If you grew up in the late '70s and early-to-mid '80s like I did, you know what games can be like without any hand-holding or mandatory tutorials. You read the manual that came with the game (or you didn't if you were truly hardcore and adventurous) and then you were on your own, bucko. Nowadays, video games have been progressively dumbed down to appeal to more casual audiences. And, believe it or not, there's an executive at Electronic Arts that agrees with me. In fact, he thinks things can get (and will) get a whole lot worse.
As Gamespot reports, EA Chief Creative Officer Richard Hilleman recently expressed concern that the learning curve for most of his company's games is just too steep, which means they're losing out on many potential customers.
"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman explained. "The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game. And asking for two hours of somebody's time...most of our customers, between their normal family lives... to find two continuous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask."
I'm going to presume that Hilleman is green with envy over mobile games such as "Candy Crush Saga" and "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" that have small budgets and ridiculously simple mechanics and rake in buckets of cash from casual gamers through micro-transactions and/or in-app purchases.
At this rate, I fully expect that EA's new goal will be to make all of the mechanics of its games moving forward to function just by pressing one button over and over again...and the sole purpose of that button pushing will be to purchase virtual goods through the game's virtual store, of course.
Don't think for a second that can't, or won't, happen.
