Video games need be shorter or the industry is doomed – Reader’s Feature

As research shows people are playing less new video games than ever, a reader argues they need to become shorter to compete with live service titles.

There’s lots of things to worry about in the games industry but as an ordinary gamer it’s all stuff that I feel I have no influence over. I’d like to look at things from a different angle though, rather than telling off evil corporations for being evil.

It seems to me there’s two big problems at the moment, that are kind of going under the radar. One is that nobody is playing new games. Nobody’s buying them, or even playing them for free on Game Pass, and the majority are still playing the same games they were playing five or more years ago – stuff like Fortnite and FIFA/EA Sports FC.

The other problem is that nobody has time to play other games anyway. One reason Fortnite and other multiplayer games are still popular is that you can play for 20 minutes and accomplish something. Because that’s all most people have time for. But I don’t see that any publisher is addressing either issue.

When I was younger, I used to enjoy a good role-playing game, like Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3. They were amazing games with great stories and so much to do that was up to you and not something you were being told to do. But they are absolutely not something you can play for 20 minutes.

If I stop playing something like that for a week or so I need 20 minutes just to remember what I was doing, and I don’t believe that’s uncommon. It’s great that modern games are so big and have so much to do and yet at the same time I think they’re actually slowly destroying the games industry.

It doesn’t help that any game like that nowadays is going to be much more expensive now than it was five years ago. So everyone is going through these decisions where they’re thinking: ‘Do I spend this huge amount of money on a game I’m not sure I’ll like, and that I can guarantee I haven’t really got time for, or do I just put Call Of Duty: Warzone for half an hour and call it a night?’

The worst thing is these are not particularly new problems but like everything else wrong in gaming, like games being more expensive to make, nobody is doing anything about it. All publishers are doing is saying, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ and trying to make their own live service games… which usually never work.

We’ve got to get people interested in buying new games, in seeing it as a better option than just playing the same old free one they always do. If we don’t gaming is just going to die. One obvious solution is to make games cheaper, which… publishers are obviously not going to do.

The other solution is to make them shorter, which then makes it more reasonable to charge less for them. And I also think publishers won’t do that either, but they should.

Anything above eight hours immediately becomes a problem, but eight to 12 hours was the norm back in the Xbox 360 era. Games were cheaper back then but they were also more imaginative and varied, so there lots of benefits in purposefully scaling back.

I know it won’t happen but then my question is this: if you don’t decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a game, or cut their price some other way, how are we going to get out of this current hole we’ve made for ourselves?

What are publishers doing to address this issue if they’re not doing what I’ve suggested? We all know that answer is absolutely nothing, and that worries me. Whole generations of kids are growing up where the idea of paying money for games, or playing lots of different games all the time, is completely alien to them.

Very soon the majority of gamers aren’t even going to realise there was a problem to solve.

By reader Wooster

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