How long before you decide a game is trash?

About 10 minutes for the game to get to the point, if it does
another 10 minutes to introduce me to fun gameplay, if it does
an hour to see if it can keep my interest without getting boring.

Most games fail at the first hurdle. That includes me skipping all cutscenes and intros.
 
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Evidence that I've played too many videogames is that I can almost immediately tell from a glance at gameplay if it's going to be shit or at the very least not for me. Occasionally I get surprised but only rarely.
"it gets better in the late game" stuff.
Dude the first thirty hours are a slog but once you max your skill tree the game gets fun (when there's nothing left to use it on).
Is there a nigger on the cover? Or a non sexy woman?
Also unironically this. If I'm supposed to be playing as a nigger or a woman it's an immediate red flag.
 
Once I physically feel like I’m about to fall asleep I know I don’t like it. If I genuinely am enjoying a game I’ll pay attention to it.
 
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Ten minutes of gameplay. There's a lot of shit I would have tolerated when I was younger because there just weren't a lot of games. No more.
 
I would say I almost always know within 30 minutes. For some games, up to two hours. It is very rare that a game that is bad for two hours suddenly gets good at any subsequent point--although it's much more common for a good game to get bad. Ultimately, if I load up a game, play for a few minutes, and immediately feel the urge to ALT+F4 (Starfield), that's how I really know that a game is trash.
 
There hasn't been a new concept in a videogame since I was 14, so I can tell if a game is shit by who develops or publishes it, no need to check early life section.
 
Usually depends. I know when with in a 2 hour period.

Once in a blue moon a game will sneak up on me and usually and then tells me its complete trash.

Looking at you Doom Eternal.
 
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Gaming oldfag here, if I haven't said so before. Been around since the DOS era and saw the first videogame crash and the rise of Nintendo and Sega and everything after. I have a few criteria when it comes to games, although I'm not as picky as most.

1: Is the game fun. This varies from person to person and really by mood. There are very few games you can just pick up and be like "yeah, I can spend time with this". But if a game is a boring slog, certain RPG's notwithstanding, it's generally not worth the time or money.

2: This is really more of a recent phenomenon, but is the game "preachy". I've played many preachy games, but the stupid shit pushed out now in favor of certain brainless political standpoints turns me off instantly. If there is minority/feminist "representation" in the game, I won't even buy it because the plot will be tortured bullshit trying to convince me of the HR department's, and maybe the team's politics, while the actual gameplay will be an afterthought, and boring or totally broken. If I wanted all that, I would subject myself to proggie reddit, not buy a game to have fun with escapism.

3: What's the dev's track record. This is more a thing now than it was when 3 nerdy guys in a garage could cook up a game that was fun that took up 420K, but that age is long past. AAA titles are huge endeavors, take way too much money, have shitty code, and are designed by committee. Western studios are a grab bag of wokeshit, or indies that can turn out surprising stuff, or just retreads. Do you want to play another iteration of SotN? Here ya go! Tower defense? Our studio debuted our 3,201st last weekend! Do you like buying another controller every week? We just made our bullet hell game so precise that you have to move exactly on time within milliseconds, test your skill against others in our ranked leaderboard hackers will cheese! You hate games? Have we got a walking simulator made on a potato, for potatoes for you!

Now obviously, I'm biased in favor of the types of games I like. Gaming has always been very subjective, even before videogaming, so I get why talking about them can become a total clusterfuck. Ultimately, it all comes down to the first criterion, is it fun. If it's not, refund it or don't even waste your money, but give most games a fair amount of time in your estimation before you write em off as garbage and bash them. One man's trash is another's treasure, after all. Except ET for the Atari. Fuck that damn game.
 
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It depends, but generally, I'm not a fan of the mindset of having to spend hours on something for it to become good. I might be willing to push through a slow start depending on what it is, but like others have said, if there isn't something that's hooked me in the first hour or two, I'm probably going to start losing interest.
 
I play games for the gameplay.


I tend to look at the final boss fight.

Supposedly it's the peak of the game.


Just looking at a few minutes of it should be enough to know if it's good
 
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If the game's marketing centers niggerfaggots, I know it's going to be trash, because they clearly spent more time thinking about how to put more niggerfaggots into the game than how to make the game good. Otherwise, I usually give it a few days to digest it. Sometimes I give a game way longer than I should. I think I put well over 60 hours into Destiny before accepting that it was boring and had no redeeming value. I kept waiting for my first hour's impression to change, because everyone assured me it got really good after [boring expansion that was the exact same as every other expansion].
 
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