Length /= Price?

I've been playing games frequently since I was five years old. That fateful Christmas where I got my own first gaming console, the SNES, triggered a lifelong love for this amazing form of entertainment. I can remember spending hours with games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, replaying them again and again. They weren't the longest games out there at the time but they were immensely fun to play over and over.

One thing I've noticed about gamers today is that there are so many more complaints about game length. If a game isn't long enough, some people feel it isn't "worth it." Developers have started tacking on multiplayer modes to just about every game, hoping to get people to hang onto their copies longer without selling them to a Gamestop. Where did this thinking about the value of a game come from? Some games from the SNES and N64 eras were just as short, if not shorter than the games coming out on current systems. There have always been RPG's with their dozens of hours, but for most games in other genres, complaints seem to be high about the "dollars to hours" ratio.

Limbo is a great example of this. Many people didn't think the 2 hour game was worth $15 and should have been $10 instead. On the other hand, quite a few gamers had a very powerful experience and felt it was worth the price. How do you price an experience that could vary greatly from one person to the next? In some people's opinions, a great story or powerful experience can even be worthwhile in a game with terrible gameplay, an example being Deadly Premonition. Deadly Premonition matches a fascinating world and story with some very shoddy gameplay but managed to entice a lot of people. Of course, the game was also $20 at launch, making it a much easier pill to swallow. It is a safe assumption that Deadly Premonition wouldn’t have been nearly as popular if it been priced higher.

Is this trend of valuing games’ worth due to games not impressing gamers enough nowadays? I can remember games like the ones mentioned above for SNES and how many times I must have played them over and over. I didn't care that they were that short because they were a great time each time through. Could one view this as a lack of truly memorable games from our generation? Or are we as gamers evolving into something new, expecting more innovations in story and gameplay for the money we pay for these games?