This issue, if indeed it can even be considered as such has been bugging me for a number of years, and I feel a recent need to address it before it falls off the map completely in my mind.
Today games are a mass market success dwarfing both movies and music in terms of sales, and revenue return. While I understand and accept the way gaming is going, I have noticed ever so slowly a massive change in the way games are played in the last twenty years. Maybe this is a development of maturity in gamers, in a literal sense, and being young you are restricted to your parents purse strings, or an amount of pocket money limiting what you spend those funds on, which maybe the case, still and I am now experiencing effects of a more aware and non restrictive cash flow.

But back in the late 1980’s I was playing my NES enjoying everything I could get my hands on from Shadow Warriors [Ninja Gaiden in the US], to New Zealand Story, Mario, Mega Man, Bad Dude Vs Dragonninja Duck tales, Rescue Rangers, to Jackie Chan’s Adventures. I loved my NES and these handful of games lasted me nearing on a decade. With swapping games with friends to play things like festers quest, batman titles and castlevania games. A lot of my life has consciously and sub consciously affected my life to which I don’t regret, nor apologise for.
Today these games are retrospectively criticised by James Rolfe as the AVGN via ScrewAttack and GameTrailers to which by todays standard do, “suck donkey dick”. But these were times when games were so vast in new IP’s it was rare for a sequel to be seen, and some sequels were so god awful you could hardly advance through stage one - case and point being Double Dragon III. Still this small handful of titles ended up lasting me over a decade. You’d spend month’s endlessly replaying titles with awful text translations you wouldn’t care about and find highly addictive.

Skip forward a few generations and some wannabe consoles, and you have a massive leap in game technology, which gave birth to devil spawn, sure they slightly existed before in the Nintendo versus SEGA console war but it was truly about the games offered. Nothing changed until Sony came to play and eventually gave us Final Fantasy VII and spawned the ‘Fanboy’. Before gaming had arguments which is better but until FF7 turned up there was nothing to be seen like the diehard elitism from these people, you would find them everywhere, at the time it couldn’t be deciphered too well till it came down to people just being gay for Sephiroth and Cloud or just wanting his babies if you were willing and able.

But before I distract myself with console war arguments, people were playing a different array of games almost twice as short as before. What would be six months of almost endless fun and gameplay and accessibility was being shortened, in truth this Playstation, Saturn, N64 era was the pinnacle of the RPG game. Never would it be so successful again. As it is a time when kids and other gamers are able to play as endlessly as they did before and clock up masses of time. Collecting items and defeating foes in turn based combat. While my time with FF7 was limited due to my lack of a PSX I did complete it from start to finish in an epic 47 hour gameplay session at a friend’s house sleeping over his place just to complete it.

The average was just three months of playtime per game before it collected dust, or was sold if you were so inclined. While the gameplay was dropping there was only a small insignificant dip in new IP’s which are going strong it wouldn’t be until SEGA dropped out of the console race would new IP development drop fast as light travels.



While the game Industry goes through a lot of changes as it develops to be the massive cultural phenomenon it is today, the precursor to what we have today being mainly thanks to SEGA and Phantasy Star Online, which after its retreat from console hardware development, was continued by Microsoft when it threw its hat in quite rightly after its domination of the PC market (to the point the Supreme Court was concerned about its dominance.) and gave us the Xbox.

During this last generation of gaming, I first started noticing that between games on the Xbox and Playstation 2, and remakes of Resident Evil, and new Mario and Zelda titles on the Cube, the amount of time I as a gamer was spending was drastically decreasing not because I was losing interest, but more because there was something new coming. I think while there was a decent amount of time to play ever title I wanted it wasn’t until the end of the cycle yet before the Current Gen titles came out was I skipping between games more frequently.

Now this argument if you will comes to a head with the Christmas Line up of games of 2007. This is a time when every anticipated title read in magazines, seen online from mid 2006, through spring and summer of 2007 are going to release. To a hardcore lifetime gamer such as myself you will have spent anywhere from £200 to £600. With a host of games with some released on the same day, or a week between title releases, while you would have the subsequent drought of January, February, and march of 2008 to play these titles over, it was daunting in a time where the gamer is no longer to blame for time spent, but the marketing companies behind all these titles, pushing players to buy these titles, and buy them now because all your friends will be playing them now, not in three months time.



Marketing is the be all and end all of a product. While post release date the future of a franchise or game depends entirely on the quality of the title itself, everything pre-release is what drives though sales, it used to be magazines and word of mouth, which was a great time, but sadly the time of having Sir Patrick Moore as the GamesMaster giving out cheats and tips, hosted by Dominic Diamond every week, which is another article and another time. But is Marketing effecting how long you play games now? Maybe you don’t even know you are doing it? Maybe you thought you will play a bit of modern warfare 2 this year but focus on assassins creed 2, and mass effect 2 and have modern warfare 2 for the rest of the year. Fap – leave a comment, maybe you had a similar thought on this.