The Problem With the Ever-Longer Video Game
Somewhere along the way, the number of hours a game takes to finish became a selling point in its own right, and that has quietly made many games worse.
The logic is easy to understand. Games are expensive, and players want to feel they got their money’s worth. A box that promises dozens of hours of play sounds like a bargain next to one that promises an evening. Publishers noticed, marketing followed, and over the past couple of decades the expectation of length has crept steadily upward, especially in big-budget open-world and role-playing games.
The trouble is that hours are a measure of time, not of value. A game can be long because it has a great deal to say, or long because it has been stretched to fit an expectation. From the outside, the two look the same on the back of the box.
How length gets padded
Anyone who has played enough large games will recognise the tools:
- The icon-strewn map. Outposts, collectibles and repeatable side activities scattered across a world, each worth a few minutes and none worth remembering.
- Travel as filler. Long trips between objectives that look like exploration but mostly involve holding a stick forward.
- Gated progress. Story missions locked behind a level or resource requirement that nudges the player into grinding.
- Recycled encounters. The same handful of enemy types and scenarios, reskinned and repeated until the end.
None of these is a crime in moderation. Some players genuinely enjoy the meditative rhythm of clearing a map. But when they become the bulk of a game, the strongest moments get diluted, and many players simply drift away before the ending. It is a common observation in the industry that a large share of players never see the credits of the games they start, and bloat is an obvious suspect.
The case for the shorter game
Some of the most admired games of recent memory are notably compact. Portal could be finished in an evening or two and is still discussed as a near-perfect design. Journey, Inside and What Remains of Edith Finch each tell their stories in a few hours and leave a stronger impression than many games ten times their length. Their brevity is not a compromise; it is part of the craft. Every room is there for a reason.
There are also long games that justify their size, where the side stories are as carefully written as the main plot and the world rewards curiosity. The point is not that long is bad. It is that length should be a consequence of the content, not a target the content is stretched to meet.
Players have more games available to them than ever and less time to play them. A game that respects that time, that ends when its ideas are spent, is offering something increasingly rare. It would be good to see that treated as a selling point too.
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