'Starfield' Lead Quest Designer Claims Large Portion Of Gamers Are Fatigued With 30+ Hour Long Games
Starfield Lead Quest Designer Will Shen, who left Bethesda back in 2023, recently claimed that a large portion of gamers are fatigued with 30+ hour long games.
In an interview on the KIWI TALKZ YouTube channel, Shen stated, “Now, we’re reaching a point where people are fatigued, or a large section, or a growing section of the audience is becoming fatigued at investing 30+, 100+ hours into a game because they already have that.”
He explained, “They already have the games that they will continually come back to and adding another one to that list is a tall order. It’s always a tall order. So we’re seeing this resurgence of short games.”
Shen then pointed to Mouthwashing, “I just played Mouthwashing. … It’s only like three hours long at most. It’s a very short experience, but part of the benefit is that the community engagement around the story of Mouthwashing is only possible because everyone who is a fan has actually played through it all the way to the end. And that’s important for engagement with the story and the product.”
“So Mouthwashing is a huge hit because its short,” he said. “There are other factors into that: the execution, nice iconic key art, all that kind of stuff. But that game doesn’t succeed nearly as well if it were longer and had a bunch of side quests and miscellaneous content. The shortness is the point. And that level of engagement was so refreshing to see from a developer who’s done a lot of big games. It’s like, ‘Oh, you can have a fan community conversation around a game that’s much shorter because the shortness allows everyone to engage fully with the entirety of the product.”
“Most games that are 10+ hours long, most people don’t finish and I would say 75% of your players only play through the first 5 to 10 hours. So that’s a huge fragmenting of your overall fan community base. Between the people that will play through it all the way to the end and then play it again over and over again, and the vast majority of your audience who will play it for the first five hours and then put it down and say, ‘That was pretty good.’ And then they move on to whatever’s next,” he added.
On top of claiming players already have the games they will already go back to, Shen also noted the reason he believes this fatigue has set in is due to the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout.
He said, “Part of what happened was the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. These really big titles that you can play pretty much forever. There’s still a lot of people that play Skyrim even after all these years. And the idea of these evergreen games that you could just sink thousands of plus hours into. That hit the industry.
“Before it was MMOs that were that,” he continued. “World of Warcraft. There are World of Warcraft superfans who 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 can almost play it forever. And so that became the big trend that hit the games industry.”
“And you can see Dark Souls and Elden Ring begin a secondary trend of, ‘Let’s make third person action combat really hard.’ And so that trend line of all of a sudden every game needed 40+ hours of content and depth and progression systems and survival crafting because Minecraft became super popular and all of that,” Shen shared.
Shen would later point out that gamers have big back catalogs as well as sports games that are already offer short experiences.
He said, “We have so many games now in our libraries that we can return to forever and ever. And then there are the mammoth successes where if you’re only engaging with on game it’s like Madden of FIFA, Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, World of Warcraft. Any of those really big behemoths like Skyrim. That has happened and I think it’s going to be a long time before those games leave the market.”
“How long will Fortnite go on? It could be another 20, 30 years. Maybe its forever. Sports have gone on forever. Football, soccer, basketball. It’s been a long time since someone’s introduced a new team sport that has huge mainstream cultural influence. So maybe forever. Maybe in our lifetimes. 50 years from now there’ll still be Fortnite updates and it’ll still be the mammoth success that has always been.”
Despite claiming a significant portion of gamers are being fatigued by 30+ hour games, Shen hedged and noted that it really depends on the genre.
He stated, “The games industry as a whole is gigantic. It’s more than anyone can comprehend and it’s everywhere across the entire planet. So when we’re talking about the games industry we’re usually talking about some segment of the games industry for a particular market of the games industry. Often times that’s the AAA market in North America and Europe. That is where most of the fan discourse happens. But an inordinate amount of the play time and money is spent say in the mobile market in places like Asia or South America or Africa where that is not something that’s in the AAA North America Europe conversation.”
What do you make of Shen’s comments about players being fatigued by 30+ hour games?
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Sorry shen. But your game is boring. That’s why we didn’t finish it. I love long games.
Does this idiot not know that JRPGs exists?
These idiots are what is wrong with Gaming. Live Service is the second biggest Cancer in Gaming History behind Battle Royal. No one has EVER had a problem with a few DLCs within the first year of release of a Game before they moved on to the Sequel. Now it's just "Let's Milk this Game for 5+ years with shit reskins and pointless Events".
SOME Games can have a Live Service structure such as Diablo like Games or Gacha Games, but when Dying Light 2 does it, it's gone to far.
Selling "FOMO"(Fear Of Missing Out) is never a good idea. That's why we are hopeful of Games like Okami 2 where we can spend 50+ hours enjoying the Game, and then hoping for a Sequel.