When the first Harry Potter novel came out in the late 90's I recall paying somewhere around $40 for it. According to its modern day Amazon listing the book is 320 pages long. Nearly a decade later I payed almost the exact same price for the final book in the series, the 750+ page Deathly Hallows. After finishing this book I told my brother who had also just finished it that it would have been much better if they had cut 200 of the 300 pages spent detailing Harry moping in a forest. Overall my enjoyment of the series decreased as the books increased in length. Rowling began spending so much time on useless exposition that I nearly didn't even read the final two books.

In 1966 the Soviet Union produced its rendition of the legendary Russian novel War and Peace. The film was 427 minutes (or over 7 hours) long and likely cost the current equivalent of about $50 million to produce. I was able to see it during a very rare US showing at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago in 2007. That year (2007 not 1966) also saw the release of Paranormal Activity. The film was a mere 86 minutes long and cost only $15,000 to produce. The price of a ticket at the Gene Siskel Center in 2007 was about $9 for a matinee. The price of a ticket at the AMC down the street where I could have watched Paranormal Activity? $9 for a matinee.

Why do I bring up these events? Because not a single person I know complained that they were charging the same amount to see a 80 minute long movie that cost $15,000 to make as they were to see films that cost 1000x that much to make and lasted nearly 3x as long. No one walked out of the theater muttering how the film would have been even better if they had just tacked on another couple of hours. That would be insane. I've seen animated films that barely broke the hour mark, and that War and Peace film had three intermissions built in for people to stretch and eat. Let me tell you that there were plenty of people who left long before the end credits rolled. The theater actually showed the film for three days so people could see part of the film one day and then come back the next day to see the rest. I assure you that many people didn't come back for day two.

But currently forums across the web are ablaze with comments about the length of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Beating 100% of the game is supposed to take around 4 or 5 hours with the main story taking only 2. Now in any other entertainment industry this would not be newsworthy. People complain far more when a book or movie is too long. If a writer can tell a story in only an hour or only 150 pages then no one tells them they wasted money on their book or play or movie. The story is as long as it needs to be. Once there is no more story to tell the book, movie, or whatever is over. No writer would add in several more scenes to a story just to pad out the length. That's the type of thing that causes audiences to get bored and walk out or put the book down.

And likewise no one expects to pay less for a ticket to see an indie film than they do to see a major summer blockbuster. A film could cost $10,000 or $100 million and we pay the same amount to view it. Yet when we are asked to, for example, pay full price for a game like Rayman Legends, many scoff at the idea of spending the same amount of money for a product that cost only a fraction as much to make.

Gaming is the only form of entertainment that is judged based on value for the dollar. People pay hundreds of dollars to go see their favorite musicians perform for a couple of hours and some will pay thousands to see their favorite sports team win the championship. According to a recent study there are only 11 minutes of game time in a Football game, with the rest spent planning and setting up each play. Yet when Europeans try to explain why their Football is better I never hear the argument that when they see a 90 minute game they are getting a full 90 minutes of playtime. In fact quite a few people prefer American Football because they only need to pay attention once every 10 or 15 minutes. People don't judge the value of a concert by its length, or the quality of a sport by the total game time. Yet a two hour long game is for many people automatically worse than one that is 100 hours long.

The entire concept reeks of a young medium in which quantity is judged over quality. Most movies run between one and a half and two and a half hours. The reason for that is that any more time and most people will get bored and any less and the film likely won't be able to fully develop its plot. In almost every narrative medium pacing is much more important than overall length. A 2 hour movie that is poorly paced can seem like a 5 hour slog, while a 3 and a half hour epic can seem like mere minutes in the hands of a master filmmaker. Compare two Stanly Kubrick films of similar length. The Shining, to me, feels like it passes by very quickly as tension is ratcheted up at a perfect rate so that two hours of nothing feel like some of the most intense of your life. Meanwhile in 2001: A Space Odyssey many people walk out long before the end credits, often during a 20 minute long light show in which nothing happens. For many those 20 minutes likely seem longer than the entirety of The Shining. (Of note I think both films are great but I don't mind super slow films). Point is, the pacing of a film, and its perceived length is far more important than its actual length when determining whether or not audiences find that length acceptable.

There is one other aspect of the economics of games I want to bring into this discussion as it is something no one seems to take into account when complaining about the rising cost of games. A common message among game makers is that used games are killing the industry. The response by many gamers is that numerous other industries have survived a strong used market so why should games be any different? I'll tell you why using a slightly unique metaphor. When I walk into an Italian restaurant I will almost always see a Pasta Alfredo of some sort on the menu. Nearby they might list a juicy steak. The Pasta will likely cost the diner only half as much as the steak but it costs the restaurant pennies for every dollar charged, compared to the steak which they likely can only price at double the cost of making it at most. Alfredo sauce costs a lot less to buy for the diner but it costs almost nothing to make. Using this strategy a restaurant can undercharge for a more expensive dish and make up the loss selling staple foods that cost pennies to make.

This strategy is also employed in the film industry. People often mention Marvel as being a major money maker in the film industry these days. And as far as pure dollar earnings go, Marvel Studios makes more money than any production company each year. But they also spend more. Even their less popular films cost upwards of $250 million to make and market, while The Avengers and Iron Man cost that much merely to make, with marketing eating up another $200 million. So while The Avengers might have made over 1.5 billion dollars that is only a 3 times return on investment. The most valuable production studio in Hollywood is actually Bloomhouse Productions. They are the folks behind Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister, and several other horror films. What makes Bloomhouse films so great is that none cost more than a couple million dollars to make, with the early Paranormal Activity movies made for under $100,000. So while Paranormal Activity only made $250 million that is a 2500 times return on investment. Horror and comedy films are often movie studio's insurance. It isn't how they are going to make their billions, but they are almost pure profit meaning that a $200 million disaster like, say, last year's Lone Ranger, won't bring down the studio. Maybe they won't earn a ton of money in a year with a major flop, but the money earned from cheap films lets them take bigger risks because they have a safety net should those films fail. The only reason this works, though, is because the ticket and DVD price for a cheap horror or comedy film is the same as the price for a summer blockbuster.

Now you might see where this is going. Game studios don't have the safety net that film studios do. That is the difference between the industries. Because gamers want their cake and to eat it too. Since they won't pay top dollar for lower investment games studios are at a much greater risk when a big project fails. If a major publisher could charge $60 for a budget game then they would be much more willing to take a chance on a small project. The issue, though, is that if you have to charge a discounted price for a budget game then there is no incentive to make it. And by budget game I don't mean a low quality version of a AAA game, I mean something that could be made for a couple hundred thousand dollars. The types of games that we currently pay $15 to play. If gamers were willing to pay for quality and not quantity then game publishers would be a lot more willing to take risks. As it is, game publishing is a low margin business. If gamers want things like paid DLC to end then we have to be willing to pay more for games that may be cheaper to produce but are of very high quality. Until that day don't expect to see publishers back down on used games or DLC or micro-transactions. These studios need that safety net and time and again gamers have proven that the safety net is not going to come from buying high quality low budget games. I certainly hope that changes and games can be judged like any other form of entertainment based on how much they entertain, not how long that entertainment lasts or how much it cost to bring it to us.