While small independent titles only require a few hours to complete, others, like AAA for example, require dozens of hours from the player to reach their conclusion. In the end, it all depends on what you want, a dreamlike adventure that will take a lot of time, or a less demanding chill game that will make you change your mind quickly. On the other hand, for this former PlayStation boss, “long duration” games no longer make sense.
The games got too long for Shawn Layden
In an interview with Eurogamer.com, Shawn Layden, former head of PlayStation and president of SIE Worldwide Studios from 2014 to 2019, said that game development has exploded in recent years. According to him, games are no longer connected with reality. He believes that players no longer have as much time to devote to their hobby, especially as they get older. In summary, The older you get, the less time you have to devote to video games, and more specifically to those that offer dozens of hours of play..
I think part of that answer is – and this sounds simplistic, but hear me out – I think games are too long. I haven’t even opened Red Dead Redemption 2, because I don’t have 90 hours. And I’m retired and I don’t have 90 hours. For a long time, we kept talking about “100 hours of gameplay”. This is going to be awesome. That’s 100 hours of gameplay! Like that’s the most important thing to know. This was a measuring stick in the early years, when the average player was between 18 and 23 years old. And when we are between 18 and 23 years old, we are rich in time and poor in money. But when the average player age increased to the late 20s, early 30s, the opposite happened, right? You may not be money rich, but you are definitely time poor. So I think our approach is not adapted to this market, to reality.
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A little backward-looking, he believes that the desire to have a game with a long lifespan belongs to the past, when we had no idea of the evolution of the industry. For him, wanting 100 hours of gameplay is no longer in line with reality, and no one would want that anymore.
He then returns to his own journey, and the games in which he participated. He admits to having created these famous games which require several dozen, but believes that this was perhaps a mistake, especially because the time spent on said games was probably not worth it at certain times: “I’ve made a number of games that were 80 or 90 hours long, and I’ll be the first to say that it wasn’t always 100% quality hours. I’d like to see a world where you can going back to 18 or 23 hours of gameplay, but with gameplay so engaging that you don’t want to put down the controller. I want the whole game to feel like that moment in Resident Evil where the scary dogs come in through the window and you. let go your fear controller. I want more gameplay moments like this, if we can reduce the scale and scope.”
An opinion contradictory to the current market
If we look at recent years, titles offering a rather long lifespan have been very successful. Examples include The Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3 and, even from Layden’s own example, Red Dead Redemption 2. Even so, Layden’s arguments are understandable. Many people of his generation who played a lot were still in school, studying, or had a lot of free time at the time. Many of them now have jobs, regular daily lives, and perhaps even families, which consequently limits the amount of time they can devote to video games.
In the end, perhaps it is appropriate not to have a fixed opinion. Everyone is free to devote their free time to what they like, whether it’s one hour or a hundred.
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