamers bought the title just to see if it deserved the hype. Think about what that means.
Someone somewhere made ‘Elden Ring’ their first-ever game, and it probably killed any interest they had in video games (souls games are notoriously difficult). More than that, online platforms such as the PlayStation Store and Steam put games on sale all the time.
You would be shocked by how many people buy games simply because they have dropped from $70 to $15 for a week on Steam, and it feels like sheer stupidity not to get them before the opportunity closes.
Players acquire these games on a whim, open them just to see the opening cutscene, and then abandon them to a growing library of hundreds of video games they are yet to play.
In other words, gamers are shopping addicts no different from your female friends and relatives who collect shoes and handbags like they are going out of style.
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