Is the game long enough?

Image: Never enough plays. Needs more plays. Right?

“My team is worried the game isn’t long enough. They want to increase scope. But we can’t change our release date or budget, and it’s coming up fast. What can I do?“

Ah yes, a classic. It’s very common, at many points in production, for game dev teams to feel a little insecure. For all the planning you’ve done, everyone has pre-conceived, often subconscious ideas about what a game must be, and in our most stressed moments, we can get pulled away from our planning and sage practices, and towards instincts that respond to our fears.

The way I think about handling this problem has a lot to do with user experience– both the player as user, and also about members of the team and their needs.

Probably no one really wants to make a longer game. That would mean more work, more testing, more localization… more of everything except time and money. So we could solve this problem by figuring out how to twist the whole team and the fabric of spacetime into pretzels… or we could gather enough information that everyone feels reassured that the right choices have been made.

Are your leads acting on their own fears, or have they received a directive from a key investor, or head office, that they must make the game longer?

This won’t really change most of these steps, but if it’s the former, and not the latter, and you have a good relationship with your leads, then you can probably breathe a little easier, knowing you just need to convince one or two colleagues, and not a larger entity you may not have a direct relationship with.

Note: Please be careful and tactful about how you find out why. Some leaders can interpret Why questions as “questioning their authority.” Make it clear up front that you trust their judgment, and are trying to learn.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen teams panic about game length before they’d implemented more than a quest or two. If this is the case, then you probably don’t have enough information to know how long your game is now, let alone if it should be longer.

If this is your situation, having so much implementation left to do within a tight timeframe before shipping should tell you there will be big risks associated with creating even more game content. Implementation is bound to bring up problems of its own, so you could be sitting on a mountain of unknown unknowns.

This argument is likely to cause more panic, and won’t solve the problem on its own. It should be just one point in a multi-faceted defense. But your team is best served by remaining aware of the velocity and volume of their work, not just the perceived scope of the final product.

Do you actually know how long it takes a real player to play your game? I’ve seen a lot of cases where everyone was convinced the game was too short, based only on playing it themselves– or based on their own playthroughs of game elements without any of the menus and transitions that a player of the finished game will deal with.

It is guaranteed that anyone on your team plays your game the fastest. This is particularly true for a game with a lot of dialogue or text. If you could see your colleagues playing (and you may not, now that remote work is so common), you would see them skipping content. You would see them already knowing the strategies in combat, already knowing where the collectibles are. It’s very difficult to fake not knowing these things. (And even harder still to get devs of a narrative game to actually play narrative content. :-D)

The most accurate way to get real playtime information is to invite players from your target market to play the game, and time them while they play. If you can’t time them, ask them to time themselves.

Failing that, there are things you can do to get your team to play more realistically. Try gathering your team into a virtual room, to play together. Assign one person as the designated player. Require them to narrate what they’re doing as they’re doing it. If it’s a game with on-screen text, assign different team members to read different characters, and UI text. If it’s a game with choices, assign yet another person as a designated question asker. You’ve now introduced enough delays to get something closer to a “real” playtime– and you’ve also ensured everyone in the room really sees the content, and what it’s like when other people play.

If you can’t get your team to participate, you can do all of that on your own. Use a stopwatch, talk your decisions aloud, and when reading any text, force yourself to read slowly.

Once you know how long a given chunk of your game is, you can extrapolate to the full planned length to estimate its final playtime.

However, if you really can’t get your team to participate here, that is a sign of something. Are they way too busy implementing to find out how long the game is? That’s a critical level of busy-ness. Or do they just not think it’s important? That could be a sign that your influence within the team will only stretch so far, and this scope battle might be uphill, or out of your hands. But you’re still learning, so keep going.

It’s a 2025 reality. Many players– especially players with a lot of adult responsibilities– would prefer shorter games. Indie publishers in particular are catching up to this reality, bolstered in part by changes in the overall economic situation of the industry. (Their budgets are lower.)

What length of game do your target players want? Have you asked them?

If you don’t have the access to poll your players, do a search to find the most recent articles, studies, and forum posts concerning your audience and play times. You will know best which sources are most likely to convince your team.

Here are a few I found very quickly while writing this:

• https://www.thegamer.com/starfield-quest-designer-player-fatigue-long-games-100-hours-short-games
• https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/the-case-for-shorter-games
• https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/15w5agt/is_it_just_me_but_lately_i_prefer_shorter_games/?embed_host_url=https://www.discoglobe.ca/wp-admin/post.php
• https://www.zleague.gg/theportal/gaming-news-the-resurgence-of-short-games-amid-100-hour-fatigue/

What games is your marketing team comparing your game to? What games were referenced during conceptualization? What games are coming out soon that share features and a player base similar to your game?

Use the same Steam tags your game will use, and have a look at how long those games are. Look at the reviews. Do they mention length? How did players feel about it?

Now, take that same list of games, and use tools like steamspy, SteamDB or VG Insights, and see what you can find out about how those games performed. Were they short? Was it fine? Were they long and it wasn’t?

Now you can know:

• What the team is concerned about, and who the Stakeholders of Game Length are
• How long the game might be, if you keep building what you’ve planned
• What your players want
• The playtime of other games like yours, and how they’ve fared

Put it all together into a one-page summary. What does all this information now tell you, about your ideal game length? Hopefully this makes some answers easier to see, and informed decisions, possible to make.