"An interesting hypothesis, but the game used as an example in the article features emergent gameplay. In RDR, you progressively receive more weapons, mounts, a

"An interesting hypothesis, but the game used as an example in the article features emergent gameplay. In RDR, you progressively receive more weapons, mounts, and (to some degree) abilities as the game progresses. I think emergent gameplay pulls some players in, but I'm not sure it explains the statistics provided by the article." To your point, there's actually a very good argument to be made that emergent gameplay (or the possibility thereof) decreases the desire to finish the game. It increases replayability, and total time played, but it creates incentives to "mess around" within the game and not to play it in a linear fashion. My overall thesis is that games seem to have shifted away from linearity on aggregate, to the point where "story mode" is now a value-add. Single-player, linear, traditional gameplay is the side option that multiplayer or sandbox used to be in the early days of console gaming. Fewer people are finishing games in the traditional sense, because fewer games are being published that are designed to be finished. [That design choice may not be intentional, as evidenced by the exhorbitant production values and costs being sunk by developers and publishers into "story mode" voice acting, cinematics, art direction, and so forth.]