How Live Service Video Games Are Poisoning The Industry

7. Every Game Wants To Be A Sandbox

Part of the reason that games have gotten longer, especially across the latest console generation, is that the in-vogue sub-genre has moved from being first-person shooters to open world sandboxes. In the heyday of the Xbox 360 era, it didn't matter if the latest FPS only had a five-hour campaign, as long as it had a killer multiplayer suite that could sustain countless matches and rematches, it could become a phenomenon.

Thanks to Ubisoft and Rockstar, though, big franchises were then expected to be these huge, freeform experiences, with a sandbox filled with main missions, side quests and random activities that demanded the player's attention. Consequently, the average length of a game jumped from 10 hours, to 20, to 40 and higher - and sometimes that was just the main story, not counting everything else required to get 100% completion.

While on the surface that was great, as players were getting way more for their money than they were used to, every major franchise adopting a sandbox structure ultimately led to uninspired, homogenised game design that can, if not done right, actively damage the enjoyment of certain titles.

There is a reason why the industry embraced longer sandbox games, however, and that's because they were seen as a great way to stop players buying a title, completing the main story in a handful of hours and immediately trading it in. If it included 10s of hours of busywork - just compelling enough to not become mundane - then players would be less incentivised to move onto the next game immediately.

Of course, developers soon realised that players not trading in their titles meant they could also continue to pay money for a game they already owned.