THANK you. This is one proverbial "elephant in the room" that game developers and publishers have been ignoring, or at least dismissive of. Make the game intuitive and accessible (as you say with hardware requirements and the UI), and polish the gameplay for a good first impression and they will come.
But no, the publishers see the costs rising higher and higher during game production and eventually they snap and say "ship it, I don't fucking care what you're bitching about - this shit is costing me money." The folks funding production don't play their own games - they play for 10 minutes (maybe), consider that "fun enough" and call it a day.
So that's why there's so much hand-waving about the "awesome graphics (that run like shit)" and the number of polygons that the game can push versus the subjective part called "gameplay."
Re: Why WoW won.
THANK you. This is one proverbial "elephant in the room" that game developers and publishers have been ignoring, or at least dismissive of. Make the game intuitive and accessible (as you say with hardware requirements and the UI), and polish the gameplay for a good first impression and they will come.
But no, the publishers see the costs rising higher and higher during game production and eventually they snap and say "ship it, I don't fucking care what you're bitching about - this shit is costing me money." The folks funding production don't play their own games - they play for 10 minutes (maybe), consider that "fun enough" and call it a day.
So that's why there's so much hand-waving about the "awesome graphics (that run like shit)" and the number of polygons that the game can push versus the subjective part called "gameplay."