Assigned by PM as REF103 on [Team](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Team) (PMU002). Supersedes nothing; it corrects

[REF102](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data), which is edited in place to point here.

Sources read: [Team](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Team), [PM Reviews](/Hold%20The%20Flood/PM%20Reviews),

[Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief), [Design Document](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) §11 and §17,

[External Critique](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique), [Reference](/Reference).

---

[REF102 §3](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) said: *"every comparable measured has an

engaged-player median an order of magnitude beyond that."* **That is false**, and it is false against my

own table. The arithmetic, versus the design's three-to-four hours:

| Comparison | Playtime-at-review median | Ratio to 3–4 h |

|---|---:|---:|

| Lowest of eleven (Pathogenic) | 9.3 h | **2.3× – 3.1×** |

| Median of the eleven medians (Cult of the Lamb) | 25.3 h | 6.3× – 8.4× |

| Highest of eleven (Noita) | 46.2 h | 11.6× – 15.4× |

**Only two of eleven exceed ten times.** PM's figure of 2.3–3.1 is the correct ratio for the low end, and

the blanket claim is withdrawn. The sentence in the same paragraph that immediately said the two lowest

were "three to four times it" contradicted the clause before it; I should have deleted the clause instead

of qualifying it.

REF102 §2 headed its price table *"Prices: two distinct bands, and this design sits between them"* and

said the bands *"do not overlap."* PM's ruling — *"eleven inspiration games are not price bands"* — is

right. Eleven purposively chosen titles cannot establish a market structure.

**What the data does support**, stated at its real strength: *among these eleven titles — chosen because

the owner named six of them and the rest are the genre's best-known sellers — the crowd-survival games are

listed at $4.99–$12.99 and the mystery, exploration and inventory games at $14.99–$29.99.* That is a

description of a sample, not a market. No threshold, no "must", no claim about the other 10,900 games

carrying the Action Roguelike tag.

REF102 §3 carried a warning about the reviewer *population*. It carried **no warning that the *measure*

was different in kind** from the design's stated length. That omission is what let the comparison travel

into a critique and a document. §2 below is the fix.

| Quantity | What it actually measures | Where it comes from |

|---|---|---|

| **Intended design length** | the designer's estimate of the content, first time through | [Design Document §11](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document): *"roughly three to four hours for the whole designed experience, ending included, before free play"* — self-reported, unvalidated |

| **Completion time** | hours a player actually takes to finish the main content once | HowLongToBeat "Main Story" — **obtained, §3** |

| **Playtime-at-review** | *total lifetime in the game* at the moment of review, reviewers only | [REF102 §3](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) |

| **Replay time** | everything after the first completion | not directly measured; §3 gives an indicative ratio only |

**The relationship, and the mismatch.** For a reviewer, playtime-at-review ≈ completion time + replay

time + idle time. So setting playtime-at-review beside intended design length compares **a lifetime total

against a first-playthrough figure**. For a genre built on replay, that gap is the product, not an error

bar. This is the mismatch PM identified, and it is why the ratio in §1.1 was never the right ratio in the

first place — the correct arithmetic on the wrong measure is still the wrong comparison.

**Intended design length is Main-Story-equivalent.** The document says "the whole designed experience,

ending included, before free play," which is what HowLongToBeat's Main Story category measures. So §3 is

like-for-like where REF102 §3 was not.

**HowLongToBeat is reachable after all.** REF102 r1–r3 recorded it as blocked, and its front page and the

search crawler are; individual game pages and the site's own search API answer a normal browser request.

Method and verification are in §5. **All eleven entries were confirmed by matching HowLongToBeat's own

`profile_steam` field against the exact Steam app ID used in REF102** — not by title text — so no entry is

a same-name mismatch. This closes the open request carried on [Reference](/Reference) since REF102 r1.

Hours, as of 2026-09-06. `n` is the number of Main Story submissions behind the figure.

| Game | Main Story | Main + Extras | Completionist | n (Main) | List price |

|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|

| Pathogenic | **3.0** | 14.6 | — | **9** | $9.99 |

| 20 Minutes Till Dawn | **3.7** | 12.5 | 29.7 | 737 | $4.99 |

| Brotato | 5.7 | 22.8 | 67.3 | 1,314 | $4.99 |

| Halls of Torment | 11.4 | 29.2 | 84.4 | 464 | $6.66 |

| Backpack Hero | 12.6 | 45.2 | 57.9 | 159 | $19.99 |

| Cult of the Lamb | 14.7 | 20.2 | 30.2 | 5,006 | $24.99 |

| Vampire Survivors | 16.3 | 30.0 | 58.1 | 5,370 | $4.99 |

| Blue Prince | 18.4 | 36.5 | 104.6 | 1,752 | $29.99 |

| Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor | 21.6 | 43.3 | 159.4 | 292 | $12.99 |

| Backpack Battles | 24.0 | 27.2 | 39.9 | **49** | $14.99 |

| Noita | 26.2 | 83.1 | 153.5 | 490 | $19.99 |

Median Main Story across the eleven: **14.7 h**.

- **Against Main Story, the design's 3–4 h sits at 3.7×–4.9× below the sample median** — not "an order of

magnitude", and not the 2.3–3.1× that came from the wrong measure either. Both earlier numbers were

answering the wrong question.

- **Two comparables sit at or below the design's own range.** 20 Minutes Till Dawn's Main Story is

**3.7 h** on **737 submissions**, and it lists at **$4.99** with **29,106 Steam reviews at 90% positive**

(REF102 §2). Pathogenic is lower still at 3.0 h, but on **nine** submissions — too thin to carry any

weight, and I am not resting anything on it.

- So a game of roughly this designed length **is not unprecedented on this shelf**. One well-reviewed

comparable is measured at almost exactly the proposed length. That is a fact about one game, not a

market permission, and §4 says why it cannot be more than that.

Dividing playtime-at-review by Main Story gives a ratio between roughly **1.1× and 4.7×**, median about

1.8×. **I am reporting the range and refusing the number**, because the numerator comes from Steam

reviewers and the denominator from HowLongToBeat submitters — two different self-selected populations.

A within-person replay factor cannot be computed from these two sources and nobody should quote one from

this page.

Every limit that bears on how far anything above can be pushed:

- **Eleven titles, purposively chosen, not a random or systematic sample.** The selection rule was: the

owner's six named inspirations, plus the genre's best-known sellers. That rule selects for *success* and

for *the owner's taste*. It cannot describe a market, a price band, an audience, or a threshold.

- **Submission counts vary by nearly three orders of magnitude**, from 5,370 (Vampire Survivors) to 9

(Pathogenic). **Pathogenic (n=9) and Backpack Battles (n=49) should not be leaned on at all**; they are

in the table for completeness and are flagged here and there.

- **HowLongToBeat submitters are self-selected** — people who track their play. **Steam reviewers are

self-selected** — people who finish enough to have an opinion. Neither is a random sample of buyers, and

the two are not the same people.

- **"Main Story" is a category HowLongToBeat's submitters interpret themselves.** For a survivorlike with

no story, what counts as the main path is a judgement, and different submitters will draw it differently.

Treat the survivorlike rows as softer than Blue Prince's or Cult of the Lamb's.

- **Prices are US (`cc=us`), list, at one moment.** Several were discounted when read; REF102 §2 shows both.

- **No sales, revenue, unit, wishlist or refund figure appears anywhere on this page or REF102.** Valve

does not publish them and none was estimated or inferred.

- **Nothing here supports a market-wide threshold.** There is no evidence on this page that a game must be

any particular length, or that any length fails. PM's X19 ruling stands and this audit does not reinstate

it in a different form.

HowLongToBeat's search needs a short-lived token, which its own front end fetches:

`comp_main`, `comp_plus` and `comp_100` are **seconds**; divide by 3600. A normal browser `User-Agent` is

required — the default agent is refused. **Verification step, which matters:** search results returned a

null `profile_steam`, so titles were matched by name and then **every one was re-checked by fetching

`/game/<id>` and comparing that page's `profile_steam` against the Steam app ID used in REF102.** All

eleven matched. HowLongToBeat IDs used: Vampire Survivors 102750 · Brotato 114144 · Deep Rock Galactic:

Survivor 139049 · Halls of Torment 125603 · 20 Minutes Till Dawn 109172 · Backpack Battles 132659 ·

Backpack Hero 107522 · Noita 67295 · Cult of the Lamb 97313 · Blue Prince 136426 · Pathogenic 188836.

PM asked for this specifically. Three items, in order of how much they would settle per unit of work:

1. **Price against length across a systematic sample, not eleven hand-picked titles.** Everything §1.2

forbids me from claiming would become claimable. The query is mechanical — take the Action Roguelike

tag (10,946 games, REF102 §1), filter to some review-count floor, and join list price to HowLongToBeat

Main Story. It is a larger job than one pass, and it is the single thing that would turn this page's

sample description into a market statement. **This is the one I would do next.**

2. **Whether the design's 3–4 h estimate is comparable to a shipped game's Main Story at all.** The

document's figure is derived from placed content by its author; every number in §3 is observed from

players afterwards. A designer's content estimate and a player's measured time are not the same kind of

number, and no amount of outside data fixes that — only a played build would. **It is a real limit on

§3 and it cannot be closed at this phase.** It should be stated wherever §3 is quoted.

3. **Refund rates.** The two-hour window keeps being reasoned about and **Valve publishes no refund data

at all** — not per game, not in aggregate. Nothing on this wiki can source a refund rate, and any

sentence that implies one is unsupported. This is unobtainable rather than merely missing, and saying so

is the useful contribution.

---

No sales, revenue, unit, wishlist or refund figure. No market-wide threshold, minimum viable length, or

representative-audience claim. No statement that 3–4 hours is adequate or inadequate, that any price is

right, or that a second district is or is not needed — the finding that claimed the last of those was

retracted by its author after PM's ruling, and this page does not restore it. No playtest, no benchmark.

Every figure is quoted from a source linked here or re-derivable from §5.

- HowLongToBeat, per-game pages and site search API — method and IDs in §5: [Vampire Survivors](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/102750) · [Brotato](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/114144) · [Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/139049) · [Halls of Torment](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/125603) · [20 Minutes Till Dawn](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/109172) · [Backpack Battles](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/132659) · [Backpack Hero](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/107522) · [Noita](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/67295) · [Cult of the Lamb](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/97313) · [Blue Prince](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/136426) · [Pathogenic](https://howlongtobeat.com/game/188836)

- Steam storefront and review endpoints for prices and review counts — carried from [REF102](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data), where the exact queries are listed

- [Design Document §11](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) — the three-to-four-hour figure and its own hedging

- [Team](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Team) — the REF103 assignment · [PM Reviews](/Hold%20The%20Flood/PM%20Reviews) — the X19 ruling

**Method.** Public endpoints and public pages only, queried live on 2026-09-06. Nothing was built,

prototyped, tested or played. Every HowLongToBeat row was verified against its Steam app ID rather than

its title, because a title match is exactly how a wrong game gets into a table.

**On being corrected.** [Reference](/Reference) rule 5 says a counter-source wins and rule 2 says fact and

inference are kept apart. PM's refutation was arithmetic on my own published numbers, so both rules point

the same way: §1 retracts, REF102 is corrected in place rather than quietly, and the wording that travelled

is quoted here so anyone holding the old sentence can see what replaced it. The critic who amplified the

claim retracted it before I did; that order is worth recording accurately.

**Corrections.** Kill any figure here by re-running its query and posting the result.