Video Games Are Taking Longer to Complete. NewsWire

NewsWire: 3/26/22

• There are more video games available to buy than ever—and they’re also longer than ever. Some single-player titles can take over 40 hours to complete the main story. (The Washington Post)
  
• NH: In the original Assassin’s Creed, released in 2007, it took 32 hours to complete the entire game. But in the franchise's latest iteration, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it takes a whopping 135 hours to complete every mission. That's 4.2x longer than the original. 
• Single-player video games are increasingly taking longer to complete. Just 15 years ago, many games took 10-20 hours to finish. Now popular titles like Red Dead Redemption II and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild take 170+ hours.
• This shift reflects the growing intensity of the attention war now being waged in the media industry. Just look at other entertainment services. Netflix (NFLX) and Disney+ (DIS) are turning out endless hours of original content. These producers manage to extend plotlines that once could be dramatized in a single 2-hour movie into a multi-season series that requires a week to binge-watch. In today's marketplace, the biggest winners are those who can stretch out a user's attention to the max.
• But can this model last? I doubt it. People's available time is not infinite. As media companies keep churning out exponentially more content, a lot of it will inevitably end up played or watched by too few people to be economically viable. Everyone is producing on the assumption that there's still a lot of time slack out there. But what if everyone overinvests, so that two or three seasons from now a lot of these costs won't be recouped? We never used to think that media was subject to an overinvestment boom-bust cycle. Maybe soon we will change our minds.
  
  

Did You Know?

• Black Americans Now Lead in Opioid Deaths. Last April, amid surging opioid overdose deaths, I noted that opioid deaths among nonelderly blacks were rising faster than those among whites. (See “The Opioid Crisis is Looking Worse.”) Now the nation is marking a grim new milestone: For the first time since 1999, the opioid overdose rate among blacks has surpassed that of whites. This is according to new research from UCLA. While opioid deaths increased among all racial and ethnic groups during the pandemic, they grew by far most sharply among blacks. From 2019 to 2020, the opioid overdose rate among blacks surged 49%, compared to an increase of about 26% for whites. More than 15,200 black Americans died of overdoses last year, more than double the number four years earlier. Their overdose death rate is now second only to the death rate of the much smaller Native American or Alaska Native populations.