Many times over the last month I keep coming across this outright lie from developers.
"People are demanding shorter games"

No... no they are not
In my 30+ years of gaming I have never ever come across anyone who wanted less for their money, finishing a game has no deadline and if a game is good people will play it for months or even years.

This really sums up the attitude of the industry now, they think we are stupid and tell blatant obvious lies as an excuse to cut expenditure while blaming the customer.

Imo, if a dev treats you like the enemy, then don't give them your money.

Yes...yes they are. Shorter games does not equal "less for their money". It's trivial to make a 100+ hour game: just make the player have to spend hours and hours grinding for everything. That doesn't make it good or worth the money. You can find quite a few messages from people here and any gaming forum where shorter but high-quality games are desired for a number of reasons (less time for gaming, tired of artificially-inflated game lengths, etc.).

After having recently finished a game that took months, I'm personally just playing short games for a while. Also some of my favorite games are quite short...a relatively brief but intense/memorable experience has a lot more impact than a generic, unnecessarily drawn-out game. The obsession some people have with the $-per-hour factor while ignoring everything else is drastically missing the point of even playing games in the first place. It's a factor—I probably wouldn't pay $60 for a 1-hour game—but not the only factor.

I'd suggest not throwing around ridiculous accusations like "blatant lies", it just makes you look bad. And BTW, finishing games absolutely has a deadline. You can't just coast along indefinitely with no income; devs have to be paid.

I am one who is. We have had numerous others (people, and posts) corroborating that. True, it's not all, but a not-small set. For many of us, more important than "shorter" is "completable" and "respectful". A lot of games pad length in in ways that make it just grueling and unfun to complete, and disrespectful of the player's time.

There are numerous people who complain about how games complete vast swathes of content that they'll never experience because the game gates it behind various systems and checkpoints (often to pad time in a different way). Again, it's less about "we want shorter games" and more about "we want games we can play and enjoy".

One of the few benefits of achievements (that really should just be dev metrics) is to see how far people get into games. I've done that plenty, and you can see clear patterns of "well here was a giant cliff after which few people progressed compared to before". For 80% of buyers, in those cases, the game would have been the same if it had been cut off there. Again not that devs should necessarily have done that -- but it gives them an indication that something is wrong and that players are either burning out, or losing interest, or reaching a hurdle (or something) where they should probably take a look at fixing that. Creators hate creating content that their audience isn't going to be getting to.

So, in short, you haven't looked at all. People don't want games to consume their lives for months to be able to complete.

EDIT:
Here's one game that comes to mind. Hyrule Warriors. Even just the base/first Wii U version (before the later revisions that added more) had way too much content that it was impossible to get through it. And I love "Koei Warriors" games! It was a mix of the above -- certain bits I would have enjoyed getting to were locked by some too-hard combinations, along with there simply being too much (needless padding) content, a little bit of high repetition to make it easier to drop. But in general it would have been just way too long to complete, so I stopped where I was and moved on to other games.

EDIT2:
Another one, God of War (PS4). Pretty darned good game, but not worth completing. I got to the end of the story, but there was a lot left to do that was just not worth it. It would've been nice if they spent some of that "end game side stuff" dev time on another chapter of the main story. I'm not technically asking for a longer or shorter game in this instance, just that they put in a lot of wasted time-consuming content that the game may have been better without.

Unless devs manage to really fill their 100+ hour epic with tons of worthwile content (which let's face it most don't by half), I vastly prefer a tight, engaging, fun 10 hour expierence, thank you very much. I have a full-time job, my time is very much finite and I have zero patience for Grind Simulator 2021.

I don't like short games , small grind is preferable compared to lack of features short games. Most indie games fall into this category , most have only 1 oh look so special feature and thats all the game can offer.

If somebody has more games than free time , there is a solution , stop buying more games.

I had 1000 hours of fun in Witcher 3 (and still discover new stuff). That's great, right?

But I also had fun and great experiences in games like Tsioque, Chuchel, Gorogoa, which are all maybe 4 hours long, and never felt I any way cheated.

Developers saying such a thing sounds like an excuse to be lazy. At the same time, copy-pasting sidequests and introducing plot points that conveniently have you backtracking through the game's previous areas in an attempt to pad length, is also lazy.

I'm of the opinion, especially in the RPG genre and its offshoots, that there is a place for shorter games that, in the genres I mention, is rather empty.

Part of the reason I can replay SaGa 1 so much is that the game is short and dense; it's actually designed to be clearable in 8 hours (and can be much faster if it's not your first playthrough), and yet you still get to explore a tower and 4 full worlds that branch off the tower, not to mention a final ascent at the end. It's so much faster paced than its successor, SaGa 2 (which is still short by modern RPG standards, particularly if you play with only robots and monsters).

Also, shorter games tend to be cheaper to make, as they won't need as many assets; they also tend to be smaller, for the same reason (important because it seems some games have gotten to the point where they're much bigger than what I consider "too big"); and they're more likely to be finished (not to mention shorter development time for those that are finished). (Note that similar factors apply when looking at game features, except there the consideration is code rather than assets, for the most part.)

Remember that, back in the day, many games could be finished by a good player in under an hour; Castlevania 1 is less than a half hour for a good casual player, for example. (See also Bloodstained's Classic Mode, which is in some ways based off the original Castlevania.)

This is one reason why I would prefer games to not have minigames or stealth/escort sections (except when such aspects are the game's primary focus, and minigame focused games should have an option to skip minigames); they can block progress in the main game, and players buy the game for the main game, not for the minigames. There's also a major accessibility issue here; when a minigame is inaccessible in a way the main game is not, it can create a roadblock. (One example is real-time minigames in otherwise turn-based games; I believe someone here complained about Albion doing that, for example.) Sometimes the "padding" is precisely what I'm up for; there's a reason I sometimes replay Dragon Warrior on the NES.

Sometimes I actively look for a shorter game, especially after finishing a very long one. Some stories don't require hundreds of hours to be told. A good example is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice; it's a rounded piece of art that lasts what it needs to.

I guess I'm in the opposite camp, the only padding I can endure is fighting mobs for exp if the battle system is enjoyable...to some degree at least, but even then I look for ways to cheese the system like fighting mobs that intenionally or unintenionally give you way too much exp (I'm looking at you metal king slimes).

quality over quantity is easily yelled and often abused..... i do agree with the op but .. dev's will use anything as excuse to use lame routines to create money sinks .... routines did get a lot better over the past decade's .. i'll give them that and.....

all this bickering and crying did lead to me installing the 1 dollar hour fun ratio, it sounds a bit ridicilous when applied to buying games but, since i started using this i've been more aware of spendage and more alert on time i put into games, sometimes the rules forces my hand a bit into playing some more and sometimes it is a hard realization that i'm not good enough or are not able to spend enough time into some specific genre's

of course any veteran gamer will develop a similar sort of routine to cope with his or her habit right?

Metal King Slime runs away.

That he does. :P