A Brazilian video game publisher wants to defy decades of industry wisdom by promoting a line of new games based on how quickly they’ll take to complete, not by how long.

Driving the news: Flux Games is rolling out a new label called Short N Sweet, promoting games for console and PC that can be completed in as little as a sitting or two.

• The initial lineup will include the one-player/two-character game Mirrored Souls and delivery game FoodBoy.

Why it matters: Playing video games is a time-consuming pastime — one where many players, aided by marketing campaigns that brag about game length or promise multiple seasons of future content, have come to equate a game’s duration with its quality.

• Many great games do demand many hours of their players’ lives. Two of last year’s most acclaimed games, God of War Ragnarök and Elden Ring, have average completion times of 25.5 and 55.5 hours, respectively.
• Not so with Short N Sweet’s games, which may run as short as two to four hours, the label’s founder tells Axios.

What they’re saying: “A significant number of players just want to chill and play a nice, fun game on, say, a Tuesday evening or any short time window,” Short N Sweet founder Paulo Luis Santos tells Axios. “But that is surprisingly hard to find!”

• Santos says his company’s market research shows that people are looking for shorter games but can’t find them, especially on consoles.
• He also believes developers would benefit from a label that can successfully sell short games. “We really want to remove the pressure of adding content for the sake of game length, allowing developers to make their game last as long as they envision it to keep it to the highest quality they can.”
• Though Santos says Short N Sweet is still working out pricing for games, he says they’re “committed to pricing them in a way that’s fair and affordable to our community but at the same time fairly rewards the devs and us.”

The big picture: Game publishers have long pointed to lengthy playing times as justification for console and PC games’ relatively high costs, and in recent years, some of the biggest publishers have built business models around maximizing player time in a game.

• But backlash hits from time to time. Assassin’s Creed developers promise the franchise’s next installment will be “on a more intimate scale” (aka shorter and also cheaper), following its fans grumbling about swelling playing times.
• Short games are also not a new phenomenon. Some of the field’s most acclaimed games, including Gone Home, Unpacking and Portal (running time: 3 hours) were brief, even if there was no label at the time to hype their brevity.

The bottom line: Santos believes Short N Sweet can make money with short games. “Our sales targets are not too high,” he says.

• “They are just enough to enable us to get the developers that we are working with in a good position to establish and grow their studios, while Short N Sweet can sign and fund more great games for our 2024-25 games lineup.”

WWE chairman Vince McMahon is a playable character in this week's new WWE 2K23 video game, despite controversies that have largely kept him out of the public eye, Axios' Herb Scribner and I write.

Why it matters: While publishers of sports video games have cut controversial people from their rosters, that has not happened here, despite other moves made to diminish McMahon's visibility with the wrestling company.

Details: Players of WWE 2K23 can select "Mr. McMahon" as a playable character. He can grapple with other wrestlers, male or female, in a multitude of matches.

Catch up quick: McMahon briefly retired from WWE last summer, shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that the longtime wrestling promoter had secretly paid off a former employee with whom he allegedly had an affair.

• A company investigation last year found that McMahon had paid almost $15 million to settle allegations of sexual misconduct.
• In January, McMahon returned as board chairman, saying he intended to facilitate a sale of the company.
• McMahon, who used to regularly appear on WWE programming as the evil boss character Mr. McMahon, had largely been absent from the company's TV shows in recent years. He did appear on-air shortly after the Journal's report.

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• Games have long production cycles, and rosters of playable characters are generally established a year or more in advance.

Yes, but: Roster cuts can happen closer to or even after release.

• Electronic Arts has previously removed playable athletes from its Madden and FIFA games when they've been suspended by the league or run afoul of the law.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is stepping down after a 16-year run at the streaming company. He cited a desire to spend more time raising his newborn and said he will remain a Twitch adviser.

Former Blizzard boss J. Allen Brack and his successor Jen Oneal are launching a new game studio called Magic Soup.

• Brack exited Blizzard shortly after being named in a California anti-discrimination lawsuit against Blizzard as someone who’d been warned that employees were leaving due to sexual misconduct at the company. Oneal left soon afterward.
• Asked about their departures and their new venture, a rep for the studio referred Axios to a new interview with the developers in which Brack says he has “been listening to and reading many personal accounts and opinions about the things that should have been better” at Blizzard.

Microsoft has announced 10-year commitments to bring Xbox PC and Call of Duty games to cloud gaming services Boosteroid and Ubitus, should regulators approve its bid for Activision.

• Meanwhile, the FTC, which has sued to block the merger, is pressing the tech giant to share more details about its deals and its strategy around ZeniMax, the last large game-maker it acquired.

Friday, March 17

• Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon (Switch) and WWE 2K23 (PC, Xbox, PlayStation) are released.

Saturday and Sunday, March 18 and 19

• A quiet weekend.

Monday, March 20

• The Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco and runs through Friday.

Tuesday, March 21

• Tchia (PC, PlayStation) is released.

Wednesday, March 22

• A quiet day.

Thursday, March 23

• PAX East begins in Boston.
• Storyteller (PC, Switch) is released.

Friday, March 24

• Resident Evil 4 Remake (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.
• Diablo IV's open beta (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) begins.

The Tetris movie (releasing March 31 on Apple+) turns the making and licensing of one of history's greatest video games into a Cold War thriller.

• I enjoyed it, but a little less so once I cross-checked it with the real history.

The movie fictionalizes the efforts of the real Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton) to secure the rights to Tetris from Soviet authorities in 1989, just before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

• Tetris was invented by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), but the focus of the movie is on Rogers, a buccaneering businessman who hustles his way into Nintendo HQ in Kyoto and, later, into Soviet government offices to get those rights.
• The movie turns reality into cartoon, complete with frowning bunker-dwelling KGB agents and a climactic car chase, best not taken too seriously.

Yes, but the deeper truth of the movie holds: Tetris was a brilliant idea worth struggling for — and worthy of a feature film.

• It's worth a watch at the end of the month, best paired with a BBC documentary that gets closer to the actual events.