Game Time is Running Out.
There are too many games to play, and nobody has the time.
I read an interesting article on Medium that discussed how gamers are spending less and less time playing newly released games, year over year. The data confirms what I've been ruminating on in my personal life. There are too many games to play, and the older I get, the less time I have to play them. I've been recommended to play Bauldur’s Gate 3 at least 20 times by a handful of individuals. But I can't say I will ever jump in and play it, because its 100-hour run time scares me. I just recently started a break from playing Destiny 2, a game that I've accrued 1200 hours in over the last 7 years. Now, in its current sandbox, it would take 90 hours to get to a point where I can play the content I find the most fun there. These numbers terrify me. I can hardly manage to put in about 10 hours a week for gaming. To commit to 9 or 10 weeks of playing a game is extremely daunting.
Traditionally, what gamers have wanted is games that never die. We hate saying goodbye to characters and the worlds they inhabit. I think many individuals that participate in media of all forms do. So we all praised big, long games, and that's where the industry decided to grow. With live services—barring any narratives they try to weave—ideally, you'd never have to say goodbye to a world. With your big heavy hitters as discussed in this article, like Minecraft, Fortnite, Etc., it's very clear players absolutely have not, and are not intending to. But, when you don't remove that game's time sink from that gamers' life with a definitive ending, they don't exactly magically find the time to play other games.
The constant interaction from players as a revenue source for these live services makes executive corpo-types squirm with glee at the thought. Their wallets can't help it; they want a piece of that pie. So, they attempt a live service and dream of the fat stacks of money they'll get when everyone is playing 'Big Beautiful Rushed Game #7' with every successful looking game idea they can get their developers to steal. Surely, gamers will play it when they make it low-cost or even free to play, right? Have some microtransactions, and in a few years they have a whole crop of cash cows, terminally stuck in their grasp.
I'm sure the data doesn't lie, communities are extremely important to making new games live and thrive, especially live services. But to even get a community started, game companies need to take a step back and realize that the first barrier isn't primarily what the game will cost up front. It's time. The time a player has to dedicate themselves to learning new systems, to growing fond of the world, the characters, and this to a degree to recommend it to friends, and start that community. The developers need time as well, to get comfortable in their newly established world, with their characters voices, all while navigating unknown territories through the laws that govern the place conjured by their imaginations. All this must be balanced by the current video game market demands. What live service games do players currently sink their time into? What single player experiences are available and how much time does it cost players to complete them? Can our new game fit into an unclaimed corner of their territory? Can it be wrestled away from what's out there for long enough to take hold?
We truly live in a golden age of games, where there are so many good games available to play, both as single player, or live service, with communities, and without communities. Unfortunately, the accessibility of tools to make games has spread the industry so thin that the resource determining success, I truly feel, is how fun the game is, and how much time the player must invest to play it. As the market gets more saturated with any kind of release, AAA, AA, indie, whatever, we will see even fun single player games monetarily fail because not enough players have the time resource to dedicate to them. This will especially be the case of new live services that want to try and take a portion of the market.
Will the industry course correct, and make shorter, and more densely packed games? Will the market collapse on itself as players continually don't have the time to spread between all of its new releases? All I know is that I'm running out of time, and I'm not sure that the industry realizes that.