I'm certainly feeling that big game burnout.



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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."



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