To be honest, these days I'm finding myself preferring shorter games. I find that something in life will inevitably come up when I'm halfway through a long campaign, which means that I'll shelve the game, and by the time I come back to it I've forgotten what was happening and want to restart. I just finding myself not getting the most out of very long games, since I never get to the ending.

A good 10-15 hour game is ideal for me, as it something that I can conceivably finish in a month or so and get a good sense of satisfaction from finishing.

A decent length is nice but so long as it was great then it can be short and I don't care.

I prefer short and great to long and great. Longer games, when replaying, run the risk of dragging when the experience is no longer new. Short games don't have that as a risk, and in fact the length is more pleasing for speedrunning which has been very rewarding for me. Short and great games ultimately are more replay friendly all around.

very important cause i dont have much money.

but the most important thing is quality

I agree with Layton but you clearly haven't tried to get the super ultra best score (or whatever it was called) for World of Goo. That spinning level in world 1 is impossible to get a good enough score in.

Game length is very important to me. It's one of the factors I take into consideration when buying a game.
Of course I would love to play a good short game over a long boring one, if that time ever comes. But I have never finished a retail game that took me less than 10 periods of 1-3 hours.

@kkslider5552000 No, I stopped replaying old levels when I found out my extra rescued gooballs didn't count toward anything. The Goo Corp area has a limit to how many gooballs you can have, so you can only build so high. Getting rid of that limitation would have kept me replaying it.

i like it when game devs make an otherwise short game really hard so it's length increases.

I like when devs make the distance between goals farther so the game is essentially longer.
Or when the enemies are sponges and take 100 hits to go down.
These are not things I look for when I buy a game

depends on the game, but yes.

I very much appreciate game length, but Tales of the Abyss has shown me that there is such a thing as a game that is too long.

Half Life 2 is an example of a game that is so long, it's sometimes intimidating to play. i dont want to play it because it's so long.

Depends on the game of course. If I pick up a JRPG and it only lasts 10 hours, I will be sorely disappointed. Then again, games always seem to take me so much longer to beat than other people. around is fun.

This site is interesting and relevant so I will link it here! http://howlongtobeat.com/index.php

According to the above site, TotA is around 50hrs? I just beat Persona 3 a couple weeks ago, that game took me 110hrs (average is ~80 though)

Then don't touch a Monster Hunter game. Wait, too late. So that's why you quit MHFU! >:3

@zezhyrule Persona 3 is also a way, way better game than Tales of the Abyss. The pacing in that game is pretty much perfect, while in TotA it's okay. I personally felt that TotA was too long. If a game does a good job at sustaining it's length, like Persona games, then I like them long.

Funny, because I got bored to death so many times in P3. The only thing that kept me going is that I decided I wouldn't play any other games until I finished it The pacing is horrible imo, especially near the beginning and most of the months leading to the end. I still love the game to death, but there's no way I could say the pacing was perfect Dx
_{I also interpreted his comment as "50hrs is too long for any game" but I see what he meant now}

Quality is the only thing that matters.

pretty much what @Philip_J_Reed said. The quality is more important than the length, the only thing length does for me is determine how much and often I'll want to replay it. The longer the game the less often I'll want to replay it unless it has some sort of newgame+ like the tales series's grade shop. Where as I've put hundreds of hours into games that are long but much less story driven like Monster Hunter or Monster Rancher.

Heck I've had more fun playing Mrs. Pac-man or skeeball at arcades than the rest of the stuff there, and even more modern games.

It's only important that game length is suitable for the price they are trying to sell the game.

A game that only lasts 5 hours, but is being sold for full RRP (~£29.99 for 3ds) is an absolute no.
I run an average of, if I'm not likely to get ~1 hour of playtime for each £1, I'm not buying the game.

But yeah, obviously the game actually has to be good too!

It's important for me to get a game of suitable length for what I payed, but I'd much rather have a fantastic game that left me wanting more than a good long game that got me bored half way through.

A good example I suppose is that my favourite Zelda game is Minish Cap. It's short - but every part of it was fun and engaging. I have still yet to finish Ocarina of Time completely because it got me bored just over half way through, and as such I'll never regard it as highly as I do Minish Cap. You can make your game as long as you want but if it starts to get to the point where finishing it feels like a chore then you've done something wrong.

It does matter, but the actual game matters, too.

I usually clock in about 60+ hours beating the main campaign on Pokemon. When White came out, I did it in 30. 30 isn't bad, but it was half the time for everything that I usually did. I'm really only used to longer times because I played RPGs when I first got good at video games. Dragon Warrior, Dragon Quest, Pokemon, Summon Night, Harry Potter GBC, and the like.

Nowadays, I'm usually beating games in under 30 hours. Ocarina of Time 3D took about 60 counting the Master Quest.

And the game matters because if it isn't fun and engaging, I won't make it through. Children of Mana was a short game and...it disappointed me. The game was too short for what I feel the story could have actually done. 13 hours. However, Orcs and Elves was a new and unique experience I hadn't had on a console before and even though it only took me 6 hours to beat it, I'd play it again any day.

Basically...Good Game and Long? GOOD!
Good Game and Short? GOOD!
Mediocre Game and Long? Maybe... (I say this because most of the time when this happens to me, I find the better parts of the game later in)
Mediocre Game and Short? BAD!