The main element here is that it kills short games and short form game experiences, because players can play the game through and refund it before the refund window closes. Any short form game experience like that has pretty severe pressure to increase the runtime to avoid getting refunded. Other than that, it doesn't have a huge effect on things. Games have a huge incentive to hook players within the first few minutes, let alone hours, because we must. Generally speaking, the amount of effort a player is willing to put into a game is directly proportional to the cost for that player to obtain that game. When games are hard to obtain, we value them more. When games are easy to obtain, we value them less. Since games have become so easy to obtain, there is a commensurate increase in need to hook players faster.

When I was a child, new games were incredibly rare and difficult to obtain for me. Since I could only purchase a handful of games a year as a child, I spent a lot of effort determining which I would choose and I would spend a lot of time playing them because I wanted to ensure that effort and choice were worthwhile. I spent so much time playing and replaying those games because I wanted to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment I could out of them - even the bad ones. I would be willing to give any new game I got significantly more time before I gave up on it because I lacked other options.

Today there are huge numbers of games available for extremely cheap or free. Steam sales, Epic Game Store giveaways, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, EA Play, bundles, freemium games, and so on are all available. Most are available within minutes or even seconds. This means that there is almost zero cost associated with them to the player - the majority of the cost is the time it takes to install the game and try to play it. Since there is no cost, there is no inherent buy-in or effort the player is willing to put into the game. This means that any game that fails to hook the player within the first few minutes will probably lose the player's interest and the player will move on to the next thing. There is no reason for the player to bother spending the effort to get to the good part.

This is one of the saddest things to me as a dev, because every single game that gets discarded almost immediately for not having a hook within the first few minutes was built by a team who did their best to build a fun and compelling experience, and it means that players can easily miss a game this way that could be really fun and engaging for them. Unfortunately, this is the way the incentives line up and, thus, the expected outcome.

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