Average time a game takes to finish

[Pancakes]

When I look at a game, i want to know the average amount of time people spend playing the game, so I know how much time I want to allocate before I go on an adventure.

[Jaunitta 🌸]

When the game has a story and includes open world side quests exploring you could more than 500 hours.
Depends on the game and what you love doing. Exploring can be very rewarding
Witcher3 Wild hunt and DLC Blood and Wine , Hearts of Stone is one such game.I played over 700 hours as it was just so good exploring.
Skyrim
Kingdom Come Deliverence just started playing it a few weeks ago and its brilliant.
Forest village life is feudal I played over 2000 hours

[Pancakes]

yea. So you cull the outliers, for people who spend more than a standard deviation away from everyone else.

[Jaunitta 🌸]

Some just want to finish the main quests and be done with it.
Have a look in the store>feedbacks you can see how long the players have played the game they are reviewing.

[LowJack_VA1]

There's this site:
https://howlongtobeat.com/
This site used to let you connect it directly to your Steam account giving you stats for your entire library. They probably still do it.

[Gwarsbane]

Publicado originalmente por トド (Todd):

yea. So you cull the outliers, for people who spend more than a standard deviation away from everyone else.

That doesn't actually solve the issue for some games. Borderlands 2 for example. To finish the whole game with a single play through for 1 character, without side quests is about 20 hours I think. To finish the game with a full play through for a single character (means playing on 3 different levels) without side quests would be around 70 or so hours. With side quests, tack on another 10 or so hours to each one.

Now thats just for 1 character. There are lots more characters to play and each character plays very differently. So which do you consider average time? Single play through with no side quests, or full play through for all characters.

I've got hundreds of hours in Borderlands 2, I've only played 2 character, only 1 of them fully.

Left 4 Dead 2, I have 1200+ hours in.

Defense Grid: The Awakening 146 hours.

DiRT 2, 113 hours

Pinball FX 2 108 hours.

All games that you can play over and over and over and over and over again. Now am I a regular player or am I an outlier?

If Valve put that info on the pages, it could easily be misleading and they would get a lot of crap over it. "This game said the average playtime was 120 hours, I beat it in 10, I want my money back!!!!!" Then you have the games that are just starting out and the average time is really low and people don't buy it because it looks like its a super quick game thats too expensive.

Then there is the fact that Valve as no idea if you are just playing or idling in the game. I have a couple of games in the thousands of hours. Valve has no idea if you have actually beat the game or not just how many hours you have spent playing it.

In the end, average play time is pretty meaningless to most people.

[Zekiran]

Some people speed run and call it a day.

Others like myself dwell on details, take lots of screenshots, and replay games over and over.

So....

"time to complete" a game is meaningless, "does the game have content I'm likely to enjoy" or "is this a game for speedy runs", might be better questions for you to think on.

[LowJack_VA1]

Publicado originalmente por Zekiran:

Some people speed run and call it a day.

Others like myself dwell on details, take lots of screenshots, and replay games over and over.

So....

"time to complete" a game is meaningless, "does the game have content I'm likely to enjoy" or "is this a game for speedy runs", might be better questions for you to think on.

No, I totally get what you are saying, but how would a Steam calculated figure be any more accurate? That's what the OP is asking for.

[Xite >X< 👁️👁 🇦🇺]

Average play time using realtime stats would make older games appear to have more content.

Some games have no end at all.

[Zekiran]

That's my point: it cannot.

No program could possibly give an even remotely adequate amount.

"I wasn't really playing for 14 hours I walked away and went to a movie and had lunch can I get a refund? I only really played for 20 minutes! honest!"

"I didn't get what I wanted out of this game" <- play time 2000 hours

"This game is junk!" <- play time 20 minutes


.... They could all literally be talking about one game.

[LowJack_VA1]

The play stats don't mean anything. I play games 3 to 6 times longer than many. But, the OP is asking for an average, OP will soon learn that doesn't mean anything.

[LowJack_VA1]

Publicado originalmente por Zekiran:

That's my point: it cannot.

No program could possibly give an even remotely adequate amount.

"I wasn't really playing for 14 hours I walked away and went to a movie and had lunch can I get a refund? I only really played for 20 minutes! honest!"

"I didn't get what I wanted out of this game" <- play time 2000 hours

"This game is junk!" <- play time 20 minutes


.... They could all literally be talking about one game.

Brother/Sister, we are on the same page . . But you put it better than I did.

[Zekiran]

I think a better indicator, that people need to still actually be participating in actively looking for information, is the more or less consistent "how many people got this end-game achievement" - but even then, there's no way to correlate that with hours played. It might take a hundred, again, for some, and then 2 hours for another person speeding through. But it generally is an indication of how fun a game is ;)

[Xite >X< 👁️👁 🇦🇺]

Best indicator is in the reviews, take advantage of them. Use google search and add "hrs" to the search.

[Geralt of Rivia]

ok

[Crazy Tiger]

Publicado originalmente por LowJack_VA1:

There's this site:
https://howlongtobeat.com/
This site used to let you connect it directly to your Steam account giving you stats for your entire library. They probably still do it.

^^ this.

Whenever I want an indication about it, I check that site. And I specifically say indication, because it's nothing more than that.

OP, one of the things you have to keep in mind is that Steam can't possibly know what you're doing by itself, it doesn't know what you do when the program is open. The site that LowJack gives works based on reports on all platforms the game is on, because people give input. It can't possibly work in any other way.

And I doubt that Valve will implement something like this when there is a third party site that simply does the job properly.