At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine.
Why is that there? It’s your main menu so ugly that you have to shield players from it? Why can I not double click the game Icon, go to the kitchen to get coffee and return to the PC/console to find myself in the main menu ready to continue my game? Seriously, cui bono? Sometimes, they even show a different screen before that press, which some artist got paid for creating, so the developer is also losing (a tiny amount of) money here.
I honestly just don’t get the point of these screens.
Bonus negative points for games that only check DLC after that button press instead of any other point of the losing process. Calling a server could easily be threaded while the game assets are loaded since it takes very little hardware load to do so. But no, I get to wait an additional 10 seconds because the game devs want me to for no apparent reason.
On a related note: just allow players to auto skip intros, please. Just put an checkbox in the settings, so that everyone can see it once.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn’t crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they’re not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go “now let’s remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!”, I don’t think devs typically have that much free time
It wouldn’t be that hard. Devs already have to make all sorts of adjustments for different platforms
Getting rid of that screen would be a negligible improvement and also might mean getting rid of any unique art that some may indeed want to see.
And they are better off using their time to do those improvements rather than something inconsequential like removing the press to start screen.