7. Casual Gaming
Cough this up as just a personal qualm of mine if you want, but casual gaming tends to suck. However, they deserve to exist just as much as any other product, so that in itself doesnt bother me. What does bother me is how insanely popular many of them tend to get, and this has an impact on the gaming industry as a whole. When Facebook games like
FarmVille attract millions of players, you can bet other developers and publishers take notice. As a result, casual games have become an entire market, and hardcore games are doing everything in their power to attract members of this consumer base. People today complain that games are too easy, well, this is partially why. Casual gamers dont want true difficulty, as that requires effort beyond that which they see as reasonable. In order to attract these people, games have to be dumbed down. I admit, as someone who played games before they became mainstream and cool, it irks me to see such mass popularization, but when it starts to infest my games, that is quite annoying. By attempting to focus on these casual gamers, in many ways modern gaming is becoming too easy and too simple.