Just a little warning here. When “Game of Thrones’’ returns on July 16, after all these months of hyped anticipation and with the show’s endgame emerging as all the major characters finally engage with one another, get ready to be disappointed.

The reason: The seventh season will be only seven episodes long. And then the final season, which showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are writing now, and which will most likely arrive on HBO in 2018, will be only six episodes long. That’s 13 episodes left before the game is up (even if HBO is currently developing at least five possible successors to the series in the form of prequels, spinoffs, and the like). All the previous seasons were 10 episodes long.

Now’s the time to remember that quantity does not equal quality, especially on TV. I’d rather see “Game of Thrones’’ deliver 13 really strong and focused episodes than 20 episodes padded with extraneous filler. The entire run of “Breaking Bad,’’ for example, lasted 62 episodes, and “The Wire’’ lasted 60. But both shows are among TV’s best, despite their concision or, more likely, because of their concision. Neither show had any fat on it, just the essential number of story lines, characters, and scenarios needed to tell the story. When “Game of Thrones’’ is over, it will have delivered 73 episodes.

Author George R.R. Martin had this to say about those successor series: “I do think it’s very unlikely that we’ll be getting four (or five) series,’’ he wrote on his Livejournal. “At least not immediately. What we do have here is an order for four — now five — pilot scripts. How many pilots will be filmed, and how many series might come out of that, remains to be seen. (If we do get five series on the air, I might have to change my name to Dick Direwolf).’’

That’s a joke about NBC’s prolific king of all shows “Law & Order’’ and “Chicago,’’ Dick Wolf.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.