
It's been over a year now since Xbox's Major Nelson announced his departure from Microsoft after over 20 years there, but clearly he's still a big fan of Xbox and gaming and general - regularly sharing his thoughts on social media.
This week, he weighed in on a discussion in which Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson questioned whether publishers will double-down on the live service formula or perhaps look at creating more streamlined, shorter games for lower prices.
The Major seems to agree with the latter idea, also suggesting that not every game needs a Season Pass:
Everyone will have their own opinion on the topic, but we're pretty much aligned with what Larry Hryb is saying here - just this week we've been loving Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions which is a cheaper game that doesn't even have microtransactions! Of course, you could look at things in a more cynical manner as well, with Forbes' Paul Tassi suggesting that we may be looking at a future where shorter games become the norm - but still at high prices.
Anyway, if you're wondering what Major Nelson is up to these days, he just recently announced his move to the Community team at Unity, where he'll be collaborating with developers to help "shape the future of real-time gaming and experiences". In his time at Xbox, Larry worked in a variety of roles including Senior Project Manager and Senior Director of Corporate Communications, and was known for being the face of Xbox's marketing efforts.
Do you agree with what the Major is suggesting here? Let us know down in the comments below.
Comments 22
Agreed. Games use to get sequels 2-3 years after release. Now it's close to 6 years. If Halo had the kind of development cycle as it does now, then Halo 3 would have come out in 2019 and ODST wouldn't have been released until 2025.
Games don't have to shoot for the moon every time they come out. A 20-hour story use to be more than acceptable for a release. People also paid full price for them (i.e. Mass Effect). Now it seems everything has to have a 10-year plan.
Do you agree with what the Major is suggesting here?
Kind of, but we still have Indie games and I don't see them going anywhere just yet.
I would rather let developers make the games they want to make, be that a 15 hour "indie" game or 100+ hour epic.
Just stop forcing devs to make games they have no interest in.
I personally prefer games be the length of RE titles. I’d rather have a solid 10-20 hour game than a bloated 60 hour game.
Would I be happier with shorter games?
I already am with many indies which don't outstay their game mechanics and remain fun to the end. But it isn't one size fits all, I also like some longer epic games. It all depends if the game mechanics get tired.
But many AAA games DO have a problem with over-padding their games with unnecessary repetitive content which often makes you wish they were tighter experiences. Especially open world games. Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed are the worst offenders but many more do the same.
It isn't just open worlds though many games just stick around for too long as if longer playtime equals better value. It may do for some, but not for me.
You mean like how gaming used to be? I agree, Larry.
Well, we have an example of this. Xbox released Hi-Fi Rush at $30, and that resulted in them shutting the studio down. The big publishers, of which Xbox is now the second biggest (behind Tencent), don't have an interest in this.
They don't want to make a game that costs $10 million that might double its budget. They think that is a waste of time. They want to make a game that costs $150 million that might make $1 billion. And the only way to get to that amount of revenue is a long-running live service with a bunch of microtransactions.
Indeed not every release has to be AAA nor dose it have to be "all new" I'll happy pay for stuff like ODST or the "sequel-expansions" things they did to AC2 l.
I'd also take stuff like an "offical standalone" version of things like Fallout London.
Agree with Larry here. You only have to look at Nintendo to see how it’s done!
No idea who this bloke is, but I agree with what he says!
I feel like this is already a strength for xbox. They have a lot of variety in game type, game length, and game price. Perhaps more than any other publisher.
Don’t let Phil see this he will say we need more indies
Some of the games I enjoyed the most are 100+ hours games. Would it be cool for shorter games to be cheaper? Yeah.
I'd just be happy with games at all at this point, at least from team green.
Yeah, basically the PS2/Dreamcast days. But we saw how it worked out for Tango...
Legend? The guy who did those staged interviews with Xbox architects in 2020, getting them to say that series s will only have lower resolutions but have the same visual set as series x games? That legend?
A legendary con man.
I would love to go back to the days where games would take 2-3 years to develop and take 8-20 hours to beat.
More things like Assassin's Creed Mirage!
Doesn’t this happen to a degree anyway?
Both Astrobot and AC mirage are closer to the £50 mark at release than the £70. Helldivers was £35. And many undies are £20-40. (Examples of a few this year)
But I guess most major publishers will want to spend less time on development while charging same price.
Yes. Stop making mammoth stupidly long games that cost ridiculously large sums of money to produce. I'm way more likely to jump onto a strong 5-10 hour game than a bloated for the sake of it 200 hour borefest.
We need more B games, more low budget games. Graphics and AAA budgets are killing the industry. We need uglier, shorter, and fiercely more creative games, made by smaller teams.
We see these large games where you have to commit a significant part of your life too. I miss the days where the focus was on story and game innovation instead of putting gamers like gerbils in a spinning wheel endlessly taking their money in one microtransaction filled game.
And wouldn't it be great if a game shipped on day one as a complete package that had very few bugs and didn't feel like you were buying an alpha or beta game?
And when you finished a game you were actually finished until a new sequel came out?
At one time, I bought games very often. At least four per month. Now, I have more or less stopped buying games unless the game is focused around a story/campaign, it has a definitive start and end, does not require microtransactions to progress at a decent pace, and is a decent price.
What makes AAA games being filled with so much worthless bloat even worse, is it's the SAME worthless bloat across all games, for 10 years. I'd rather play a 6-20 hour game multiple times than play a 100+ hour slog once. That's why you get more people hyping up re-releases of things from over a decade ago instead of what the corpos think will be their biggest hit of the year.
I’m nowadays time poor rather than financially poor, so I have a preference to a (denser) game that can tell a story in 5-15 hours rather than something I’ll need to commit weeks to. While I do appreciate them, expansive RPGs or open world Ubisoft games are a bit hard for me to commit to.
So yeah, I’m all for shorter games and I’ve never been one to base the value of a game by the hours/cost ratio.
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