For me personally, I tend to look at things in terms of costs and benefits. Through that lens, most games seem like a bad deal. In principle, I like some of the more quirky or esoteric ones, but it quickly seems like a lot to learn relative the payout.

This is where you lost me. The title of your post is about how you don’t get “long” video games, then you go about costs vs benefits.

First I tend to dismiss any kind of correlation between how long a game is and how good it is. There are fantastic games on the shorter side. there are basically infinite games that manage to be engaging through and through. There are terrible games of all lengths that are full of boring padding.

But even seeing it through the cost vs benefit lens (in a kind of naive way), wouldn’t it mean a longer game is more “worth it”?

And why is “a lot to learn” is listed as a negative? If you are enjoying what you’re doing, you probably don’t mind that it takes some time. If you don’t, why are you playing that game at all? Games are not an investment. Like all entertainment media, engaging with them is supposed to be fun, or interesting, or evoking something you want to feel right now at least.

Regarding FPS, not sure where you got that idea. They’ve been common and popular for very long. Doom was a cliche image for the public representation of video games for a long time. Big FPS games (especially the military kind) have always sold like hotcakes and were long tied with sports games for “those games that are bought by people who don’t play anything else”. If anything, they’ve progressively lost a bit of ground to third person shooters, but they were always strong.