Big game burnout is real, and I suffer from it. I used to play multiple AAA games and open-world games simultaneously, but now all I can muster up is passion for one at a time as I drip feed myself shorter games to help tie myself over.
"For a long time, many games have been focused on creating these infinitely replayable, high-retention, forever experiences," Nick Lives, co-founder and creative director of Night Signal Entertainment says during an interview in Edge issue 420.
"Either their magic works on you and you actually play them forever until you die, or else the spell wears off and your last impression is getting burned out. I think a bunch of players are gradually warming up to the idea of self-contained, satisfying one-off experiences that can leave you on a high note."
I feel that on a spiritual level. My current game of choice is Pokopia (I know, blasphemy for a PC gamer), and while I still love a great open world game, I have less bandwidth for them now. By and large the best gaming experiences I've had of late have been with shorter, more concise games, such as Organized Inside, Mouthwashing, and Bloodletter.
I recently talked about how I appreciate Resident Evil Requiem being just 10 hours long. And before I get a bunch of people in the comments spewing about how I want gamers to get less bang for their buck—no, I don't want you to be short-changed with smaller games that are overpriced, but I also don't think that game length should equal price.
I'd rather pay £60 for a 10 hour game that was excellent from start to finish, with no bloat, than an open world game that pads out the runtime with needless fetchquests or other pointless sequences. In my mind, there's no reason a game can't be short, as long as it makes every second worth the money spent on it.
This is actually something that Lives has found when it comes to developing shorter games. When talking about Night Signal Entertainment's two hour long desktop horror game Home Safety Hotline he revealed that "it turned a profit, and fairly quickly at that."
Home Safety Hotline is only $15/£13, making it an easier purchase than Requiem for sure, but the point still stands that the secret to making bank no longer unequivocally lies in open world games.
"The notion of having a huge open world that's, like, 500 kilometres isn't new any more," Yura Zhdanovich, co-founder of Sad Cat Studios (developing upcoming cyberpunk action platformer Replaced) adds. "It's not enticing. Nobody cares about that."
Zhdanovich goes on to say how developers can make an "ok game" pretty easily now thanks to game engines like Unity and Unreal. "But being ok now is the same as being nothing. For people to care about you, you have to do something exceptionally well."
Players do still have different tastes when it comes to picking their game of choice, I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention Crimson Desert and it's recent success. But what do you think, would you rather pay for quantity or quality? Are you ok having a decent game that lasts a long time or an excellent game that's shorter? I'm all for the latter, but I'd still be interested to hear what other gamers have to say.
