Dev slams focus on game length: "Who cares about value for money?"

Would you rather play an amazing game for one hour or a tedious one for 50?

That’s basically the question being asked by Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who has teamed up with Syndicate and Chronicles of Riddick creators Starbreeze Studios to make new digital game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

"I feel many games have come to a certain point where you feel that you could have taken away three to four hours easily," Fares told Eurogamer. "If you play Max Payne 3, after one hour you’ve played the whole game. They just only change the setting. I love Rockstar, but what?

"Why should we ask how long a game is? The question should be is it a good game or a bad game, not how long it is. This game is as long as it has to be. If it’s 20 or one, it doesn’t matter.

"Who cares about value for money? You never question how long a movie was – people say they put this money down and they want value for their time. But value for your time is if I get three really good hours, that’s value for my time. Then I can do something else. It’s not that I replay ten hours of shit."

Fares unsurprisingly says that Brothers shuns extended length in favour of an experience that will leave a lasting impact on the player.

"Brothers is the opposite to those games – everything you see, it happens only once. It is a three or four hour game. We could have made it ten hours if we wanted, but it’s important to keep the player curious, and on a journey.

"People talk about Journey being short. It’s not a bad thing to be short if it’s strong. In many ways, Journey is longer than all the games out there because it’s with you – maybe not when you’re with the controller, but it stays with you."