Between massive open-world games like Elden Ring and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, or live-service titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Marvel Rivals, there are no shortage of games that can eat up players’ free time. And that’s why the industry may have reached a tipping point with its seemingly endless games, according to Bethesda veteran Will Shen.
Shen–who was previously the lead quest designer on Starfield–recently shared his thoughts about players being put off from jumping into large games during his appearance on Kiwi Talkz. He accepted that some of his previous Bethesda titles, including Skyrim, which “you can play pretty much forever, ” may have contributed to player fatigue. However, Shen contends that the oversaturation of giant games leaves players without enough time to fully invest in new titles.
“We’re reaching a point where people are fatigued, or a large section, a growing section of the audience, is becoming fatigued at investing 30-plus, 100-plus hours into a game,” explained Shen. “Because they already have that. 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.”
Shen pointed to the success of shorter games like Astro Bot and Mouthwashing as titles that can be easily enjoyed by players without having to invest massive of amounts of time. He also suggested that the short length of those games allows more players to create a community around them because they’ve all been able “to engage fully with the entirety of the product.”
The long AAA titles go hand-in-hand with the escalating budgets for video games. Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin recently revealed that one of the reasons he agreed to sell his company to Sony was to prevent the massive development costs from sinking everything he and his team had built prior to 2001. Those rising expenses also contributed to the devastating job losses in the video game industry last year.
