They released a whole ass other game in that window.

Probably not in the way you mean. There are certainly movies that benefit from watching again, whether to fully understand what is going on - often involved convoluted plots or a twist that adds new context to all the scenes, or because each individual shot/scene has so much going on that you’re always catching some new detail. And I do think those aspects are mostly intentional.

Well, there’s two ways you could interpret that:

• As you say, ‘shelf life’, how long they can sell the game with their voice in it
• Or, ‘voice time’, as in, contracts are negotiated in total duration of voice lines. Exceeding that number requires renegotiation.

I suspect it’s the latter as that is more similar to how voice work is already done, to my understanding.