Shawn Layden Wants Tighter 20-to-25-Hour Games Over 100-Hour Epics

Former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios CEO Shawn Layden has made the case for a more contained kind of big-budget game: a roughly 20-to-25-hour experience built to stay compelling from start to finish, rather than an 80-, 90- or 100-hour epic whose length is partially sustained by repetition.

Speaking on the Expansion Pass podcast, Layden said he has worked on games with enormous running times and does not believe every hour of those experiences is equally strong. His example was deliberately simple: sending players across a desert to find a red key, then making them return to use it on a red door. The point is not that travel, gates, or backtracking are inherently bad. It is that they can become a means of extending a game without adding proportional dramatic, mechanical, or emotional value.

“I would rather see a world where we have good 20 to 25 hour games that are just action-packed,” Layden said, comparing that momentum to a John Woo film.

That position lands in a familiar tension for modern games. Players regularly ask for value, and raw length is an easy number to advertise. At the same time, a game’s duration is not the same thing as its density. A shorter game can offer a complete campaign, room for its mechanics to evolve, and a satisfying ending. A much longer one can do that too—but only if its additional missions, places, systems, and narrative beats justify the time they request from players.

What Layden means by “quality hours”

Layden’s argument is best understood as a critique of padding, not a demand that every game become short. Padding is design that chiefly exists to increase completion time: repeated tasks, long travel with little meaningful interaction, familiar mission templates, or progression gates that postpone the next substantial moment. It is different from optional depth that lets players engage more deeply with a system they already enjoy.

Open-world and sandbox games are especially exposed to this question because their appeal often rests on scale and player freedom. A sandbox, in this context, is a game structure that gives players a broad space and a selection of activities rather than pushing them through a narrow sequence alone. That format can create discovery, experimentation, and a convincing sense of place. But a large map also creates a practical creative obligation: developers must fill it with activities worth doing, and must make enough of those activities feel distinct.

Layden’s red-key illustration is really about that obligation. A locked door can serve a story or teach the player how a world works. It can create anticipation, encourage exploration, or make an eventual shortcut feel rewarding. The problem begins when the same loop is repeated without a fresh challenge, surprising context, or meaningful change in the player’s relationship to the game.

That distinction matters because “less is more” is not automatically a better design rule. A 20-hour game can still be repetitive; a 100-hour game can sustain its length through variety and ambition. Layden is proposing a production target, not a universal measure of artistic merit. His preference is for games that remove the weaker stretches rather than treating duration as a goal by itself.

Why runtime has become a development question

The debate is not only about what players enjoy. It is also about the increasing cost and risk of making major games. Layden connected smaller-scale projects with an opportunity to slow, if not reverse, escalating development costs. He argued that building toward a more focused template could reduce some of the pressure attached to game production.

That does not mean a 20-to-25-hour game is automatically inexpensive. A contained campaign can still require expensive art, animation, performance, design, engineering, audio, accessibility work, testing, localization, and platform support. Likewise, a shorter route through the main story does not reveal how much optional material sits around it. But scope remains important. Every additional region, quest line, cinematic sequence, character arc, enemy type, and gameplay feature can create further work across several disciplines.

In that sense, scope is more than map size or number of missions. It is the total promise a game makes: the environments it contains, the systems it supports, the interactions it allows, and the quality level players expect from each of those pieces. A tightly bounded project may give a team more chance to refine what it has already committed to, instead of spreading effort across a much larger set of content.

Layden’s comments arrive alongside frequent discussion of blockbuster budgets. Estimates have placed projects including Battlefield 6, Hideo Kojima’s Physint, and GTA 6 in the hundreds of millions. Those figures should be treated as estimates rather than a standardized accounting comparison, but the broader concern is clear: when projects become extremely expensive, commercial expectations rise with them.

That pressure can influence what kinds of games get made. A publisher facing an enormous investment may see a very large campaign, a huge world, or an extensive feature set as a safer value proposition. Yet those same commitments can add cost, complexity, and risk. Layden’s preferred answer is a deliberately smaller target: make the core experience hard to put down, then avoid building hours that do not meet the same standard.

Not every side activity is “faff”

The conversation should not turn optional content into a villain. Side quests can deepen character writing, provide alternate challenges, reward curiosity, and offer a gentler pace between major story beats. For some players, they are the main reason a game feels personal rather than merely efficient. The issue is whether side content feels authored with purpose or resembles a reusable checklist.

That is why the discussion is not neatly divided between linear games and open worlds. Both can be excellent or bloated. A linear action game may interrupt its strongest ideas with too many nearly identical combat arenas. An open-world adventure may give every region a distinctive reason to explore it. What matters is whether the game’s structure keeps creating meaningful decisions and memorable moments.

Several major series cited in the wider discussion around Layden’s remarks—Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy, and the Final Fantasy VII remake project among them—show why a blanket verdict would be unhelpful. Large games can inspire affection precisely because they give players more time with worlds and characters they value. But affection for a series does not require approving every detour, repeated activity, or familiar mission structure within it. Players can appreciate scale while still recognizing moments that feel like obligation rather than discovery.

For developers, the practical takeaway is not simply to cut content. It is to make harder choices earlier: identify the game’s most important fantasy, decide which mechanics genuinely serve it, and avoid expanding every promising concept into a major system. For players, the potential benefit is clearer expectations. A 20-to-25-hour campaign can be presented as a complete, substantial experience rather than as a lesser version of a 100-hour game.

The rental-era explanation—and its limits

Layden also traced part of the industry’s attachment to length back to rental culture in the 1990s. Developers had an incentive to ensure a rented game could not be finished too quickly over a weekend, he said. The idea helps explain why difficulty spikes, replay requirements, and other delaying tactics became associated with perceived value.

That historical observation does not mean today’s long games are simply relics of game rentals. Modern large-scale games are built around many different goals, including exploration, ongoing progression, optional storylines, and expansive simulation. Still, Layden’s point is useful because it asks whether old assumptions about runtime remain embedded in modern design. A feature that once helped prevent a rapid rental completion may not automatically serve players who have a crowded library, limited free time, and dozens of other games competing for attention.

It also raises a value question that is more complicated than hours-per-dollar. Time is a cost to players as well as a benefit. A game that respects a player’s time can be valuable even if it is shorter, while a much longer title may only feel valuable if its later hours remain engaging. This is not an argument against players who want sprawling adventures; it is an argument that the market needs room for projects that are confidently focused.

A case for variety in AAA ambitions

Layden’s proposal is ultimately a call for a healthier mix of scales. The industry does not need to abandon enormous games, nor do players need to abandon them. Some concepts genuinely call for a long journey, a broad landscape, or a vast collection of systems. But if every major project is expected to be a maximal one, developers face an escalating burden to make more content, at higher fidelity, for more platforms and with more interconnected features.

A reliable place for sharply paced 20-to-25-hour games could offer another path. It could allow teams to concentrate on a smaller set of ideas, give players more completed experiences in the time they have available, and potentially limit the upward march of production costs that Layden highlighted. The crucial test would remain the same at any length: whether the next hour gives the player a good reason to keep holding the controller.

The broader business backdrop makes that question difficult to ignore. As spending rises and layoffs continue to affect the industry, conversations about scope are no longer merely aesthetic. They are about sustainability, risk, and what a successful game is permitted to look like. For another perspective on how commercial models can shape those calculations, see this look at Game Pass economics and sales estimates.