According to the community at HowLongToBeat, The Last of Us Part II (27 Hours), Ghosts of Tsushima (42 Hours), and Horizon: Zero Dawn – Complete Edition (61.5 Hours) all require a substantial time commitment from players if they want to experience the full story and at least some of the sidequests. Their recent back-to-back-to-back launch over the last six weeks has also reignited the debate about game length.
It’s probably a coincidence that all three games were published by Sony, but the consolemaker’s recent focus on creating bustling single-player adventures has put them in the hot seat for this round of the debate. Ironically, it was a former executive from Sony that fired the first salvo this time around.
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That’s not to say that Shawn Layden is just any “former executive.” Beginning in 2019, he served as the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide (now known as PlayStation Studios). And before that, he was the CEO and President of Sony Interactive Entertainment America. So all three of these titles were conceived and created under his direct supervision.
Layden was a featured speaker at this year’s Gamelab Live conference, which gathers together some of gaming’s biggest names to talk amongst themselves about the future of the industry. As captured by GamesIndustry.biz, Layden emphasized that making AAA games like The Last of Us Part II is expensive, and said that it may not be sustainable from a dollars-and-cents standpoint:
It’s hard for every adventure game to shoot for the 50 to 60 hour gameplay milestone, because that’s gonna be so much more expensive to achieve. And in the end you may close some interesting creators and their stories out of the market if that’s the kind of threshold they have to meet… We have to reevaluate that.
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It’s been $59.99 since I started in this business, but the cost of games have gone up ten times. If you don’t have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult. I think this generation is going to see those two imperatives collide.
Shawn Layden: “I would welcome a return to the 12 to 15 hour AAA game”
But Layden also believes that this dedication to extending the length of games could also be hurting the artistic aspirations of game creators and turning away older players who don’t have the time to dedicate to the often bloated storylines found in AAA games:
Personally, as an older gamer… I would welcome a return to the 12 to 15 hour [AAA] game. I would finish more games, first of all, and just like a well edited piece of literature or a movie, looking at the discipline around that could give us tighter, more compelling content.
It’s something I’d like to see a return to in this business.
Shawn Layden: “I would welcome a return to the 12 to 15 hour AAA game”
Garrett Martin wasn’t responding directly to Layden when he published a similarly-themed piece through Paste Magazine (they appeared online at roughly the same time). But he instead chose to focus on how the need to force a single-player game into a box of the “expected” length can affect the narrative, while also further perpetrating game development’s crunch culture:
As long as 20 to 30 hours would be for television, it’s not that long for videogames. If a major would-be blockbuster’s story can be wrapped up in the same amount of time it takes to watch a season of Better Call Saul, the game will probably get torn apart online. Part of that relates to money—a new game costs $60, whereas that season of Deadwood is just part of your HBO subscription, so it’s far easier to break down how much you’ve spent per minute with a game than a TV show. Still, judging a story based on how much it costs is a bad way to look at these things. It does a disservice both to the work in question and to the people who made it. These expectations that a game needs to be dozens of hours long to be worthwhile are holding the medium back.
The Last of Us Part II’s Unnecessary Length Is Bad for the Players, the Developers, and The Last of Us Part II
This tendency to equate game length with dollars and cents goes all the way back to the arcade era, when the time you were able to have with a game directly related to how many quarters you stuffed into the machine. If you believe The New Yorker‘s Simon Parkin, we’ve never really broken that connection:
Early video-game narratives were simple: The invaders are coming, shoot them down. Eat, don’t be eaten. “Avoid missing ball for high score,” as Pong intoned. A game’s story lasted until the player’s skill was exhausted; the more proficient the player, the longer the story (even if a typical extended plot was grimly predictable: more aliens died). In the economic crucible of the arcade, the worth of each quarter was measured in seconds.
Gaming’s Long Con
Jumping back into the present, GamingBible‘s Mike Diver largely agreed with Layden’s assessment, and added his name to the list of players who find it hard to make time for the latest blockbusters as they age:
And while this idea’s long rattled around my head, that today’s triple-A games could do with a little nipping and tucking (hire experienced story editors, as well as scriptwriters!), it’s interesting to see former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden coming out yesterday (June 23) to say that he’d welcome a return to shorter big-budget experiences. That tells me that it’s not just my tired bones talking here, skewing my appreciation of what others have called a masterpiece. That tells me that the bigger studios of the games industry need to remember that you can have too much of a good thing.
This Generation’s AAA Action-Adventure Video Games Are Too Darn Long
But PlayStation LifeStyle‘s Chandler Wood took a slightly different tack, pointing out that a game being “too long” (or even “too short”) is an incredibly subjective judgment. Wood argued that games should be as long as they need to be, while also agreeing with Layden that it’s incredibly expensive to make long games in 2020:
The simplest answer here is that each game should individually be as long as it needs to be without excessive filler content to artificially pad out playtime. That’s the basic universally agreed on truth (which can then be torn apart by thousands of opinions on what exactly constitutes filler, etc.). But there’s a bigger part of this conversation than the endless debate by players.
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As long as the game respects the time that it asks of me, I’m happy to pour hours and hours into each of these worlds. As long as the developer is respecting the health and happiness of its employees, I want them to pursue their artistic vision for whatever length that means for the final product. That’s what’s at the center of the “are video games too long” debate. Somewhere in the middle of artistic vision, consumer demand, developer health, and business viability is the perfect answer, an impossible paradox that we’ll never solve because you can’t please everyone.
Daily Reaction: Are Video Games Too Long?
That last sentence really does say it all.