(Video on the hidden costs of long playtimes in modern games
I still don't necessarily agree with this. I do agree about quality over quantity. And yes, I'd rather play a game where its 6 hours of fun fills out its 6 hours of play-time rather than 6 hours of fun spread out over a 40-hour experience.
However, I've been really rolling my eyes lately at the concept of games being beaten for the sake of beating them. So often now I hear that people just arbitrarily hate long games because "Waah I only have about 5 hours a week to play video games as an adult". A game's length has nothing to do with how much time you can spend on it. What matters is how fun it is.
If you're enjoying yourself, it shouldn't matter what game it is. Whether it's the same game for 100 sessions or 100 games in one session, what matters is the answer to this question: Are you having fun?
The problem with modern video games isn't that they're too long, because the length of games really hasn't changed over the years. The problem is that developers have no idea how to pace their games, but audiences are obsessed with beating them all anyway because of some combination of FOMO and time-sunk fallacy. Video games aren't being enjoyed, they're being consumed. And that's why all these people are coming out and complaining that games are too long.