I have always been a big fan of good length single player campaigns. I am not a big RPG fan but games such as Assassins Creed, Arkham Asylum or even Halo Reach give me the full fledged single player campaign I enjoy.

I am currently coming to the end of LA Noire with the intention of writing a review and the length of the single player should be exactly what I want. The thing is I feel like my feelings towards this game would be much more positive if it had ended sooner. This experience along with games like Call of Duty have got me thinking.

Do you think games need to be above a certain length to be value for money?

Is a short campaign acceptable if it is high quality?

Portal. 
 
2 hours. 
 
Considered nearly perfect by almost everyone. 
 
EDIT: OK. better response. 
 
Call of Duty is too short. I really liked Modern Warfare 1 and 2's campaigns, and have played them a whole lot. But they're way too short. It really depends on good pacing. I feel like MW1 could have had another level to round it out better, but it ends a bit abruptly. 
 
I have another dilemma, though. Now that I've got the money to buy all the games I want, I don't have the time to beat them all at least once. I'm glad to get a seven or eight hour shooter - it means I'll beat it sometime in the next two weeks instead of the next year or so. I'm trying to burn through both Fallouts, Saints Row 2, RF Guerilla, and Just Cause 2, and I have nowhere near enough time.

I think at the end it comes down to quality. Multiple games have content that is meant to lengthen the experience in a very artificial and lazy way, Mass Effect's mining comes to mind; it has no purpose other than engange the player in a repetitious and unsatisfying process of gathering materials (similar to grinding in mmos), it does not engange the player to explore or to adventure outside the obvious path, its simply there to add empty calories to a gaming session.  
 
A lot of games do this, the developer either runs out of time and/or creative juice and they start to include time wasting features. They do this because they have to meet an objective or they feel they have to package enough "content" to appeal to the player (20+ hours of content). It is pretty safe to say that most players would feel better if materials were gathered from a box in the level rather than engage in mind numbing game play.
 
We are an industry that sees games like vehicles, a game must have an specific number of features, options, etc, but unlike cars we do not have different levels of pricing, everyone is either $60 or less than $20, nothing in between. So everyone is competing against everyone, but all genres are different, even games within the same conditions of a genre can offer vastly different experiences based on the audience, but there is always a PR or publisher in the back telling them X number of weapons need to be in the game, X number of levels, if Halo has this then we must have it too, etc.

@believer258 said:

Portal. 2 hours. Considered nearly perfect by almost everyone.

Game, set and match, as far as I'm concerned.

I like short games I can rent and get a good experience from such as Enslaved, Alice in Wonderland, Heavy Rain etc.
 
Unless there is a lot of content and I will be playing it for a long time there's no way I will pay £40 for it unless it's called Portal 2.
 
Games like LA Noire which I will only play once and are to long for a single rental I usually miss or wait for a GOTY edition at a cheaper price.

Portal.  2 hours.  Considered nearly perfect by almost everyone.  EDIT: OK. better response.  Call of Duty is too short. I really liked Modern Warfare 1 and 2's campaigns, and have played them a whole lot. But they're way too short. It really depends on good pacing. I feel like MW1 could have had another level to round it out better, but it ends a bit abruptly.  I have another dilemma, though. Now that I've got the money to buy all the games I want, I don't have the time to beat them all at least once. I'm glad to get a seven or eight hour shooter - it means I'll beat it sometime in the next two weeks instead of the next year or so. I'm trying to burn through both Fallouts, Saints Row 2, RF Guerilla, and Just Cause 2, and I have nowhere near enough time.

@tofford said:

Do you think games need to be above a certain length to be value for money?

This is always the central problem whenever this question of game length arises.

A video game as a piece of entertainment associated with a certain market value and a video game enjoyed and criticized on its own (without any outside influences as price) are two entirely different things.

While games like Portal which some people have already mentioned are great and had a very short length would have received much more damaging reviews if it had been sold with a $50 or $60 dollar price tag.

Normally, I enjoy my games to be about as long as the first Assassin's Creed. Long enough that I am able to really get into it but not so long that it drags, I grow bored, and more on to something else because they failed to keep my attention (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood). For some reason or another this doesn't seem to apply to the Fallout games or the Elder Scrolls series as I have gladly dumped hundreds of hours into both (because they keep me engaged).

Games, due to their high price point, have this interesting dynamic in terms of art and entertainment that most other mediums do not a majority of the time. Many times it can be worth spending the $10 to see a halfway-decent movie with friends but rarely are you going to drop $60 on a short, middle-of-the-road quality game since that price of entry is so much higher.

Sorry, I feel like this is just me rambling...