monkeydelarge: Is it possible for you to provide "updates" or "free DLC" for your two games that are less than 2 hours to make them both longer than 2 hours? That is what I'd do in order to protect myself. Just throw in some extra content so the games don't become free to play for people without any morals. Make it so if someone rushed through both games, each game would take him or her, 2 hours and 1 minute to finish, basically. For example, add cut scenes that can not be skipped to extend each game to over 2 hours. Unfortunately this means, you are going to have to work for free just to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of douchebags. But I can think of no easier solution. On the bright side, the extra content might make your games look more appealing and you will have more sales. :) So maybe in the end, you won't have to work for free in order to protect yourself.
tammerwhisk: Arbitrarily inflating game time (especially if it degrades the experience) is going to harm more than it helps. The runs the risk of alienating actual customers.
Using the same halfassed logic as DRM does is not the way forward. You don't focus on the shitbags, you focus on the legitimate customers.
From a dev point of view, if you start artificially lenghtening the gameplay length of your game, you'll get in the same pitfalls of game design than the F2P on mobile (and it's growing on PC). This is where you start putting unlockables and leveling system....
To take an example on how modern game mechanics detracts from the core experience, I'll take the shmup genre and in particularly the case of Humans Must Answer and Soldner-X 2:
For a long time, the core experiences of shmups was : first you try to go straight to the game ending then you put yourself the challenges you want to accomplish like finishing the game with only one credit, finishing in hardcore mode, getting the best scores, etc...
In the two cases aforementioned, the challenges are put before the core goal of finishing the game. In both games you have to collect some secret items through the stages to unlock the later levels. So as an old-school gamer, I focus on blasting everything as usual and the the game tells me I can't go further because of some game mechanic which has nothing to do with shmups :( That's sad as apart from that I like these two games.....
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On another story, my deliberate abusive refund request was accepted this morning and I can tell you it's a bit infuriating... More on this later but it really seems like the refund department is run by monkeys with no common sense :(
