How to measure hours of gameplay

[JayBlue]

How do you measure the amount of time it takes to play through a game?

Do you time it based on the main story, do you include side missions and side storys apart of it? Do you include all the extra things you can do in a game like completing the monster encyclopedia, recruiting all the characters, unlocking all the CGs in the gallery?

Is it based on how quick a person can speed run through the game.
Or is it based on how long it takes to get every single thing done in the game.

Do you include alternate routes in game and/or the true end route?

Thoughts?

[Fuseblower]

Well, basically, take the shortest (non-premature ending) route, count the number of words and use 200 words per minute (which is apparantly the average reading speed) and that will be the game playing time. I wouldn't add things like playing time of mini games since they're far too variable.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

This is almost impossible to quantify without a large sample of players recording their times and averaging them together. If you've seen any game forum or thread for newly released AAA games, there is a HUGE variable range of completion times players are claiming it took them to beat the game, and those often conflict (either shorter or longer) with what the publisher advertised.

Obsidian recently advertised a game as "short" and it took many players 20-30 hours to beat it, and others beat it in 8-10 hours.

It might be a good idea to questions WHY you would want to advertise a certain game length? Does it add anything of value versus the risk of not being accurate for your players? Why not just advertise the number of routes and endings instead?

[Sonomi]

"How do you measure the amount of time it takes to play through a game?"

Just to chime in a point that has not already been mentioned, you could share the word count with players. If I see a visual novel with 5000 words, then I assume it will be a 10-15 minute affair. 100,000+ for me indicates a few hours or more. Because different people read at varying speeds, it might be beneficial for them to decide how many gameplay hours they can expect. I notice that a lot of VNs on this site tend to do this.

[Katy133]

The website How Long to Beat lists each game with different playing time categories:
[*] Main story
[*] Main story + Extra
[*] Completionist
[*] Combined

Separating each game into separate categories like the above helps potential players determine if the game's "right" for them.

Errant Signal also made an interesting video on the subject:

[Metatype]

I've wondered the same thing too because on the Ren'Py games list there are some who list a time sometimes with the word length and couldn't figure out how they determined this. I just always assumed they were including everything.