I generally do not like most of the console game centric design choices which have come to dominate game design in recent years decades. I have considered if I am out of touch, but no, it’s the games that are wrong!
I will point to the huge roguelike boom from the early 2010s as evidence that these are good and universally appealing design principles: short games that start being interesting immediately and can be completed in one sitting, minute to learn lifetime to master systems, high score leaderboards, wildly hard challenges for expert players (remember the first eggplant run?); for a second all the arcade design pillars were all the rage again! Then Hades and Vampire Survivors happened, and even roguelikes or lites or whatever started to regress into console design hellholes. Games that you cannot beat before grinding for dozens of hours of unlocks, currencies that you can trade into different currencies, banal crafting systems, games that are not even playing fields and high scores that are meaningless, tiny incremental decimal point nonsense upgrades as far as the eye can see. I’m not out of touch damn it, these things suck and they always have.
That’s not to say that all games these days suck obviously. Capcom just knocked my proverbial socks off with Street Fighter 6. There’s an ocean of great indie games like Hazelnut Hex and Demon Throttle that are keeping arcade design principles alive and well. I just do not want to spend another moment of my life collecting plants to turn into a soup to raise my dps .3% for 2 minutes. I can’t do it anymore! Let me shoot something in the head! NOW!