While it's a meme and a joke, there's definitely truth to it. As an industry, we've already moved in that direction without people really noticing. The truth of the matter is that live service games, the kind of games that have regular content updates, are literally "shorter video games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less". We're leveraging our existing tools and assets to make more game with less effort. We've got shorter dev cycles so we scope down and crunch less. The fact that we can keep the players playing on a quick cadence is what makes it sustainable.

This approach breaks down if we're trying to ship multiple smaller games - it's hard to build up an audience that can sustain a game franchise like that. Individual launches have additional costs like marketing, certification, distribution, and so on. Getting people to buy new games is significantly harder than getting them to continue playing a game they already like.

Beyond that, building a new game typically requires significant ramping up and exploration - we need to figure out what the core gameplay is, what we're building, how we're going to create all the necessary content, establishing the tools, and so on. That takes a significant amount of time, after which we still need to actually build everything we planned out. Players expect separate games to be fundamentally different, which bites us if we're releasing smaller titles faster. This is one of the primary reasons episodic games didn't work as a business model except under very strict conditions - even going from episode to episode is a lot harder than adding on to an existing game.

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