In our previous article, The Five-Minute Game, we looked at an increasingly important shift in how modern games compete for attention. Shorter matches are not necessarily the evidence that players have become impatient or that games are becoming less sophisticated. The difference in the length is often a response to something much more mundane. People still want meaningful gaming experiences, but the amount of uninterrupted time available to them has drastically fallen. A five-minute match can fit into a lunch break in a way that a 45-minute commitment simply cannot.
There is, however, another side to that argument. Making the match shorter will not accomplish much if everything surrounding it remains slow. A five-minute game baked within the process of several minutes of matchmaking and menus is not really a five-minute experience. This is where the concept of "time-to-fun" begins to play a role in game design. Instead of measuring how long a match lasts, it asks how much time passes before the player reaches the concluding part of the game they have launched.
As competition for any free time that is yet left becomes more intense, implementing the idea of “time-to-fun” becomes difficult to ignore.
When Does the Match Truly Begin?
Multiplayer games have always involved some form of waiting, and for much of gaming history players accepted it as part of the technical reality. For those who remember the old days of multiplayer gaming, spending time browsing servers and waiting for connections may not feel like a hurdle, but it definitely does for those who came after.
Online matchmaking solved some of the problems but introduced others. As games became more sophisticated, finding opponents of similar skill became a challenge. The better the matchmaker became at considering rank and region, the harder it sometimes became to make the match happen immediately.
League of Legends may serve as a useful example because Riot Games has explicitly discussed what it calls "time-to-game." To Riot, it means the entire period between pressing Find Match and reaching the loading screen. That includes the matchmaking queue and champion selection, while a late dodge can send everyone back to the beginning. Riot said that at the highest levels of LoL mastery, some players were waiting literally hours for matches back in 2016, but later changes reduced these queues. In 2021, the company reported another interesting insight, suggesting that around 33% of champion selects at Diamond I and above were ending in a dodge, increasing the average time required to reach a game at that level by roughly 40%.
It is worth noting that while the numbers are old enough that they should not be treated as a description of League today, they illustrate the core problem of multiplayer matchmaking. From the player's perspective, the meaningful unit of gameplay is rarely the same as match length. It is the total amount of time required to play that match. Riot itself has addressed situations at high MMR where players could spend hours moving between queues and champion select only to complete a single game. Once gaming is viewed through the lens of an effective unit of gameplay, reducing wasted time becomes more than a matter of convenience. It becomes part of the game design itself.
Waiting Is Not Always Wasted Time
There is an important caveat here, since not every minute before the action is necessarily bad as some games may require preparation. League's champion select is part of the strategy because team composition and bans influence what happens later. Tactical shooters use setup periods to give teams space to plan, while social games may deliberately create quieter moments because conversation and connection is part of the experience itself. That said, removing every pause would not automatically improve these games and could easily make them worse.
The more interesting design question is whether waiting has a purpose in a given title. Fortnite is an example of how developers can turn unavoidable downtime into part of the experience. Fortnite pre-game spaces allow players to move around while the match is still loading, rather than presenting a static loading screen and asking players to wait. Even more, Epic's tools for Fortnite creators explicitly allow developers to design pre-game lobbies where players can learn the rules before play begins. Epic also gives creators control over matchmaking thresholds and queue duration, including the ability to begin with fewer than the maximum number of players rather than indefinitely waiting for a perfect lobby. If this was not enough, even the documentation recommends keeping wait times minimal and gives an example in which matchmaking moves from a preferred full lobby toward a smaller acceptable player count within just a few seconds.
This distinction between necessary time and empty time is more than significant, because players are often willing to wait if they understand the reason. Short drafting phase can create a moment of strategic pressure and pre-game lobby can teach newcomers the basics to prevent confusion later on. The frustration begins only when the player cannot see what the additional time is required for. Waiting for a balanced opponent is one thing; waiting because a cumbersome interface requires several unnecessary steps is another.
Good game design does not need to eliminate every pause. It needs to make sure that the pauses are a part of the experience.
The Hidden Cost of Better Matchmaking
With time, competitive systems grow more sophisticated because matchmaking itself begins to involve a new trade-off. Players generally want games to start quickly, but they also want opponents of similar skill. Those goals can often work against each other, particularly at the edges of a given skill distribution where fewer appropriate opponents are available. Developers have to pick between a system that launches a match instantly with the risk of producing an unfair contest, and one that takes too much time to find the perfect opponent.
Competitive games have spent years trying to find the right balance. Riot's Premier system for Valorant, for example, has historically told players that most weekly matches should be found within eight minutes at maximum, but tournaments could take more time to begin. Riot also notes that longer waiting time may eventually lead to matches against teams with different performance levels within the same division. This is the central matchmaking problem many studios have to face as every additional condition intended to improve the quality can narrow the pool of available opponents, and a narrower pool can increase the time required to find a match.
For large titles with already established audiences, that trade-off can often be managed because there are enough players to keep the matchmaking system liquid. The problem begins when you are a small studio and there are not yet enough players to keep the matchmaking smooth. Also, even if the game is of a mediocre size, splitting an audience across too many modes or skill brackets can leave each individual queue rather thin, creating a vicious circle where longer waiting time causes players to leave and the shrinking population makes the waiting time even longer. This is why reducing friction is not merely a matter of polishing the user experience. For smaller competitive ecosystems, the speed of matchmaking is key to whether the ecosystem will function in the first place.
The ideal system does not have to simply find a match as quickly as possible, but it has to find a match quickly enough to preserve the competitive spirit within the playerbase.
Fun Time Begins Before the Match
The same principle applies before the matchmaking even begins. Modern games often ask new players to go through account creation and a number of tutorials before they have any real chance to see if the game is even worth playing. Each unnecessary step may seem reasonable to the developer, but from the player’s perspective it creates another chore to deal with before the fun begins.
This is why “time-to-fun” is particularly interesting as a design concept. One of the analysis of mobile onboarding argued that leading mobile games often aim to deliver core value in under a minute. They used “Call of Duty: Mobile” as an example of a game that gets new players into action before serving them too much of the complexity. The similar “ideal” approach will obviously differ from genre to genre, but the idea still stands.
There is a useful lesson here for games in general. Respecting time is not the same as simplifying the game. It is about deciding when the (necessary) complexity is introduced.
Competition Has Its Own Waiting Room
The problem becomes even more visible when ordinary players move from casual matchmaking into organized competition. Joining a conventional tournament can involve a number of necessary steps like finding an external website and registering an account before checking in at a particular time. None of these tasks is the reason the player entered the tournament and collectively they can make a short competitive experience feel like a day-long commitment.
This matters especially for the kind of everyday esports we have discussed throughout our blogs. Professional competition can tolerate organizational overhead because the stakes and prestige justifies it. Micro-tournaments and Play2Win formats, however, operate under different conditions and in a different environment. Anyone thinking about joining a small competition during a lunch break is much more sensitive to any friction, because every minute spent outside the match is a minute lost.
If the ambition of a given studio is to make their competition feel as natural as ordinary matchmaking, the infrastructure and all the surrounding hurdles need to become almost invisible.
This is exactly why Elympics fits the broader argument so well. As an infrastructure layer, its role is not simply to make competitive games possible, but to handle game systems such as matchmaking so that developers do not have to worry about building the rails from scratch. If the goal is to remove the “administrative” work that does not improve the experience, then every minute spent in the game should be steered towards the actual gameplay.
The Best Waiting Room May Be the One We Stop Noticing
It is impossible to remove the waiting entirely, and it may not necessarily be desirable. Matchmakers need time to find the right opponents, strategic games require some kind of preparation, and there are experiences that can benefit from a slower rhythm. The world in which every game is optimized for immediate stimulation would probably produce its own set of problems, not only those with design.
What is changing today is the growing lack of tolerance for time that serves no clear purpose. If a game can deliver a meaningful match in five minutes, another two or three minutes spent waiting become much harder to defend. Once players become accustomed to joining competitive experiences much quicker than they used to, everything unnecessary begins to feel less like unavoidable features and more like remnants of an old system.
The question developers now have to ask themselves is therefore not simply how long the game lasts, but how much of the player's time is spent doing what they actually want to do.
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