Former Rockstar president and Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies wants his new studio Build a Rocket Boy's debut game MindsEye to take around 20 hours to complete because, well, who has time for anything else?
Echoing Fallout creator Tim Cain's recent YouTube video about hefty, 100-hour games, Benzies tells GamesIndustry.biz in a new interview that "I don't think you can have filler content in games."
"I think people want the meat, and they want the potatoes," Benzies continues to say about MindsEye, which so far sounds like a more linear, action-oriented Cyberpunk 2077. "We've tried to make as much meat as we can, if that makes sense."
The game will take "20ish" hours to beat, which Benzies concludes is a "good length for a game."
"What you also find through data," he says, "is that [with] big games, people don't play them all. The majority of people – 60% or 70% of people – don't actually play games to the end."
"So when you're making something, I would prefer [...] [that] you had the whole experience from start to finish, and not create this 200-hour game," Benzies explains. "Create something that is finishable, but have some side things that will fill out the universe."
At the moment, MindsEye is set to release on June 10 at $60. "On price," adds Benzies, "the world's in a funny place. People are worried about the price of eggs. So value for money, I think people appreciate that when times are difficult."
Exec on former GTA 5 lead's new open-world game MindsEye says negative reactions have come from a "financed" and "concerted effort to trash the game and the studio"
