The Doom re-boot and single player campaign length.

Later this year, Bethesda Softworks and Id Software will be releasing Doom, a reboot of the popular Doom franchise. The franchise that many credit with the popularization of the First Person Shooter genre and which was certainly responsible for the rise of online multi-player. Just this past week, the developer tweeted that a play through of the game's single player campaign is averaging about 13 hours in length. There are a lot of people on the forums complaining that a 13 hour game is "too short". I think those people are seriously lacking in perspective.

First, and probably most importantly. Doom is a full First Person Shooter (FPS). It is not a FPS/ Role-playing Game (RPG) hybrid like Mass Effect. It's not a FPS with RPG Elements like Crysis or Borderlands. It's just a FPS. It doesn't have anything other than gunning down enemies and mild puzzle solving with an occasional cut scene to pad it's length. Taking into consideration the fact that Call of Duty: Ghosts had only a 4 hour campaign, or that shooters like Star Wars Battlefront have no campaign at all, 13 hours is nothing to sneeze at.

Second, let us compare the cost of going to a movie to the cost of a video game. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the average cost of a movie ticket in 2015 is $8.34. Most people go to the movies with at least one other person, so tickets lone are going to cost $16.68. Based on my own movie snack habits, I'm going to estimate that the average cost of going to the movies is between $30- $40 dollars, though I have seen some people place the cost as high as $50. The average movie is 2 hours long, so you're looking at an investment of $15-$20 dollars an hour for a night at the movies. By contrast, the average video game costs $60 at release time. That means that for Doom you'll only be paying $4.61 cents an hour, not including multiplayer content or re-playability of the game. If you are a gamer, buying Doom is a far better investment than going to see Deadpool.

Third, the average gamer in the US is a 31 year old male. The average 31 year old male in the US is married, has at least one child, and has a full time job. Work and sleep are going to take up around 16 hours of his average day, not accounting for commuting and any work he does from home. Assuming he doesn't completely neglect his family, or himself, for that matter, he wont have much time for playing video games. Assuming he has the sense to realize the a hyper violent game like Doom shouldn't be played in front of his kids, he'll have have even less time to play. A 13 hour campaign is long enough to be interesting, but short enough that the average gamer might actually be able to finish it.

In short, at $4.61 cents an hour, a 13 hour campaign in a modern FPS game is pretty awesome for the average American gamer.