Time

It's 2012, and that puts us about 25 years after the start of the golden age of the NES. Classics like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out all came out around 1986-87.

Metroid takes around an hour to complete if you know what you're doing. Even an average player can finish Punch-Out in around 40 minutes. Heck, if you finish the game, it's not even really possible to take more than about an hour and a half in a single play-through, and a good chunk of that will be spent watching fighter intros. The Legend of Zelda theoretically takes a little longer, but it's still only really a two-hour game.

Back in the olden days, games made up for such short play times by having cheap instant kills and punishing difficulty that wasn't so much fun as it was incredibly frustrating. These days that kind of thing won't fly, so the minimum time you'll get out of a full-length retail game is probably about six hours, with most coming in more like 8-10; and that doesn't include multiplayer. Despite the increase in length and vast improvement in graphics and design, a new game will still cost around $60, just like it did in 1987, so you're getting a lot more bang for your buck. Games for handheld devices may not look quite as nice, but they're the same length and generally less than $40, so they're still a pretty good deal.

When it comes to mobile apps, things are a bit different, though. People seem to want a lot more from the play time:dollar ratio. If an app costs a dollar, then even if it's not quite as pretty as a game for a handheld device (and in some cases, they can be just as good-looking), it should conceivably be able to get away with only about fifteen minutes of gameplay; maybe half an hour. But that's not nearly enough for most people. Most people want hours of enjoyment for a mere 99 cents (and a good chunk of them are only begrudgingly paying that small amount), which means developers either have to include far more content than they normally would, or they have to fall back on that old game design stalwart: repetition. Punch-Out takes 40 minutes instead of 30 because you fight a few of your opponents twice, and Metroid is the king of backtracking; and a lot of apps will have the user do the same thing over and over and over again just to pad out the running time. It's not actually more content, but it seems like it is, and that's what's important.

Basically, what I'm saying is that apps are an excellent use of your entertainment dollar, but people don't seem to realize that, and they always want more.