Players don’t want a long game, they want one worth the money

Length is not a measure of quality. Sometimes it is a reason not to buy, especially in the 25-30 and older crowd. A player looking at your page is working out in their head how many hours they are handing over, and if those hours do not look worth it they never start. Nobody cares about a mediocre 60-70 hour story. That game gathers dust in the library.

It is 2026, and games are one of the hardest things to get into compared to any other entertainment. There is even a classic line about some of them, “the game gets much better after hour 100.” But 100 hours, even for someone who plays 2 hours a day, means opening the same game 50 days in a row. A normal player coming back 50 days straight is not very likely.

The player opens the game, the launcher pulls an update, they fight with the settings, then the prologue, then the tutorial. Half an hour is gone before they actually start playing.

Under the nonsense banner of accessibility, AAA games out of the West have turned into press-one-button simulators. The ledge you are going to climb is painted yellow, the direction you should go is written on the screen, combat aims by itself, and if you stand in front of a puzzle for ten seconds your character just says the answer out loud. The player is handed the answer before anybody asks them a question.

Stories and systems went modular too. Every scene is written so it can stand on its own and work in whatever order it gets played. Write it that way and no scene can lean on another, so there is no proper build up. The writing is genuine garbage. These games are now written, unfortunately, by activists guarding their own agenda more than doing any writing, by anti-work types who do not want to work more than 20 hours a week, and by people who feel they have to crack a joke in every line and be cool every second.

When you write a character only so they represent one thing, that character has no room to be wrong. A character who cannot be wrong cannot change, and a character who does not change pulls nobody in. Productions that break their own coherence and immersion for the sake of diversity are everywhere, and most of the people doing it are doing it because they do not know how to write a story. Someone with no craft grabs the message, because the message cannot be criticised, and the second it is, out comes you are a racist, you are a whatever-phobe.

In the end the player is not playing to receive a message, they are playing to relax and have fun. Stuff a game with message up to the throat and the player leaves. Behind the effort on the making-it-easier side sits an old assumption, the assumption that players run from difficulty.

Except players do not run from difficulty. The same guy walks into the same boss in Elden Ring forty times and comes back all forty. What he runs from is the effort asked of him before he has even started playing. He sits down, the tutorial opens, he watches twenty minutes of button explanations and drops the game before it begins. The same thing happens every time he opens it, because a player who stopped halfway does not remember the game, and teaching that many unconnected systems over again every time is very hard. Especially if players cannot get inside the story or the gameplay.

Teaching is level design’s job. When that job is not done you get an artificial tutorial, and the tutorial lectures the player. Nobody opens a game to be lectured. The later the player makes their first decision, picking their first weapon or choosing their first path, the lower the chance they open the game a second time.

The player is protecting their calendar, not their money. Time is worth more than money, money comes back. A game with a visible end fits in the calendar and the expectation shapes itself around that. A game with no visible end is open-ended work, and nobody wants to tie themselves to open-ended work. The half-finished games in their library are the proof. Most of those games were not bad, you just could not see the end of them.

Put 60 hours on your page and the player does not read it as a promise, they read it as homework. And to get to those 60 hours you usually have to put the same content in over and over, so the content is not growing, only the repetition is. If your game runs 8 hours and the price is an 8 hour price, nobody even brings the length up.

There are two things to look at in your own game. First, which minute the player makes their first decision, and you can measure that with a stopwatch by handing the game to a friend. Second, whether your store page shows when the game delivers what it promised. Your median playtime is already sitting in Steamworks, open it, look, and turn that number into a target.

Nobody gives you money for the hour count, they give it because they believe the money will be worth their time.