What is really a shorter game though?.
With the advent of indie and mobile games can we say 1-2 hours is on the short side? (personally think thats where the notion of people wanting shorter games comes from).
I think most people expect value for money/time.

I have purposely been buying point-and-click adventure games because I wanted something I can complete in shorter amount of time. It's a nice break from time sinks like RPGs.

You mean blatant, obvious lies like: "We're retracting the release of Devotion because 'many gamers' asked us not to release it!" ?

Yes, companies who stoop to such lies that insult the intelligence of their customers don't deserve any support!

One of the very first things people always ask about when it comes to a new game is how long it is. So I don't believe that developer argument, I mean, who exactly have they been asking? It does not match the reality of what I've been seeing.

People generally want longer games but also the option of finishing it sooner. If they really like the game, they want the option of continuation, through open-world-ness, new game +, random or procedural map generation etc.

I think certain developers are too eager to equate "some" with "all" or "most", in the same way they are equating "games journalists" with "[actual] gamers" to justify some sort of change.

If there's one thing I absolutely hate, it's those people who make those arguments on forums which go something like this: "I am a person with a full-time job/family/wife who doesn't have much time for video games, therefore all devs just make their games shorter and less complex for me", really makes me want to reach through my monitor and strangle them.

One thing I remember:
* Playing one of the Nintendo 64 Zelda games, which can take a while to get going, and which are fairly long.
* Then, playing Zelda 2, and noticing how much progress I can make in a short amount of time.

So did you not read any of the posts in this topic? Also, developers have actual data, through things like achievements and other telemetry, where they can see for themselves how much time people spend before quitting. No, I specifically want shorter games that have a defined end, where you're just 100% done, and you move on. Not all the time, no, and maybe not even the majority of the time, but I do want that. (Also, the number of times I've ever actually played a new game+ is zero. I've started a few out of curiosity but don't stick with it for long.) I think certain people are too eager to think that "I want a thing" means "everybody wants that thing" because they can't comprehend that they're not the center of the universe and their opinions are not the majority. Some are also eager to think that a few loud people on the internet are representative of anything.

I'm with you and think your comment here should be high-rated.

It is easy to look at open-world games and say they are bloated, but look at NON-open-world games and this phenomenon is very clear. Even big name franchises are coming with less actual content or quality of content. Indie devs are among the worst offenders in many cases since the customer is being asked to pay significant amounts of money for what would've been freeware/shareware/a tech demo back in the day.

I think there is a real disconnect between the modern mentality and what I come to games for. A modern indie game will typically have a cool mechanic and base a short experience around that. Meanwhile I want to be lost in another world, see its lore, become completely immersed. I know many old games were indeed pretty short, like Sonic and Resident Evil. But I would want to stay in their world, which I'm not really seeing happen in modern short games.

Counterpoint: Earthbound is one hell of a slow burn. Link's Awakening has a windup, and Link to the Past has the whole escape sequence before the game actually starts.

Sure, the addition of polygons does tend to tweak the pace a bit, but picking out the N64, whose wings were fledgeling (so they had to organically teach players how to get to grips with then unknown controls) maybe not the best choice.

They very much are. You're not asking for shorter games, but you do not speak for the entire market. The devs go where the money is.
The same thing happened with the adventure game genre. Big publishers became unwilling to fund point and click adventures in the early 2000s, not because the market for them had shrunk but simply because it hadn't grown at anywhere near the rate of other genres such as FPS. Well this is a ridiculous and hyperbolic way of saying "vote with your wallet". By all means don't buy things you don't want, but they're not your enemy.

The same applies to you mate.

My input was not directed towards other posts, but to the original post. If I wanted to reply to indivdual posts I would have done so directly, that should be self-evident.

I don't care at all about what you want, my reply was based on my observations of how gamers typically behave.
A typical behaviour when a new game is launched, is to ask about about how long the game is. It's an important factor that even games journalists write about in their reviews. How long a game is, is therefore something even reviewers care about and affects their ratings.

User reviews are even harsher than journalists when it comes to game length. It's highly common for good games to get lower ratings simply because the game is quite short, it's common even here at GOG.

What you want is not the discussion here. The rise in popularity of rogue-likes, Souls-likes, and sandbox games shows that a very large number of gamers want longevity in some form or other. To the extent that even tripla-A publishers started implementing modes that made their games longer.

The data they have access to is not a realiable surce; if the game is bad, mediocre or filled with bugs, people will stop playing it. To interpret this as people wanting shorter games is clearly wrong. It coud give certain developers an excuse to make their games shorter.

Both ALttP and Link's Awakening are still much faster paced than Ocarina of Time.

ALttP's escape sequence has the advantage that it is real dungeon gameplay, so it doesn't feel slow. Also, the game doesn't slow things down afterwords; you are going across the world and exploring dungeons, which feels like the core of Zelda gameplay.

LA is where you start having to do busywork just to get access to the next dungeon, and so it tends to feel slower than ALttP. It's also where the series switched from a combat focus to a puzzle focus, and is the first Zelda game that I felt to be somewhat of a disappointment (though at least it didn't have the insta-fail stealth sections that appeared in later games in the series).

Earthbound was actually disappointing in some aspects for me. One that I distinctly remember is that the enemy AI is not at all intelligent about its use of healing spells. (I've seen enemies use Healing Ω when there were no dead enemies to revive.)

Ocarina of Time...?
I consider it to be long, but it was really good and well done too! One of the best games of all time.

(Except... *cof* Water *cof* temple! *COF COF* Jabu-Jabu's *COF COF COOF* Belly *cof* *cof*
Excuse me.)

Water Temple (excluding the boss) was my favorite part of the game!

What ruined the game for me is actually the two insta-fail stealth sections. Those two sections single-handedly ruined the game for me (and the continued appearance of such sequences ruined the entire series for me, except the earlier games), are very not Zelda-like, and are incredibly infuriating to try and play through them. Insta-fail stealth sequences do not belong in a Zelda game, or in any game for that matter that has any other content, for that matter.

I hope you have your mask on while typing this.