Shorter Games with Worse Graphics Really Would Be Better For Everyone, Actually

By Grace Benfell | October 17, 2025 | 10:45am

Video Games Features Games industry

Shorter Games with Worse Graphics Really Would Be Better For Everyone, Actually

From 1997 to 2002, a five year span, we got five mainline Final Fantasy games. Those five games are all classics in their own right. Each one is daring and experimental, offering something quite different from each other. In the last 10 years, we have gotten four. Two of those are parts of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy. Final Fantasy 15 itself was planned to have several expansions, which were cancelled in one of the most hilarious moments in gaming advertising. How often can you say a publisher held a livestream to announce that they were cancelling a game that was already out? The Final Fantasies of the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 were among the most expensive and high profile games at the time. Yet, their team sizes are dwarfed by the average Ubisoft game now. This feels wrong. As game budgets have ballooned, and as games take more and more of a place in broader pop culture, they have become less ambitious, less flexible, and more conservative. Perhaps, as the meme goes, worse graphics and shorter (or, at least, smaller) games really would be better for the medium as a whole.

It’s no secret that video games have reached an unsustainable scale. The massive failure of Concord, a game which cost hundreds of millions of dollars and was pulled from the market in two weeks, exemplifies this problem. It was a game so , fully honed for market appeal that it, in fact, appealed to no one. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was shifted from a live service game late in production, resulting in something that feels caught between worlds, unsatisfying in multiple senses. For Squaresoft in 1999, swerves and changes from entry to entry could be part of a solid business strategy. At the scale of most AAA games now, it is most often a serious failure.

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It is easy to romanticize whatever time we were playing games as children. I’m sure that, even now, there are young adults thinking of how Roblox was better 10 years ago. I both want to caution against naked nostalgia and acknowledge that it comes from a real place. Before Bungie turned to pseudo MMO madness, it was releasing classic FPSes with a clockwork regularity. Now we wait five years or more between Halo entries, all of which are unwieldy and clumsy in their own way. The reasons for this mismanagement and decay are various, but one cannot deny that scale is a part of it.

But here comes the other half, the unromantic part. So far, I’ve theorized that games have reached a massive and unsustainable scale, but video games have never been sustainable, environmentally or otherwise. They have always relied on global networks of extraction, on underpaid and overworked laborers, on a tech-forward profit motive which squashes innovation and art. Dreaming of a time when games came out more often, because they relied on smaller teams and less intensive graphical power, is still dreaming of a time when these problems were just as endemic as they are now. Imagining a sustainable video game industry means rethinking every portion of its existence.

But I think this is one part is a good one to think through, especially because it has a ready, emotional appeal. What if you didn’t need to upgrade your system or buy a new console to play exciting new games? What if new entries in storied franchises could feel new and different? What if every new game wasn’t made with a “blockbuster-or-bust” mentality? What if studios had talent who had all shipped multiple games? What if that talent was ready to work, got enough sleep and time with loved ones to be creative, could work without the c-suite breathing down their necks? All this will take more than one thing, but lowering the technological barriers would be a great place to start.

Even so, some games are going to take forever. I don’t begrudge Team Cherry for taking so long on Silksong, for example. Both short and long development cycles can be emblematic of mismanagement. But even for projects that take over five years, a more flexible iteration process and less intensive development costs can lead to more time for quality assurance, more ability to cut features that aren’t working. No game should ever be too big to fail.

I got thinking about all this because it has been 25 years since the PlayStation 2 was released. Of course, this was an advanced system at the time, certainly a visible leap over the first PlayStation. Yet, it was still pixelated enough that many games had a hazy poetry. You had serious dramas with well rendered faces, in Silent Hill 2, and fairy tales given broad, mythical gesture, like Ico. The possibility space felt wide, not narrow (though I grant, this may be a symptom of looking in retrospect), and not every game made by a major studio had to aim for blockbuster status. It is still evidence, like every system which came before it, that games can utilize less power and less manpower than they do today, and still be creatively successful and commercially popular. The benefits to the environment and to people’s well-being are obvious. Perhaps a welcome side effect is that it would be good for video games too.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.