Side content can help a world in a game feel more alive. Helps immersion.

Developers pad games with filler content because people demand 30-50 hours play time for "epic" games. The problem is to fill that 30-50 hours will "real" gameplay would require another 8-12 months of development time and another $30-$40 million in budget. 

That's actually the reality of what's going on. So developers just pad the shit out of these games with mindless filler content. 

The problem with FF7 Remake isn't that it's three games, it would likely have taken them 8-9 years to remake the entire 3 game trilogy at the current quality, the problem is they didn't embrace the Switch, XBox, and PC platforms as well. Yes, you would have to tweak things a bit for Switch, but ultimately you need to have a high roof of userbase to do the 3 game anthology thing, not doing that was a mistake that probably is costing them 2.5-3 million copies per installment. 

I agree with PC and possibly Xbox, but that game on Nintendo Switch would just be unplayable blurry mess... Switch 2 can get entire trilogy in 2028.

They ported Dragon Quest XI to the Switch and it looked and played fine and that was a PS4 game. 

Maybe too you don't need to go balls to the wall with every stupid graphical effect, they have a version of FF7 Remake (Ever Crisis) that looks fine even on smartphones during the battle sequences it basically uses the same assets as FF7 Remake. 

I mean relative to the alternate ... destroying what was one of the best selling franchises in Japan and turning it into a joke sales wise, they've driven that IP into the toilet with bad business decisions. Was a few shiny textures and higher end sparkly effects here and there really worth cutting off a userbase of 140+ million and the no.1 platform in Japan by 10 country miles. 

FF would sell worse on Switch than on Playstation even in Japan. Too much effort/time/cost for a small return. The decline has little to do with the platform they're on, and Japan is not nearly as significant a market as it once was.

First of all, games can be on both the Playstation and Switch and the world isn't going to explode. Dragon Quest XI was made for both systems. FF7 Remake on the Switch as a port of similar quality to DQXI or Witcher 3 or DOOM probably sells about 1.5-2 million extra copies, which isn't nothing. 

Secondly, a big part of the reason the Final Fantasy brand which used to open at nearly 3 million opening week in Japan and is now in the toilet fishing around for 246,000 is because Square has tied all their fortunes to the Playstation brand in Japan, and people in Japan don't want home only consoles. 

So they've watched their entire audience based pretty much walk away in Japan. I have to wonder if it was worth it, what did they get out of it? Did the "pretty graphics" cause the franchise to explode in sales in the West? No, it didn't, FF7 and FF8 even were the peak sales for the franchise even in the West, since then they've been trending below that, but in Japan the franchise has completely fallen apart. 

You need to cultivate a fan base too, Dragon Quest and Monster Hunter can sell millions on Nintendo platforms, because they've also had a steady flow of cultivating an audience there, Square never really bothered with Nintendo and mainline Final Fantasy games after FF6 (other than remakes of older games), and really I think long term it was to their detriment. 

Lol.  DQ11 is cell shaded and isn't a demanding game.  

The easiest fix for reducing development costs is cutting the fluff.  To each their own but I find the fluff boring and worthless.  Not sure why a game needs half a dozen silly mini games and herding cats as a side quest.  

10 to 20 hours is the perfect length for a game.  

DOOM, DOOM Eternal, Wolfenstein, Mortal Kombat X, etc. aren't cell shaded. 

Look Square can argue this until they're blue in the face, the fact of the matter is they've mismanaged this franchise from something that used to open to 2.5+ million in Japan to a pathetic 246k opening. Was it worth it? I don't think so, even in the West, the sales of the franchise have gone south from FF7 even with prettier graphics, so what the fuck is really the point? It's not causing an increase of sales of the franchise any where in the world and by not having any foot hold with platforms that actually sell in Japan (Nintendo game systems) they've destroyed a once proud franchise there. 

Meanwhile Capcom sold how many millions of copies of Monster Hunter Rise on the Switch? 

10-20 hours doesn't sell, reviewers will point it out and all these studios are afraid the word will get out that it's a short game on the shelves sitting next to other games that offer 40, 50, 60 hours. That's why they don't want to do it. Again people don't take 30 seconds to look at it from the studios POV. 

If FF7 Remake Part I could be beaten in say 10 hours, you would have a whole other segment of people on the internet loudly complaining that Square-Enix is ripping them off. The easy answer is to simply pad games with filler content that is cheap to do and doesn't require an extra year of development and get the play time up to double. Again this is yet another byproduct of massive game budgets, to create an actual game with actual 30+ hours of gameplay with high end visuals becomes so costly that studios have to instead make what is really a 10-15 hour game and then pad it up to 25-30+ hours with filler that doesn't cost them a lot (ie: have the main character have to go ... find a cat all over the existing map). 

10 to 20 hour games don't sell?  Mario wonder, Odyssey, GoW, last of us, uncharted, re4, etc....  sold fine.  That take is hot garbage.

Depends on the genre, but not that many of them and the ones that really do have decades worth of fanbase built in. 

If you're making a new IP, and you don't have the luxury of nostalgia and you're trying to make a name for your "big budget AAA" game one of the most devastating things would likely be some smart ass reviewer on IGN on GameSpot saying your game can be beaten in like 10 hours and it's not really worth buying because of that and your 5 years of development is tarred and feathered in a 5 minute review. That's why developers prefer to add padding to bring that number up. 

If Square made a 10-12 hour Final Fantasy (mainline) there definitely would be people would be angry and upset about it. 

Sony is spending $200+ million (probably soon $400 million) just to make a God of War game that can be beaten on a weekend, that doesn't really speak well of the future of those types of games. What if you want to make something that looks 2-3x better but also want 30-40 hours of actual gameplay ... what's the budget for that? Half a billion?