I read a statement today from the Beth blog that i thought was very odd. They talked about 1.5 and the new features and told us to stay tuned for more news but that was not the thing that surprised me most. In fact i was fine with that, 1.5 seems to work well for me and they will probably announce a DLC next seems most logical. However something did disturb me greatly, on the surface this seems like a off comment but to me the meaning is much deeper they said and this is not a exact quote, we are astonished by the fact that the average play time for all platforms is 80 hours and 30% of you are playing beyond 100 hours. Really astonished, that info should come as no surprise at all to Beth the game is HUGE!!! it would take at LEAST 80 hours to scratch the surface of it, 100+ would be more in line with game. My favorite game of all time FO3 ( have been a gamer for more than 22 years) i have probably put close to 500 hours in to get 100% and most likely will with Skyrim. Beth should have know this well beforehand in the development stage based on there and other open world games and past information on media ( blog,forums,TV etc) So why are they surprised, makes me think that they did not plan and anticipate how big there game was going to be, this could be the very reason why Skyrim had so many problems at launch ( granted its much better now with 1.5) what do you guys/gals think?

It is a good number as an average for a game that doesn't include multiplayer. I have 1,021 hours in Skyrim myself, but there must be thousands at the other end of the scale who have played a few hours, just done the main quest and put the game away and played something else.

To Bethesda that could mean they wasted a lot of time and money creating all the dungeons, characters, side quests and guilds that those people never saw. There is a chance that there is content in TES:V that less that only 1% of players have found. Bethesda have to ask themselves when they are budgeting for their games whether it is worth making such content.

This is why I think Bethesda didn't go heavy on the choice and consequence side of RP'ing in Skyrim, and having multiple endings to all the quests. It would just mean they are creating content that will never be seen by the people (and there's lots of them) that just play the game once.

It's just modesty and a bit of publicity hyperbole. They know they have a fan base of players who will play for a thousand hours.