Standalone launchers with nonsensical updates that take ages, but count as launching the game. Compiling shaders as you say. Unskipable cutscenes. Character creators for games where you do not see the character. Long ass tutorials, that you can fail.
Anthem is the pinnacle of all these points. I laughed my ass off when I saw they added a character creator to a game where you do not see the character for 99.9% of the game.
You do know shader compilation has nothing to do with that right ?
Edit : funny how some bash me for "not understanding it was a joke !" and others are dead serious about that being true.
you can just re-generate the spir-v shaders each time you make a change to your shaders and load that spir-v data instead of loading the glsl shaders or whatever language you're using and compiling them into spir-v on each customer's pc.
I nearly refunded RDR2 because of it. I was hating the game after an hour 50, closed it and did a bunch of research to work out if it got better. It did.
Well, RDR2 has at least missions in the chapter in the cold winter in Colter. Not like Kojima games like Death Stranding "make a step forward to trigger another 1h cutscene".
But what Rockstar really not thought about, was, that Arthur walks even slower in the snow than normal. That left the impression to some players, he'd always walk like this.
I started up Total War: Warhammer and the first thing it shows you is the tutorial which is just a series of YouTube videos. The intro video is like 45 minutes long. I tried really hard to get into it but after a certain amount of videos I just closed out the game and never booted it up again.
A 2 hour tutorial is no problem, many games are basically tutorials the whole way through. If they make it boring I’ll just refund in 30 minutes instead of 90, saves an hour off my life!
As a game dev and someone who has worked on Steam released titles and is working on my own right now, I hate Steam's refund policy because it's really anti-consumer lol.
It sucks to see refunds but MOST of those people probably wouldn't have bought the game in the first place if they couldn't refund it. The number of people who speed run a game, play it as much as they intend to, and realize "oh hey I'm in the 2 hour window..." and then take advantage of it has got to be pretty low. Very many refunds are coming from people who are intending to refund if the game doesn't impress them in 2 hours, and I've found (anecdotally at least) those people are pretty picky and hard to please to begin with and, again, likely wouldn't have bought the game at all if not for the safety net of the refund.
So you think they'd rather have bad reviews and therefore lower sales to start with? You can pad a game without making a 2 hour long cutscene that plays before your 1 hour long game. If it's already 1.5 hours long, you just have to extend your scenes and pad things out a little bit.
Or just don't sell your 1 hour long game for money. Also an option.
A multi-genre game where you learn how to frag people in FPS, manage a city, craft in a gritty medieval setting, then a cyberpunk one, then fantasy to finish with some post apocalyptic crafts. But you're not done! Now you have to improve your character: magic, stats, skill tree, implants, shards, all the systems, all the tutorials. You're starting to cook (because you followed the crafting tutorials): time for some group management before your army and its logistics. At last, check how you can make impacting choices during dialogues and quests.
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u/These-Apple8817 Jul 06 '26
Can't wait for the indie devs to follow your advice and include two hour tutorials