EA’s Hilleman: Games are still too hard to learn

The complexity of modern video games continues to alienate too many potential players, EA’s chief creative officer Richard Hilleman has said.

"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman said at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, as reported by GameSpot, when comedian Pete Holmes said that he’d liked to see standardisation of controller layouts and button maps across games.

"The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game. Asking for two hours of somebody’s time, between their normal family lives… to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask."

Maintaining the accessibility of games is a key factor in publishers’ continued desire to expand the market reach of their products. However, over-simplification and lack of innovation can risk alienating the lucrative core games market.

Some titles, such as the FIFA series, offer both simplified and complex controller schemes to suit a wider range of potential players. However, many ambitious games simply can’t achieve their goals without a certain level of controller complexity.