What I've noticed over the years has been how accessible the unity engine is for new developers.
So many unity games tend to look the sameish. They use the same free content packs and follow the same tutorials. Unfortunately this engine also sucks for performance and it's easy for it to feel slow and clumsy without extra effort.
After the popularity of Minecraft and Fortnite, it seems like every developer has been chasing that dragon. Bolting survival, crafting and grinding into their games.
It can be done well, but most of these games feel like classic mmorpg grinding, while offering nothing enjoyable in exchange.
On top of that there are predatory games that attempt to normalize the behavior of paying to win or accelerate earning something. Many unfortunate kids have been fooled into spending thousands of real dollars on what equates to nothing. In older games you earned outfits and characters based on skill and achievements.
(I literally tried to remove all the quick settings, but there’s a minimum!)
Oh yes, this bothered me deeply the first time I encountered it.
I've been doing tech support for a couple decades and I have had the pleasure of training many people from all walks of life on how to use these things. Some of them never used a smartphone or even wanted it.
In the early days blackberry had an edge with the keyboard and minimal apps. It was very corporate and standardized.
As we moved onto early android phones it did have very helpful features to make it more like a dumb feature phone. Using these was a huge boon with those that didn't care to learn how to use them or really just didn't get it.
As time went on, these features were dropped or made irrelevant by other invasive features (like the busier and busier notification drawer)
What I found curious was many of these helpful features didn't go away entirely but were locked behind a secret corporate mode. This more extreme level of control is typically exposed through MDM software.
I've found over the years that apple devices (these also have a corpo mode) are easier for the elderly to use as the UI has largely stayed the same and the OS treats you like you're dumb. It has better accessibility options and my elderly customers love talking to siri.
I feel like as the knobs and levers generations dies out; the attention manufacturers and designers put towards this demographic dwindle drastically.
I remember the old GameBoy with the contrast knob on the side was super useful, and something like that may be useful. But there is also the argument if you've reached this point in life today, you're probably not going to use it unless forced to. And teaching people who feel forced into something is unproductive and often makes them more afraid of technology. Some would say leave them to the wolves by this point. (not how I feel)
Video games in general, I've never stopped playing them.
There was a period of time where I thought I stopped liking them. But it was just because everything new was trash (early access slop or f2p nonsense) or my anti-genres.
Is it possible to "win" without leaving the table?