A former Bethesda developer is tired of lengthy games.

One trait of modern gaming is the tendency for games to become investments. If people spend $70 on a new game, they’re looking for at least $70 worth of entertainment. If your game is only a dozen or so hours long, people will feel ripped off.

As a result, more and more games feature over 100+ hours of available content. While that seems like a great value, it might come at a cost.

Will Shen, a former Quest Director at Bethesda who worked on games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, thinks games are too long today. This isn’t him standing on a soapbox pining for the old days, though. He made a really good point while appearing on the Kiwi Talkz podcast.

It’s Becoming Accepted That Games Are Too Long Today

We’ve transcribed Shen’s comments the best we can:

Part of what happened was the successes of games like
Skyrim
and
Fallout 4
, these really big titles that you can play pretty much forever; there’s a lot of people that still play
Skyrim
after all these years. The idea of these evergreen games that you can just sink thousands of hours into, that hit the industry. Before, it was…MMOs were that. You know,
World of Warcraft
, there are
World of Warcraft
superfans that will never leave that game.

And then all of a sudden, games like
Skyrim
and other open-world games really hit their stride with enough content to get past the tipping point of you could kinda play this forever. And so that became the big trend that hit the games industry.

Shen continues by saying that the trendline states that every game needs at least 40+ hours of content, deep progression, and now survival crafting because of the popularity of Minecraft. He admits that the audience is fatigued at investing so many hours into a game, especially since they already have games they often come back to. Adding another game to that list is a “tall order.” This is why he thinks there’s a resurgence in the popularity of shorter indie games.

One example Shen gives is Mouthwashing, which is a three hour game. While the gameplay is short, nearly everyone who starts the game gets to finish it, leading to better community engagement. Everyone experiences everything the game offers, so everyone can share insights and relate to other people’s commentary.