My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game:
High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few.
You can have a great game, but if it's unstable, has annoying sound effects, or constant monetization related nagging, or a toxic community or some cringy voice actor or soundtrack or excessive unskippable cutscenes with irrelevant stupid dialogs... the magic in the experience goes away. Everything counts.
If you go to a 5 star hotel where everything is perfect but when you try to use the shower it doesn't work, your overall rating will be 1 star. For a experience to be gratifying, everything needs to work together.
I've read countless articles and postmortems of the style "why X is successful", and then seen games that follow those documents closely and produce a horrible game. Because they are unable to capture the whole experience.
Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.
High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few.
You can have a great game, but if it's unstable, has annoying sound effects, or constant monetization related nagging, or a toxic community or some cringy voice actor or soundtrack or excessive unskippable cutscenes with irrelevant stupid dialogs... the magic in the experience goes away. Everything counts.
If you go to a 5 star hotel where everything is perfect but when you try to use the shower it doesn't work, your overall rating will be 1 star. For a experience to be gratifying, everything needs to work together.
I've read countless articles and postmortems of the style "why X is successful", and then seen games that follow those documents closely and produce a horrible game. Because they are unable to capture the whole experience.
Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.