But Mark, you swarthy, handsome fellow; I finish all of my games! I even finish the bad ones!  Well no, but I do only have 2 games in my back catalogue, Fable 2 and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.  I loved Deus Ex's ending.  It's one of my all time favorites now. Borderlands did have a terrible ending, but the game didn't have much of a story to start with anyway.

 I don't think having few players finish a game is justification for studios to not bother with endings.  I think it has more to do with the rise of multiplayer gameplay.  My old roommate played Red Dead Redemption more than I did, and he never touched the single player campaign.  The rise of shooters -- where story takes a backseat to everything else, may also have some influence.  Even with those titles, there is usually some kind of over the top final level where you fight a Gundam armed with nukes or something.

I think blaming the gamers for bad endings is sort of a chicken-or-the-egg problem because I'd wager that if more developers crafted stories that were worth a damn, we'd stay till the end. One of my theatre professors in college once said that the greatest message you can send to the performers on stage that a play is bad is by leaving. She urged us to walk out of bad shows if we were ever at one. I think the same holds true for games, except developers/publishers don't seem to care about the players after they secure our $60. Your backlog point is interesting, too. For some reason, I think of a backlog as a list of games I haven't started playing yet that I want to (that I don't own.) If I ever owned/rented a game and didn't finish it, there's probably a damn good reason I didn't and I won't go back to it. If a game is good, I'll finish it. Sometimes if a game is bad, I'll finish it. I might be in the minority on this, but I hated Red Dead. I still finished it just to see what all the fuss was about, and it wasn't worth my tens of hours I'd spent in the game. I think games need to be shorter and less expensive and maybe that would be a start to more people finishing them. I know it's easier said than done, however.

I have to say Mark that I do agree with you.  Video games, like many other things are a business.  When 90% of your target audience does not finish a game, why would you want to invest in a mind blowing ending?  I have to also agree with Danny, this rise in multiplayer games (fps genre for example has seen a huge rise in multiplayer) has given developers less reason to focus on a single player ending.  However this I feel is genre specific.  Rpg's such as dragon age, I felt had a pretty strong ending.  I would expect a decent ending from a rpg, as story should be a main element.

And dont worry Corey, you aren't alone.  I hated red dead myself, and didn't bother to finish it.  I also agree that if the stories were well developed I would be more inclined to actually finish a game.

On a side note, this is my first form of activity on this site, and I must say it's wonderful.

Glad you guys liked the article enough to comment! Michael, glad I could help pop your Bitmob cherry. :D

I'll agree with all of you, honestly. I don't think its as black and white as "because gamers don't beat the games, we won't waste money on endings", but I do think that has to be a fairly decent reason for it. Like Michael said, videogames are serious business (and incredibly profitable). So knowing that their fans will never see a part of their game might, and that is just a might, affect the amount of time and money they put into that part of the game in order to minimize costs and maximize profits.

I do also agree that, as multiplayer has become not only more prevalent, but more popular, that single-player games as a whole have taken a fall in quality. But with that argument, what is the explanation for a game like Deus Ex that has no multiplayer they had to focus on?

@Corey I've always defined backlog by games I've bought but never finished because something I was more excited about came out. Case in point, Gears of War 3 comes out Tuesday and right now I'm playing through Dead Island. If I don't beat it by the time Tuesday comes out, then chances are DI will be put on the shelf until there aren't anymore games I'm more excited about coming out.

Great read.

I honestly hate when people say that we should have shorter games that lose "filler". Some gamers I know would rather a 3 hour game filled with awesomeness than a 8 hour game that has some "filler". Personally, the more reasons we give developers to make shorter games and still charge us full price, the more we are going to get shorter games that we pay full price for.

I want the filler. I want all the crap that makes my games 20 hours long. Knowing it is there makes me believe that I am going to get more value with product A, as opposed to Product B which can be beaten in 3 hours (Uhum...Every Call of Duty since World at War). And giving me a tacked on multiplayer mode is not going to convince me to buy it. As a matter of fact, I usually buy used most games that I think had funds from the single player taken away in order to fund the multiplayer. Bioshock 2 is a perfect example of a game I purposefully bought used because they removed funds from the single player game in order to create a tacked on multiplayer experience.

I do think that shorter games would probably mean more people beating them, but I just don't think the reward is worth the loss of content. I beat 99.9% of the games I start, and for someone who does not have a lot of time or money, I beat a heck of a lot of games. It is all about time management and patience. Some gamers I know will start a game like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and stop playing it as soon as another game like Dead Island comes out.

Then they will stop playing Dead Island when Gears 3 comes out. The vicious cycle goes on. Making games shorter might solve the problem, and create a new one. We would just be getting less content for the same price, since publishers are not going to price their games based on length. I completely agree that endings in todays video games are garbage though.

I just finished Resistance 3. I absolutely loved the game. It was the Half Life 3 we never got. The ending though?? Terrible. I actually made a "Who farted" face during the entire credits sequence, half expecting the game to say "LULZ Just Kidding, Here's The Real Ending!".

I don't think that developers necessarily have to make shorter games. Some of the old classics, such as Final Fantasy 6, turned into great epics because of the long journeys and all the quirky side quests.

Many new games just can't pull out the full range of emotions because they don't develop the characters as much as they should. Borderlands lost my interest, because it only based on some boring journey to collect more guns and to find a fabled treasure. Fallout 3 at least provided me with plenty of quests to save actual people and negotiate with them, rather than fetching boring stuff all day.

Games really just need to convince me to care about these characters, rather than seeing them as a dull NPC who stands around most of the time. It isn't hard, but many sandbox and first-person shooter developers make it more difficult than it really should be.

Game endings are terrible becuase game stories are terrible. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had a very weak story to begin with, and all 4 of its endings fell in line with the endings of the other 2 Deus Ex games. As for Borderlands, it didn't really have that much of a story. All I remember was being on a bus, getting attacked by a giant vagina, and a robot trying to give me the clap.

However, I don't think the reason that people don't finsih games is due to game length, and with a few exeptions (Like RDR, where you could get all the way to the end of the game, and not actually finish it because you might think that the game is over and have no idea what you're supposed to do), I think the problem is multiplayer. I know some people who have never touched the single player campaign in Call of Duty, and only buy it for the multiplayer.