This is not the AI summary. This is the version with the actual numbers, pulled from 425 games, by someone who has personally bounced off three open-world games this year because he ran out of weekend. I quit Assassin’s Creed Valhalla after about nine hours. Not because it was bad. Because I opened the map, saw the wall of icons, checked how long people said it took to finish, and felt my soul leave my body. A hundred and ten hours. For one game. I have a job. I have a kid. I have, on a good week, maybe five hours to play anything at all. I used to think this feeling was me getting older and slower. It is not. The games actually did get longer. I went and measured it, and the number is worse than I expected. The short version We pulled the typical playthrough length for the 25 most-rated games of every year from 2010 through 2026, using IGDB’s community time-to-beat data. The median notable release has gone from about 16 hours in the early 2010s to about 25 to 27 hours today. That is a jump of roughly 50 percent in a little over a decade. The short game did not just get rarer. It is going extinct. In 2012 and 2013, more than 40…
