I’m currently playing “Cassette Beasts”. Pretty fun game that takes the pokemon formula, and turns it on its head.
I will not play long and involved 300 hour games. It’s too much. I want bite sized games.
The internet said this game is 25 hours long. Except thats bullshit. There are 130 monsters. I’ve caught 16. I’ve been playing for 17 hours. I don’t know if this game has “gym leaders”. But if they do, I haven’t seen them yet.
I have no bad words about the game, other than the fact that it takes 10 minutes (I timed it) to go from not yet opening the game, to get to a title screen. It also crashes pretty regularly. Meaning you gotta wait 10 minutes AGAIN.
But the point is, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game, and I’m approaching the time period where most people have beaten games.
Am I just bad at games?
The shit that says a game is X hours long is, generally, about how long it would take someone on the easiest difficulty and possibly using a guide or walkthrough to simply finish the main story when focusing all their attention on it. It does not include doing anything else, like collecting all the collectibles or doing any side-quests.
But the devs can also be pretty bad at getting to that number, especially inexperienced indie devs or other small teams that can’t actually do the research and get a realistic number.
howlongtobeat.com is usually where people are looking for these numbers. It has numbers for “main”, “main + extra”, and “completionist”. I usually play games on at least harder than normal setting and I pretty reliably hit ±10% of the “main + extra” number with some rare exceptions, so I don’t think your description is accurate at all.
I imagine some people are slower or faster at certain types of games but can still use the number as base to adjust from. For instance a slow reader might add a percentage to a text heavy RPG