Sonic Sez
A few years ago, this image of Sonic and his controversial message made the rounds on social media. “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m NOT KIDDING”
A statement I agree with 100%. Today, I’ll be dissecting this sentiment; what it means to me, and why I think having more short, ugly games is good for gaming, the consumer, developers and for accessibility.
Shorter Games
The implicit message here is that games nowadays are too long, and they’d be better if they were shorter. If we look at How Long To Beat, which shows how long it takes to beat games (hence the name), we can get some numbers for this. The site’s clear times are self-reported by players, so take them with a grain of salt. There isn’t anything better out there, so I’ll use them anyways. At least it’s not reddit.
By taking a look at the average time to clear reported for a the games released in one year (in hours and minutes), every 5 years, we can see a trend:
1990: 4h53m
1995: 9h
2000: 16h10m
2005: 15h36m
2010: 17h51m
2015: 19h12m
2020: 25h43m
From 1990 to 2020, games have gotten, on average, five times longer.
Zooming in on 2025’s big, flagship games, we can see the bloat in detail.
Ghost of Yotei 28h, Death Stranding 2 35 hours (story), Clair Obscur 28h, Silksong 28h.
I haven’t played Death Stranding, but the idea of a 35 hour narrative that isn’t in a novel makes me squirm. I loved Sekiro, and it has a fantastic base gameplay loop, but that game is 30 hours long, and by the 20th hour I was already starting to feel the fatigue.
However, I don’t mind playing the same game for hundreds of hours. I’ve put thousands of hours into dota2, hundreds into Deadlock, Street Fighter 6 and more. You might be thinking “but those are multiplayer games, meant to be played over and over”, and you’d be right. To me, that’s the key point. Over and over. I don’t like to go through a 40 hour game to see the end. That mostly leads to padding, repetition and stretching the base mechanics very thinly over a long time. Gameplay gets drip-fed between cutscenes, traversal, backtracking and other minutia. I prefer a game I can replay 100 times over 100 hours, than one that takes me 100 hours to complete once.
This is subjective, I know. There are people who like this sort of game. They like chipping away at a massive story over the course of weeks, getting cozy with the game, sinking into it like a nice, comfy couch. I’ve had that experience, too. I don’t play many JRPGs, but when I do, it’s because I want that specific feeling of working through a game like watching a season of an anime.
A game’s runtime isn’t an indicator of quality. A long game can be just as terrible as a short game, but the pushback here is against making the 20+ hour game the standard. Games keep getting longer and longer, supposedly as a response to consumers who want to get more game for their money. They pay $60 for a new game, so they expect at least 60 hours of playtime, so developers are padding their games out more and more to meet that demand. This puts a strain on developers to cut corners to make their games last longer. If there’s a section that could be done in 30 minutes, copy and paste a few more rooms to make it last an additional hour. Have the player fight every boss again, or go through previously cleared levels in reverse. Have an entire section that’s just walking around and looking at things, like in Mass Effect 3’s memory section, or God of War: Ragnarok, where you play as the Boy and wander around. Make a giant, open world and fill it with a bunch of trinkets and baubles to collect to make a number go up. Level-gate areas with powerful enemies that you can only beat after grinding for a while. That sort of thing.
Longer games is bad for the people working on them, too. Artists have to work on all the extra assets, they have to animate all the additional cutscenes, program a bunch of new areas, record more dialogue, do more work, which leads to crunch and unpaid overtime and a lot of stress. It’s worth it, though. Making your employees do a 60 hour week for that additional ten hours of playtime is completely valid, right? We need a giant, empty field with collectibles in it, otherwise people will complain on the Internet.
How about, instead, we get more games that are short, but meaningful? Pack all the content into a shorter, leaner package. Instead of settling for a huge game where you spend 5% of the time actively engaged in it and the other 95% mildly entertained, you get a smaller game where 98% of the time you’re doing the thing you wanted to do in the game. All killer, no filler. Denser games.
Long games should exist, but they shouldn’t be the norm, and a game’s playtime should not be used as an indicator of quality. It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it.
With Worse Graphics
Worse Graphics might bring to mind something that looks like garbage. A game that looks like shit? Who would want that?
In this context, worse graphics doesn’t mean a game that looks like a crime scene, it means there’s less of an emphasis on graphics.
Good graphics are impressive, but they must serve the gameplay first and foremost. The fact that you can see individual hairs on Aloy’s face in Horizon is impressive, but how does that translate to the game? Does every little strand of peach fuzz increase fun by 0.5%? Is there a system where you can sense danger by looking at her getting goosebumps? Do you even see them most of the time? You play that game with the camera behind her most of the time. Is it a necessary feature? Not really. It’s a fun little piece of trivia that somehow caused a massive controversy online, because of course it did, people have nothing better to do, but if you didn’t have that same level of fidelity, the game would be exactly the same.
Extremely high fidelity graphics take a toll on processing, too. There’s a diminishing return on graphics. You can increase the polygons, but at some point, the difference isn’t noticeable, and worse, the burden on hardware skyrockets. You have to pay an extreme price in optimization just to have a few more pixels on screen.
If you take a modern game and set the graphics to high, it’ll look like it’s supposed to. It looks nice. If you set all the options to ultra, it will look sliiiiightly better, sure, imperceptibly, but your performance will drop significantly. You lose 20 frames just so some shadows look nicer when you stop moving and look at them.
“Worse Graphics” in this case means getting games to an acceptable level of visual fidelity. Make it look good. You don’t have to render individual pores, or use photo-realistic models, or do a 360 degree scan of an actor’s entire body with meticulous facial motion capture. Just make the graphics look nice. Clean, clear visuals where you can tell what’s going on, optimized graphics that run well and keep a stable framerate.
The most obvious solution to this is to have a solid art style. Good art direction doesn’t age. It’s why Super Nintendo games like Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger and Yoshi’s Island still look great to this day. It’s why the apes from Ape Escape look adorable even if they’re made of just seven polygons.
“Worse” graphics are easier to make, cheaper, and a lot more lenient on hardware, meaning all kinds of systems can run them, even a potato laptop from 2010. Maybe not that far, but it will run on most systems.
“Made by People paid more to work less”
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Games made by people working normal schedules, not 60 hour weeks with months of unpaid overtime. No more exploitation, terrible working conditions or anything like that. Games made by people who are treated like people.
This point ties into the other two. If developers are making shorter games, they don’t have to work on thousands of assets for all that content. If they make the games with worse graphics, they don’t have to spend thousands of man-hours rendering each individual crease on an actor’s fingerprints. They could finish a project in a reasonable amount of time.
On that same wavelength, if they work less in more favorable conditions, that means games will be cheaper. Cheaper to make, and more affordable to buy.
Games cost $80 these days thanks to inflation. Developers would have you believe it’s because of the economy, and that $60 doesn’t buy what it used to a few years back, so we have to get with the times and adjust. The rising cost of games is due to inflation. Inflated budgets. Triple-A games these days have absurd budgets, and the cost gets pushed onto the consumer. Battlefield 6’s budget was over $400 million (excluding marketing), same with Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher 3, which came out a decade ago in 2015, had a comparatively small budget of $81 million. The next installment, The Witcher 4, will probably cost as much as similar games, and go up to around $300 million, as a conservative estimate.
If you spend that much on a game, you need to make that back plus more to turn a profit. If you need to sell millions to break even, anything that doesn’t perform to those absurd expectations will be deemed a failure.
The cost of making a game goes up, the amount needed to turn a profit goes up, and every game is seen as a risk. If you can’t bring in $600 million in profit, your game isn’t worth making, which is why we keep getting the same game over and over. Multiplayer live service battle royale shooters? They make money, they’re a safe bet. Open world action adventure games with RPG elements and Ubisoft towers? They sell well, historically. They’re not particularly fun or exciting, but what we want is a safe return on investment.
This is why a lot of games seem similar, why they don’t innovate. They push the graphics because it’s the most they can do. They have to make something they can package and sell to investors and players. If it’s too new or out-there, it’s seen as an untested idea, and it’s not funded.
If you trim games down, keep them affordable, they can be made for a lot less, and studios can take more risks, leading to new, innovative games. This is why the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era is looked back on so fondly. Games were still relatively cheap to make. Developers experimented, and threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. An action RPG based on fighting giant dinosaurs with a high difficulty and an emphasis on preparing for hunts? That’s how we got Monster Hunter. Take Resident Evil and pivot it into a melee combat/shooter hybrid with a new cast? Devil May Cry. An arcade racing game all about going fast and crashing? Burnout. Golf with Frogs? Ribbit King. No one would have made Ribbit King if it cost 300 million to make.
Conclusion
I’m not kidding. Take a small team, pay them well, and let them make smaller games. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have 90 hour epics with photorealistic graphics where you can see the character’s pupils react in real-time to light, which costs 700 billion to make. There’s room for that, too, but there should be smaller games made with less resources. The only part of triple-A development that should be eliminated completely is crunch, and unpaid overtime. If you treat your workers right, you can spend all the money you want making Assassin’s Creed 54.
Smaller games are easier to make, cheaper, more affordable for consumers, their “worse” graphics mean they can run on any hardware, and their short runtime means the experience is compact and digestible. There’s room for experimentation. You’re not shackled to massive expectations. You can take a risk on a game about a funny pizza man running up a tower. This was the case back in the 90s and early 2000s. A lot of the massive franchises we have today were born out of small games back in those days. If we make the same environment, we can get more experimental games.
This low-risk strategy is what makes indie games so special, even if they do sometimes fall into trends like triple-A studios do. If you don’t believe me, go ask one of the millions of Vampire Survivors clones out there. Not convinced? Search Cozy on Steam.
Now it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. This whole thing is a preamble to a series of short articles, spread over the next days of Christmas, where I’ll be recommending these kinds of small games. Different genres, different target audiences, and different levels of difficulty, but they’re all short, with bad graphics, made by passionate developers. They all come recommended, usually cost less than $20, and can run on most hardware. They all get the Roger seal of approval, and you should check them out.
After I finish the series, I’ll link to them here, but for now, have fun trying to figure out what I’m going to recommend!
The Games
Here are the games with my recommendation. These aren’t full reviews, more like quick blurbs on why they fit the criteria and why you should play them. They might get a more in-depth review in the future, but they still get the Load Last Save stamp of approval.
I completely agree that most games can be improved by trimming them down. Hence, I also prefer short and dense games that allow for a high level of intensity. I can highly recommend Ghostrunner and Neon White in that regard, as both games have very little fluff. If you're interested, you might want to check out my reviews of these games:
https://corerunner.substack.com/p/ghostrunner-review
https://corerunner.substack.com/p/neon-white-review
Preach!