Simple question... How long does it normally take for you to get good at a game when you first play it? This question kinda came to mind and thought it would be interesting to ask it and see how fast other people learn in games.

As for myself... Usually less than day. I mean, I recently got into TF2 the other day and I am already dominating in it normally (I usually get within the top 3 on my team. Top 5 if count both teams).

It really depends on the game.
A new Super Mario game only takes an hour until all your skills are back into the flow of the game.
But some games, like Dark Souls, require at least one full playthrough until you could be considered good at the game. Meaning that you're confident and not dying all the time.
And some games can take months before you're truly a good player. Like fighting games or puzzle games.

Depends on the game. Some games may take months (skill based games e.g Mount&Blade) while some takes hours.

It took me years to get to the level of skill that I'm at with games like Total War and Age of Empires. But other games such as first person shooters and roleplaying games take me about 3 or 4 days to really master. I honestly don't find any games to be too challenging or take me to long to get the hang of, even Dark Souls took me a week to master and that was supposed to be a really tough game.

I really chalk this down to all my years of gaming, the games don't really get harder they more or less get easier with every release so for someone that grew up playing hard or challenging games the newer ones are a cake walk. But for the rare release of a challenging game its like playing the classics again so its familiar territory and not very hard to get the hang of.

It really depends on the type of game, strategy games, like X-Com tend to take at least a full days play, then I'll restart.

Action and FPS games usually take a couple of hours, just enough for me to get used to the controls and not press the wrong buttons while playing.

Games like Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2 takes me a few days to get the hang of them.

I never had a problem with Dark Souls, mind you I did play Demons Souls before, so I quickly got used to it.

Depends on the game, it's not like an instrument where you need about 10000 hours in order to be an expert.

I would say it took some time for me to get good at TF2 back when I started, mainly because I was new to the FPS genre, then I took a break for a while, restarted again and got pretty decent pretty quickly (in the meantime I had been playing other shooters). So yeah I think it depends, I think once you're somewhat used to the genre it becomes easier too (Age of Mythology wasn't all that hard once I started because I was used to rise of nations).

As PilaPis said Mount and Blade can be quite difficult with a lot of features, playing M&B made Age of Chivaly easier though.

But skills need to be maintained, l recently picked space marine back up and I got whooped way bad for the first little bit.

I svcked at Morrowind back in the day, I think the main reason was that I was like 11 and barely knew any english words. Didn't prevent me from trying though. DIdn't do any quests back then though.

It depends on the game type and if there's a lot to learn or not...something like a standard shooter or fighting game is easy to master in no time, within a day of the Destiny beta I was pulling off handcannon headshots like a pro.

Depends on the game.. for RPGs, I'm automatically good.