It Takes Two Creator: „Devs Should Strive for Players to Finish Games”

Josef Fares from Hazelight was interviewed by VentureBeat. During conversation brushed on the topic of replayability. According to the developer, developers should not pay so much attention to this issue and instead focus on making players finish the games they've bought.

IN A NUTSHELL:

Hazelight's Josef Fares believes that not many players choose to replay video games;
In his opinion, the developers should focus on getting more people to finish their games at least once.

Hazelight's Josef Fares - responsible for co-op games A Way Out and It Takes Two - believes developers should stop focusing so much on making their games replayable. In his opinion, it's much more important for the players to finish the titles they play at all. The statement appeared in an interview for VentureBeat.

"Replayability, really–we should be very careful talking about this, because the dangers of replayability — all the statistics show that people aren’t even finishing games. The dangerous part is that everybody, reviewers, everyone who talks about this talks about replayability. Who’s really replaying games? Maybe a small percentage of people do that. We should focus on people finishing games.

Talking about It Takes Two in general, yes, you can replay it if you want. You’ll have different mechanics depending on how you play. But that shouldn’t be the most important thing in a game. We always get this question. I don’t understand why. How many people replay games? It’s not as many as you think," Fares stated.

There's some truth in the developer's words, because even the best rated and praised titles are finished by only about half of the people who play them (and in the case of many titles this statistic is much lower). There's also no denying that not everyone feels like playing the same game over and over again - based on my own example, I can say that I sometimes do, but a second or third attempt is usually only made when I'm playing games that I really enjoy and those that are able to offer something fresh/different even after hours of gameplay.

It's also worth remembering that replayability has a completely different meaning and importance in different genres. It's one thing to play a story-driven action game a second time, it's another to finish an RPG that offers tens/hundreds of hours of gameplay, and it's quite another to spend countless evenings repeating the same missions/fights in a multiplayer or co-op online game.