1) Some of the best gaming experiences for me have been games that last only 5-10 minutes. Longer doesn't mean better. Many games are made artificially longer by adding stupid mazes, needless XP grinding or whatever. Often it's wasted time really, not quality time.

2) I have never bought and never will buy games that cost 80 €. If I run out of games in the reasonable price range, I choose to play freeware instead.

3) That "time to beat" is useless information in more ways than one. First, it doesn't necessarily respond to how you choose to play the game. For instance, in adventure games going through all conversations and reading all items descriptions can take several hours, even if the path to beat the game can usually be achieved in less than one hour. Also, that time doesn't take into account things like modding, which greatly change the way the game can be played. But most importantly, that number assumes that the point of playing games is to "beat" them. In some cases, yes. In some others, it's not. There are even games that aren't meant to be "beaten".

For instance, when is a city building game finished? When there aren't any pixels left to build on?
When is a speedrun beaten? When you have achieved the fastest playthrough that is mathematically possible?
When have you "beaten" some multiplayer? When no one is playing any more?

None of that can be translated to any minutes or hours.
If someone finds that kind of information useful, fine. I fail to see how those people play their games though. With a walkthrough trying to pick all "achievements" or something?

Another vote for putting the new HowLongToBeat box underneath the game details (the most important section), not on top of it.

Of course, though it doesn't change the fact that shoppers know how much entertainment time they can expect from a game. If you feel it's inaccurate, then go to the provided link and read on the entries and what notes they've added in their playthrough. Or heck, you're more than welcome to add your own playthrough times to make it more 'accurate', though your playthrough will still be equally weighted with the average. Of course, once you throw modding in, then gameplay times can vary. The times are for vanilla releases of the game, they're non-arbitrary because most people will be playing without the mods. If you want playthrough times of mods, go to the mod page's comment section. Go find a game and read its notes. SimCity 4 for example is a sandbox game and you get a good idea after reading the [Completions] tab most people just listed the times until they got bored. I don't remember seeing speedrun in any of the 4 numbers on the GOG store pages? Use speedrun.com for the different categories of the game on how they're timed and their forums. This integration wasn't meant to capture speedruns. That would depend on the game. Some multiplayer games just go on forever. Again, read the playthrough notes or post/read their forums. Since GOG focuses mostly on [offline] single player games, these numbers are very relevant to users here. Read the above, people play differently, there's more info in the lower and upper limits of playtime.

More information to parse isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when it's a tool used by people to help them with their purchasing decisions.

As long as it doesn't end up like that thing on Steam where someone spent 800hrs on some grindy MMORPG / MOBA "unlocking" a bunch of arbitrarily locked (obvious cheap padding) stuff, then starts crapping on otherwise decent games with short playtimes and normal price-tags due to every purchase decision then being dumbed down into a overly simplistic gametime / $ calculation. "I spent 9000hrs on Fortnite for $0 and will start leaving 'Dis Sux' reviews on every $10-$20 game that gives me less 'value' than 20-30hrs". I definitely don't want GOG's HLTB integration end up fuelling those kind of 'purchasing decisions' here...

You're absolutely right. Luckily the helpful reviews rating from other users cuts through most of the grossly inaccurate review nonsense. Most of the time anyway.

The quality of the gaming experience is also indicated through the OpenCritic reviews too.

Agree with everything in this post, I too absolutely hate it, that placement it's driving me insane! And thanks for providing a way to block it, i'll be useing it until the website vandal, who designed the monstrosity get some common sense smacked into his head, and relocate it bellow the more relevant game details, possibly removing the stupid time to beat boxes along the way! numbers should be enough. Huge banners, flashing images in description text, opencritic... you just cant keep the website clean and simple can you?

And be it average or whatever, the information is about as accurate as the gog tags (which gog should fix already!). For exemple no one's gonna tell me that he beat HOMM3 in 146h 100%, it has a random map generator = infinite replayability. The times should be left to the professionals (minimum = speedrun, maximum by a hardcore gamer who checked every nook and cranny to infinity sign if it has infinite replayability).

Yes thank you gog staff for this innovative integration.
The guy that came up with this idea DESERVES a raise.
You got one up on steam now in terms of innovation.

The reasons some people come up to complain about this are just insane.

"There could be mods that always change things and would render the info and screenshots of any game inacurate but for some reason in this case they should totaly be taken into account!"

"There's a random infinite mode obviously not covered by the playtime, so that makes the playtime wrong!"

"This number that is the average of all game times submitted is not like my game time and I don't understand how numbers work!"

"This info isn't of use to me, SO IT SHOULD BE ERADICATED WITH FIRE SO THAT NO ONE CAN USE IT!"

"Someone else could use this info to apply criteria to their purchase decisions that I don't like, SO IT SHOULD BE ERADICATED WITH FIRE!"

"I hit my head on the hammer, and now penguin potato appendix!"

Critizism for not being a 100 per cent accurate feature?

How long to beat is just an overall guide, not a feature carved in stone.The more players more "accurate" the time should be. I use take it in account and I use to add a 60 per cent more of time to have an idea about how much time I could spend in the game. It will depend for every player

How Long to beat is relative. But considering that one of the first things I do when I do not know about the game was visit the site, then having this feature bundled in the GOG game card is a QOL feature. Useful for me.

About the size of the feature/banner, well. minutiae. Let the web designers do their job because what is big, ugly a beauty or unuseful for someone is great for others.

And I am not going to mention the "hard words" against OpenCritic because they are so subjective and sectarian that it would be a futile exercise as it use to be some debates in this forum.

Same. I use HLTB for years and find it fairly accurate. My personal times are usually within 30% margin to the average. I only ever check "Main" and "Main + Extra" categories, "Completionist" is just too vague term.

I was already visiting howlongtobeat to see how long an average player needs for a game. Guess i don't need to visit it now.

And another vote for same. Let's put the info you expect from the store first, and have the new supplementary info after it.

That really depends on the mod.

Let's take a classic example, Doom.
If you use some port/mod that enables something like mouselook, it doesn't necessarily change anything graphically, but completely changes the style of playing.

So any average time playing the game traditionally, with fixed view and keyboard controls, would tell nothing about how easy, hard or time-consuming it is to play with something like GZDoom.


It doesn't even need to be a mod really, it can be a designed in-game feature.
Even something as simple as hidden object games can take a very different time depending on whether you have enabled hints or play without them.

Just to confirm that I haven't missed something critical here, I checked stats for "Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek".
https://howlongtobeat.com/game/18240

I don't see any mention of hints being used or not, so that tells me absolutely nothing if I choose to use them or not, because I have no meaningful reference point in those other people's times.

I do get some information like the fastest guy played it on PC in 2 hours, whereas the slowest one took 14 hours 48 minutes. That's a massive difference of 12 hours, so was the fastest guy using hints, and the slowest guy was a champion who didn't use any in-game or out-game cheats?

I don't know, I have no idea. There's nothing mentioned about any of that.
So basically I only learn that someone had the game open for 2 hours, another guy had it open over 14 hours, and at that point they both had "beaten" the game, without any details about what it meant to either one of them.


Now, let's assume I am buying this game.
Do I expect to spend 2 hours with it, 14 hours with it, or some average number between those two, which is probably not going to be exactly how long I am going to play it either?
I fail to see how this information can be of any use, especially as it doesn't tell anything about in-game options, mods, or anything that actually does affect the playing time.

Yep that's true, games that last few minutes can be masterclasses, but you get the point. It can help choose sometimes :) For MMOs I agree, because they're almost infinite, or for roguelite. But you can add several walkthhrough on the site, so you know it's replayability. Personnaly I use Open Critic, IGDB, and HowLongToBeat along to track games and have a better idea of what game it is, or just to put some stats on my plays. That's why the website presents multiple categories depending of the way to play ! It stands for the main ways of playing globally, that can or cannot be yours, but it gives a trend somehow

Yeah, no shit. The times were meant for the vanilla release. I'd suggest refreshing on your previous statistics courses and reviewing outliers. An average is an average, it doesn't capture the full range of the dataset without standard deviations and 1/2/3σ of a bell curve. Check the [Completions] tab. I see some entries here:

Main Story
- 5h48m - Main Story only, no extra story. no hints used. Expert Difficulty

100% Completionists
- 7h 46m - Includes bonus adventure (about 1h15). Didn't skip puzzles. Checked guide about a dozen times for hidden objects.
- 9h - All achievements. 2 stories without clues. Expert mode.

Before you ask, this sample size of < 25 is not accurate at all. Therefore you're supposed to take this as a very rough reference. Yes, you have to make some reasonable presumptions with the data. If you feel any of these times are inaccurate, PM the submitter and/or report the times if you think they're wrong. Literal interpretation - 2-14 hrs depending on how you play with the caveat that it's possible for you to be an outlier. Difficulty modes should be noted down as some of the submissions do (normal, hard, expert difficulty). I think I've made myself clear on mods and how adding them in makes their game times arbitrary.

I guess in your case, doctors shouldn't be giving terminal patients estimates of how much time they have left to live because a single average of all previous patients with that disease isn't accurate enough for them and may give them the wrong idea. Does this make any sense at all?

If you want more info on those numbers, please actually go into the link to investigate further. The numbers on the store page are simply rough references. Anyone with a background in high school statistics will know that averages are a starting point in describing a dataset.

I have to repeat one final time that it should not be the all-end metric one should be using for buying because it completely ignores the quality of the actual game. If people are using this single metric to buy their games and find fault with it, that's their problem. Most users are smart and pick games on a variety of different criteria with differing weights that are important to their needs.