When designing a product for the first time, it's always challenging to focus on the core aspects instead of the finished product. This is true for game & web design, through to multimedia interface design. A group of game designers or developers can easily get side tracked discussing how a game should look or feel.
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Can't connect to a match-made game? Clipping through the floor? Corrupted save data? It's become a common occurrence for games to ship with a plethora of bugs and errors as of late. King of Fighters XII had hit-box errors, Battlefield Heroes suffered from not having enough servers for it's player-base, so on and so forth. But, is this costing the player or the developer?
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People are very strange, we like change, but when there's too much change it's overwhelming. Puzzle games are simple, fun & addictive. They don't require much learning to enjoy them, in comparison to say an RPG or flight-sim. However, I have one major gripe about puzzle games and that's how the majority of them are confined to a limited number of elements. Are we addicted to the grid? Is it a safe move to re-skin an old game? Or are developers too afraid to chance the risk of re-inventing the genre?
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For the past few years, we've been hearing a lot about the casual game scene and a growing lack of core games. While this may or may not be true, it's a trend that we, as gamers will have to get used to. Casual game elements have been around since early video games, it's really nothing new. In fact, some of the best selling video games have been casual games; Tetris and other puzzle games are indeed a casual affair.
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