When it comes to Masahiro Sakurai, you know that he’s doing his best to be honest with people who watch his “Creating Games” series, as he knows that they value his opinion and insight. What surprises people, though, is that despite being a game developer, he only looks at things through the perspective of those playing the games rather than the “business mind” of trying to make the biggest profit or making the biggest influence with their titles. That was highlighted again in his latest video, when he noted that when it came to video games as a whole, they shouldn’t be as long as they have been recently.
We’ve all seen it as companies like Microsoft, Sony, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and more have dove into game design with the simple purpose of “making the game as big as possible” and thinking that would be enough to get people to buy the titles. However, as Sakurai cautions multiple times over, that’s not how people think. After all, we live busy lives, and if a game takes 100 hours to beat, and we can only dedicate an hour or two to gaming a day, that means we’ll be playing the game for months before defeating it.
That’s also on top of all the other entertainment media and “fun things” people like to do to pass the time. A game’s length can vary, but its quality has to be absolute in Masahiro Sakurai’s mind. After all, if a game is super fun, people won’t just want to play it; they’ll want to play it repeatedly over time. We’re sure you can all think of titles that you go back to playing when you’re in a “dead period” of game releases. So, how long were those titles? Were they super long campaigns? Or were they short but sweet titles?
Another element of this video is that Sakurai recently finished playing Astro Bot, and he loved it. This is important because that game, which is currently the highest-rated full game on Metacritic in 2024, is an example of a “fun game that doesn’t take long to beat.” You can play the game in about 15 hours, and everyone who has played it notes how wonderful it is. That’s in contrast to a certain other Sony PS5 exclusive, which was DOA on arrival.
This is a lesson that many people in the gaming industry need to learn from. However, given the state of the industry and the thoughts of certain people at the top, you have to wonder if it will be received.
