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God, I'm a moaning shit, aren't I?

On the related topic of online services, I came across this the other day from GamesTM 115 Oct 2011..... @regemond

I'm going to say extra lives/continues. It meant games could move away from stuff like Pong and be longer, more thoughtful and challenging games More recently, yeah, probably live service, for better or worse. Although that's just spawned out of deathmatch from the likes of Doom, so maybe not, but the successes and failures have both shaped the industry in a number of ways

The development of live service game design. It’s huge, changed the entire landscape of gaming and the business around them & how games are funded and profited from. It’s absolutely the worst too. I’ve said many times why. They’re like a black hole for people’s time and money. They suffocate the rest of the industry. People don’t move onto new games anymore. They don’t need to buy new consoles/Pc hardware anymore to experience new games. It’s created an unreasonable expectation of how much money all games should make. This is before we get into scummy manipulation and dark patterns which have been proven to be used by these games. There’s a million other reasons why but I’ll stop there.

From hardware its the controller interface - putting 17 'buttons' and 2 sticks in your hand with a reliable remote connection is lightyears away from that tethered joystick and single button 8 bit days - but just as importantly from a software perspective - how it's implemented can still hugely impact on playability (how controls are mapped, menus structured etc). Then think about the frustration when control interfaces weren't quite up to the mark - the vagaries of the WiiMote or Kinnect / Eyetoy - which were forgivable in some games, added an intuitive accessibility for non gamers, but ruined the experience in some games. There was also that weird 'experiment' that MS (and others?) did with adding maps etc to your phone / tablet (or in Fallout, your arm mounted Pipboy) which seemed plausible - but was never really workable or fun to use beyond initial curiosity.

Last big purchase for a while, starting to have a backlog again. Will try this out in the coming days though.