Integrate "How long to beat" for each game

[Bors]

It would be great if Steam could work up a collaboration with howlongtobeat.com (or make their own equivalent) and introduce a feature that easily shows in the Steam interface a rough estimate of how long it takes to finish a game.

It would be an awesome thing to have, possibly incentivizing people to play more and also helping them tidy their backlogs. What do you think?

[Bee🐝]

Nope, these kinds of service aren’t at all that accurate.

More importantly, developers generally hate these things; a lot of people don’t like buying shorter games because they believe a 100 hour game filled with busy work is worth more.

These sites work against smaller indie devs who make shorter games in niche genres or devs who’s game times get misreported by the service.

Store pages are there to sell the game to people. The last thing we want is PC developers padding games.

[Boblin the Goblin]

Adding to Bee;

The general user thinks that a game should essentially cost $1 and hour to be worth it. This would kill games like Dead Space or Sekiro(which for me to beat twice was just over 50 hours).

Both of those games are great and are well under the $1 an hour metric.

This along with there is no really correct way to measure a game's length. A skilled player could beat Sekiro closer to the 35 hour estimate, or even lower.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

It took me about 8 years, on multiple consoles and PC, with over 8k hours to actually beat Skyrim properly.

You wanna factor that into the results?

[Yasahi]

They should just display "Infinite" on all games since most people never finish the games they buy. Should factor that in too if we're going to take some arbitrary numbers from other sources.

[wuddih]

the HLTB website itself lets you import your Steam games. so you can do that over there.

https://augmentedsteam.com/
adds HLTB times to store pages.

https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer
is a tool that lets you create collections with data pulled from HLTB.
(dunno how it performs today, have not used it since dynamic collections exist)

these are some available options that, i wanna point out, exist for a really long time already.

as with many things that exist 3rd party for Steam there is tendency towards:
"it already exists ... why?"

[AmsterdamHeavy]

I have no use or interest in how long it takes other people to finish a game.

Of what value is this metric beyond some perceived "price per hour" of gaming when gaming is already one of the very cheapest forms of entertainment there is?

[Tanoomba]

I like this idea, for the main reason that I'm often far more tended to start a game in my backlog if it's a shorter game.

[Pierce Dalton]

That would be a great addition to store pages.

People sometimes refer to that in reviews, but not always.

[Pierce Dalton]

Originally posted by Yasahi:

They should just display "Infinite" on all games since most people never finish the games they buy. Should factor that in too if we're going to take some arbitrary numbers from other sources.

Perhaps those who make the games are the best source.

[eram]

How long to beat integration
https://imgur.com/a/s6nX15T

https://augmentedsteam.com/

[GeneralHaberdashery]

Originally posted by Bee🐝:

Nope, these kinds of service aren’t at all that accurate.

More importantly, developers generally hate these things; a lot of people don’t like buying shorter games because they believe a 100 hour game filled with busy work is worth more.

These sites work against smaller indie devs who make shorter games in niche genres or devs who’s game times get misreported by the service.

For what it's worth, I actually seek out short, tight single-player experiences these days. You're much likely to find real art in a 5-10 hour game than a 40 hour game.

[Wren]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.