It's not a matter of being a fan of a particular genre, or even a matter of a particular genre. And it's certainly not a matter of craftmanship or art. The issue here is the issue posed earlier in the thread: somehow people think the length of a single playthrough determines the quality of a game, which is a completely retarded way to look at things.
Again, this state of affairs has led to developers padding games out with things like repetitive missions, levels that feel tacked-on, and extra-long grinds to be able to defeat the end boss, all to hit some magical hour marker that should be the least of a player's concern, but has somehow gotten itself lodged into the collective consciousness of the mainstream gamer. Except in very rare and special cases (
Portal), anything less than a certain length is decried as "too short" and doomed to failure.
Speaking of,
Portal has been brought up several times, but only one person has stated the key point that makes bringing it up a poor argument:
it was not initially a standalone game. When
Portal came out, it was part of a full-price package with four other full games. Had Valve released
Portal by itself for fifty dollars, it most likely would have been a flop both critically and commercially, not because it's a bad game, but because people refuse to pay that much money for short games. This is the case with
DeathSmiles.
DeathSmiles, unfortunately, has one disadvantage of not being advertised particularly well; I've heard many cases of people buying it not knowing what kind of game it was. However, in this case, the issue is that people spent $50 on a game while having no idea what it was, so they're not exactly justified in complaining that they bought a short game when they could've done ten seconds of research and discovered it's a shmup.
And, as also pointed out in the article, you're paying fifty dollars for not only a game, but also an excellent arrange soundtrack and a special faceplate (different from the one released with the limited edition of the game in Japan, so there's actually a bit of a sale market for them). As noted, the IGN review that was linked in the article never mentioned this fact, and made several claims completely disregarding this fact. Good work, games media! You've successfully managed to connect length and price in a way that bypasses common sense!
Also:
People payed top dollar for Sonic back in the day because that was pretty much the equivalent of what CoD is today - a full, fleshed-out experience with constantly shifting, varied challenges that took full advantage of the platform is was designed for.
Horrible comparison, because it completely skirts around what I said. Let's see it again:
[H]ow is a short game with immense replayability nowadays any less valid for that price than one was back then?
Now, how do you get "a full, fleshed-out experience with constantly shifting, varied challenges that took full advantage of the platform is was designed for" out of this? And how does that matter at all? It's still spending $50 on a short game, yet you're claiming it's because the game pushed the limits of its system (despite not doing so at all).
Would I pay 50 bucks for it today? Hell no, because times have changed.
Also irrelevant. It's not a matter of paying $50 today for a game from 1991. It's a matter of paying $50 for a brand-new game that happens to have a similar length to older games.