There is this phrase that people use a lot online that goes something like “I am making a short game, you know, a game that respects a player’s time.”

I am not sure where that phrase “respects your time” came from…there was this 2015 Kotaku article by Patrick Klepek called “I wish Dragon Age: Inquisition Respected My Time.” What really got me thinking about this is this youtube video about how AAA games pad their content (he uses the “respect your time” phrase a couple times). There is even this pretty good podcast that I consistently listen to called The Short Game which has the tagline “Games that respect your time.” 

This phrase “respect your time” gets thrown around so much by thought leaders in gaming that you might get the impression that you should make “short games.”  

But in today’s blog I want to show you that Steam players love long games! They consider gaming their hobby. The whole point of hobbies is to fill time and a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands.  To them, respecting their time means filling it with lots of deep gameplay. 

I wanted to write about this today because I have recently seen a bunch of indie games underperform because I think that, although they were beautiful, they were ultimately short linear experiences that left players unfulfilled.  

I pulled a couple of reviews from these games that highlight this sentiment:

Text: Limited Gameplay Depth: Some players might find the gameplay mechanics, and puzzles to be relatively simple and lacking in challenge, which could lead to a less satisfying experience for those seeking more intricate gameplay.

Also I love to look at these “checklist” reviews that a lot of players leave. Look at the scale this particular gamer uses to classify games.  A 15 hour game is considered “short.”

Length: Very short (0-3 hours). Short (3-15 hours), Average (15-50 hours), Long (50-90 hours), Extremely long (90-110 hours), No ending.

Respecting this reviewer’s time means 16-50 HOURS. Steam players like long games.

I don’t like long games but, I am an extremely online weirdo who spends a lot of my time debating and making games instead of just playing them. The typical Seam gamer is not like me. Although the “Respect your time” phrase is good most people who say it are people who review games for a living and must play through them before they get paid. You need to understand what the typical Steam audience wants: deep, long games. 

In today’s post I am going to look at the types of deep games that have deep gameplay that respects the typical steam players time by giving them a lot of content.

The resource triangle

I made this resource triangle to kind of explain this. 

Games can have 3 attributes that greatly affect whether Steam players like it or not: 

  1. Game length (depth of gameplay and hours of playtime)
  2. Graphics (what it looks like and how it animates)
  3. Quality (bug free, controls, and animations, aren’t janky)

(for the rest of the blog I will refer to these as “The 3 attributes”)

AAA games have the budget and resources to do all 3 attributes excellently. They have teams of 100s of artists and developers. They have lots of time to develop it; for instance, the Washington Post reported that Tears of the Kingdom was delayed for 1 year just to work on polish (aka quality.) Indies can’t do this.

Unfortunately, indies only have the budget or time to pick at most 2 attributes to maximize. Most of the time they can only maximize 1. When you are new at game dev, you will be lucky if you can even get 1 right.

For instance Minecraft picked Gamelength and Quality as the attributes to maximize. It is an endlessly deep game where you can do anything, and it was fairly bug free but the graphics were greatly simplified. 

Minecraft: 

  • Game length: HIGH
  • Graphics: LOW
  • Quality: Medium

The same thing goes for the original Dwarf Fortress.

Stray on the other hand optimized for Graphics and Quality. The graphics and quality levels are AAA level but the developers had to have a shorter game to compensate.

Stray

  • Game length: LOW
  • Graphics: HIGH
  • Quality: HIGH

As this Stray reviewer said, it is a pretty short game.

Text: It’s ~16 hours of playtime if you want to 100% Stray without following guides all of your playtime (only for certain achievements), so it’s a pretty short game for the price.

I think the length of Stray is just fine and wish all games were this long, but I am a weirdo internet man who spends more time writing about games instead of playing them. Steam players love long games.

Why do so many indies make roguelikes?

It’s almost a cliché that indies make roguelikes. But there is a reason for this: the roguelike metagame allows for the same content to be played over and over again while still being interesting. The genre’s focus on persistent upgrades, randomization, procedural level generation, and the emergent gameplay allows the same graphics and player animations to be remixed endlessly. There is much much less bespoke content. Roguelikes use all the parts of the buffalo. 

The roguelike meta-structure is a hack to extend gameplay time without having to hire a huge art team to generate a ton of graphics.

Alternatives to Roguelikes

But roguelikes aren’t the only genre that allows you to escape the “short game” trap.

If you have read my blog for a while you know that I constantly remind you that successful indie games typically fall in the sand-box-y, farm-y, manage-y, build-y, craft-y, open-world survival-craft-y, simulation genres. You will notice that all of these genres have complicated, long gameplay by relying on deep meta systems where emergent gameplay arises from their combinations, not the number of bespoke graphics. 

The genres that typically fail at indie scale often have linear, level-based, puzzle-focused gameplay. My theory is that small indie teams just don’t have the resources to provide enough high-quality content to satisfy Steam players. Linear games require so much bespoke content that players run past in a matter of minutes.

The first game I ever made was a puzzle platformer. This was one of the puzzles. It took weeks to design, create graphics for, code, and test, and yet people could beat it in about 5 minutes. This puzzle was the one that woke me up to the bespoke content trap.

AAA studios can release linear, story-based, FPS, 3rd person shooters, souls-likes, open world games, and platformers because they just throw hundreds of artists and designers at the problem. They have the budget to spend years making content and don’t mind if a player only sees it one time. 

Genre traps

Here are a few indie-beloved genres that I feel fall into this bespoke content trap and can wreck studios.

  • Souls-like – This is a very popular genre among Steam players but to make a game that will satisfy them, you must match FromSoftware in quality, graphics, and depth. These are very very picky fans. So you might be able to mock up a cool screenshot that looks great, but the fans are merciless if there is the slightest hint of jank. They also expect so much content that there is no way a small indie team can produce one and maintain quality.
  • MMO – This joke has been made far too much for most indies.
  • FPS – If you try to match Half-life or Doom level of graphics you will fail because they require a farm of artists and level designers. However some indies get around this by reducing the graphical fidelity (Boomer Shooters) or adding an interesting metagame layer to reuse content (Neon White).
  • Immersive sim – Tackling this genre can destroy even AAA studios. It is such a hard genre to create content for because of the multiple ways fans expect to play through it. Some indies are able to get over this by implementing some elements of immersive sims without going full Systemshock (See Void Bastards or Dusk).

So what is my advice?

People become indie game developers because they love playing games and usually their formative experience was playing AAA games. So when fresh-faced indie developers brainstorm ideas for what they are going to make, they often think in terms of content heavy genres that AAA studios make: linear FPSs, RPGs, open world games, souls-likes, 2D and 3D platformers (in the Nintendo style.)

Unfortunately this often becomes a quagmire. 

It is very very risky for indies to make those games because they require far too many resources. As a result, indies must cut corners on the 3 attributes (Quality, Graphics, and Gameplay length.) Few indies make cuts in the right ways and end up critically harming the enjoyment of the game in the eyes of the time-rich Steam audience.

But there are several genres that are very viable but indies don’t know much about them because they aren’t typically made by AAA studios and they don’t typically make it to consoles. These are the weird genres that PC players on Steam love and they provide hours and hours of gameplay with relatively less content. Familiarize yourself with these genres because they are quite approachable for small development teams to make without having to sacrifice Quality and Graphics because the Game Length comes from the game design.

Genres that can satisfy Steam players’ content expectations:

There are a few linear, narrative genres that succeed at indie scale:

  • Horror games – these work because the graphics can be cruder, and darkness can obscure environments meaning fewer development resources. Plus, fans of these genres like shorter games because how can you be terrified for 20 hours straight? 
  • Visual Novels – Fans also appreciate shorter content and the text-focused gameplay typically means cheaper and less resource intense content creation. 
  • Wholesome games – Short narrative games like Unpacking and A Short Hike can survive on bespoke content but graphics and quality must be very very high. Also the writing must be very good.

The moral of the story here is:

  • Steam players actually, really, do like long games (15-20 hours). 
  • Please be very, very cautious in trying to make games with linear, level-based meta-structures because they require huge development resources to produce enough content to satisfy the 20-ish hour appetite that most Steam players have. 
  • Familiarize yourself with the hidden genres I list above that don’t get as much attention from the mainstream press, or gamers who typically only play AAA games. 
  • Look at making more strategic, crafty, build-y, simulation-y games.