Video games must be shorter or the industry is doomed

Since research shows that people play less new video games than ever, a reader claims that they have to become shorter to compete with live service titles.

There are many things to worry about in the games industry, but as a normal gamer they are all things that I think I have no influence on. However, I would like to look at things from a different perspective, instead of telling bad companies that they are bad.

It seems to me that there are two major problems at the moment that go under the radar. One is that nobody plays new games. Nobody buys them, or even plays them on Game Pass for free, and the majority still plays the same games that they played five or more years ago – things such as Fortnite and FIFA/EA Sports FC.

The other problem is that nobody has time to play other games. One reason why Fortnite and other multiplayer games are still popular is that you can play for 20 minutes and achieve something. Because that is all that most people have time for. But I don’t see that a publisher tackles one of the two issues.

When I was younger, I enjoyed a good role play, such as Fallout 4 or the Witcher 3. They were great games with great stories and so much to do was yours and not something that you were told to do. But they are absolutely not something that you can play for 20 minutes.

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

It does not help that this game nowadays is now much more expensive than five years ago. So everyone goes through these decisions where they think: “I spend this enormous amount of money on a game that I am not sure if I will like it, and that I can guarantee that I don’t really have time for, or did I just put Call of Duty: Warzone and call it one night?”

The worst thing is that these are not particularly new problems, but just like everything else, such as games that are more expensive to make, nobody does anything about it. The only thing that publishers do is say: ‘if you cannot beat them, participate’ and try to make their own live service games … which usually never work.

We need people to be interested in buying new games, by seeing it as a better option than just playing the same old for free that they always do. If we don’t play, it’s just dying. An obvious solution is to make games cheaper, which … publishers clearly not do.

The other solution is to make them shorter, making it reasonable to load less for them. And I also think that publishers will not do that either, but they should do that too.

Everything above eight hours immediately becomes a problem, but eight to 12 hours the standard was back in the Xbox 360 era. Games were cheaper at the time, but they were also more imaginative and varied, so there are many benefits in the deliberately scaling back.

I know it will not happen, but then my question is this: if you do not reduce the amount of time needed to complete a game, or reduce their price in a different way, how do we come from this current gap that we have made for ourselves?

What do publishers do to tackle this problem if they don’t do what I have suggested? We all know that that answer is absolutely nothing, and that worries me. Entire generations of children grow up, where the idea of ​​paying money for games, or always playing many different games, is completely strange to them.

Soon the majority of gamers will not even realize that there was a problem to solve.

By reader Wooster

The characteristics of the reader do not necessarily represent the views of Gamecentral or Metro.

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