Migration of the Gamers
When autumn hits and school is in full swing again, there’s only one reason any kid would rejoice at the conclusion of pool party season: Video games season.
When I was young, my parents allowed me to get one (ONLY ONE) new video game a year. Every time I unwrapped the cellophane packaging and fired up my Playstation, a spark of excitement coursed through my veins. Hours of entertainment laid ahead of me, trekking through new worlds, battling beasts and monsters, and devouring untold stories of heroism. Back in those days, you could complete a video game in about 20 hours, which was ideal for rainy weekends and slow afternoons of childhood. Perfect! A casual, seasonal gamer could pick up a controller, complete an entire game, and enjoy every facet of the story without ever feeling like they sacrificed their real life to do so.
In those days, only the enormous and daunting roleplay games would require more gameplay, and only the most dedicated gamers, aka the stereotype gamers in their mother’s basements with their mountain of snacks, had the stamina to play those games. Modern games, however, have taken this stereotype to the extreme, steamrolling any gamer’s chance at a casual approach.
Via u/ZekkouAkuma
Max Scoville, a video game reviewer with IGN, says the newly released games in 2025 have become unplayably colossal. “There aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the month to fit all the massive games that are coming out,” Scoville said in his video game prediction earlier this year. It’s not so much the quantity of new releases as it is the density and duration of the games themselves. At first, video game innovations were cool and exciting as improving technology allowed for more complex gameplay, detailed storylines, multiple quests, and larger maps, but now video games are becoming too big to enjoy.
According to HowLongtoBeat, a website that reveals the average playthrough duration of each newly released game, some of the most anticipated games of the last two years took anywhere between 60 to 100+ hours to play. Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate, and Civilization VII (to name a few), typically require an average of 200+ hours to play the game, which is completely monstrous compared to the 20 hours casual games of the past. For the truly committed gamer, the full Civilization Series can take upwards of 1,000 or more hours to complete a playthrough from Civ I to Civ VII, according to Steam.
Via u/memecentrai
Who has time for that? Casual gamers only have a couple hours per week (if they’re lucky), to play their current video games, so they’re essentially doomed from the start if they attempt to tackle a 1,000-hour game. It’s an impossible feat. That said, surely there’s a good reason the devs, aka the game developers, are churning out impossibly long video games in mass quantities… Surprise, it’s because of shareholders!
Business is Kabooming Itself
The video game industry is projected to be valued at around $299.9 billion dollars by the end of 2025. That’s a nonnegligible chunk of change, so naturally gaming companies are pushing their development teams to create more of what they believe is working. For shareholders, who have probably never played a real video game in their lives, chasing the stock market value of their own company is their only objective.
One particular video game franchise, Dark Souls, has taken over the gaming scene for over a decade and the video game industry has been scrambling to mimic their formula. The one caveat of “Souls-like” games, as they’ve since been coined, is that the entire video game is based on unalterable, spirit-crushingly difficult game play. You can’t play on easy-mode, you have to chase down the story, there’s no real questline, and the only way to beat the game is to spend hours repeating respawns, watching gameplay tips, and scouring the game’s Wiki page for answers. Masochistic gamers who seek this style of game actually want to perish, they want to get lost, and they want to get annihilated by enemies, because that makes their 100+ hours of gameplay worth it in the end when they finally succeed.
Via u/ronflair
Gigantic, nearly unplayable games with extremely challenging bosses, convoluted maps, and unforgiving gaming structure have become the norm in the gaming industry, catering to a singular, diehard audience. What the shareholders have neglected to notice is that not every gamer wants to play games like that, so casual gamers are left with the choice of sacrificing the next 1,000 hours of free time or deciding not to play video games anymore.
Eventually, the scales of consumer reports will balance out the influx of Souls-like games, convincing developers that there is more than one type of gamer out there. For now, however, it seems that casual gamers are stuck replaying old games.
Luckily, for adult gamers juggling parenthood, employment, social obligations, chores, responsibilities, and their other real-world hobbies, story-driven, open-world games may be getting old, but they will always be there for us. God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Uncharted, are just itching for players to blow the dust off the cover and pop the game into their console for another pleasant 20-hour playthrough. Shorter games like these will always be playable, enjoyable, and can offer a hobbyist-level of enrichment without ever threatening to crush your spirit.
Sometimes, all a gamer wants to do is sit back, hack-n-slash some enemies, and feel like a hero for a little while.
