007 First Light's 20-hour playtime is perfect for an action video game

007 First Light needn't be a minute longer

There are plenty of cyclical arguments in gaming, but few are more mind-numbing than the cost-time argument: that a so-called short game "isn’t worth" its sticker price. May’s release of 007 First Light, which sports a 20-hour runtime, seems to have reignited this interminable debate. I recently finished 007 First Light. It took me about 20 hours. Also? 20 hours is the perfect length of a video game.

Released May 27 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, 007 First Light is one of the year’s big video game success stories. After years of designing elaborate human puzzle boxes in its Hitman series, developer IO Interactive deftly applied that ethos to Ian Fleming’s luxurious world of espionage. 007 First Light is the first James Bond game in 14 years — and easily the best since GoldenEye. It’s reviewing well. It’s selling well. It’s at least part of the GOTY convo. Yet if you listen to a certain corner of the internet, you’d get the idea that 007 First Light is about as light on calories as a Spindrift.

The argument around 007 First Light’s length actually started weeks before the game was released, shortly after IO Interactive indicated how long it would take to beat the game. “I love a shorter game, but not when I've paid #65+ [sic] for it. 007 First Light looks fun, but I'll definitely wait for a sale now,” YouTuber Deez Games wrote in a tweet that has since been viewed 3.4 million times, spinning out an internet debate that has continued since launch. Just this week, on the game’s subreddit, one user posted that 007 First Light “was fun but not $70 fun.”

The most generous read on these claims is that they stem from a desire to spend one’s money as efficiently as possible. And there is a very real factor driving that anxiety. Unchecked inflation, rising costs, and stagnant wages around the globe have contributed to a period of economic uncertainty that shows no signs of ending soon. It’s natural to want the things you buy to last as long as possible — to make each dollar go as far as possible. But on a fundamental level, if that’s how you’re measuring the worth of a game, you’re looking at it as a product, not as a work of art.

Not to mention that 20 hours is a perfectly normal time for a game like this.

“Game like this,” in this case, means a cinematic action game with lavish production values. Some of the best-regarded games in that ilk of the past few years clock in at or around 20 hours. God of War (2018) takes 20.5 hours to complete the main story, according to data from the tracking site howlongtobeat.com. The Last of Us Part 2 is around 24 hours. It takes about 22 hours to finish the main story and some side stuff for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Uncharted 4? 18 hours. Shadow of the Tomb Raider? 23 hours.

This isn’t just recency bias talking: 007 First Light is on the level of those all-timers. Part of its excellence is due to its carefully considered pacing. 007 First Light eases you into the role of James Bond, through an action-movie-montage tutorial sequence and a string of slice-of-life chapters. It methodically teaches you how to sneak past guards, how to shoot them when you need to, and how to use the various Q-developed tools — from the digital camera that temporarily blinds enemies to the blowdart that guarantees they seek out the nearest trash bin for hurling — for any situation.

By the end of 007 First Light’s campaign, you feel like you’ve mastered the game’s tools and tricks. You finally get its combat down, and you start to see that its level structure quietly follows a recurring rhythm (careful espionage followed by all hell breaking lose, leading to a shootout and then a chase scene). At 20 hours, for the type of game it is, 007 First Light is just long enough. Any longer, and it would’ve drawn its gimmicks out.

I’m not holding my breath that many AAA games will follow this model, at least according to the wave of games recently shown off during 2026’s string of not-E3 pressers. Persona 6 is the latest entry in a series whose games are famously longer than multiple standard workweeks. Fable and The Blood of Dawnwalker are sprawling open-world RPGs. There’s no way Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will close out the trilogy with a shorter run time than Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s 60-hour marathon. All of these games look fascinating and well worth playing. But when every game is massive, they start to elbow each other out.

Though there’s a glimmer of hope: One major game that had a big Summer Game Fest moment is being developed by a studio that understands the art of brevity. As Insomniac Games’ Mike Daly told Eurogamer, Marvel’s Wolverine will be a linear action game. GOTY material.