Bring on the Convenience Revolution
Why the Path to Play Is Still Stuck in the Past
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Games remain one of the least convenient forms of entertainment. What takes seconds on Netflix or YouTube can take an hour on PC or console.
The industry’s culture, not its technology, keeps convenience from improving. We design for people who already know how to play.
Every moment of friction loses players. Four in ten American adults don’t play games—but not because they lack access. The next billion players won’t join unless games are easier to find, start, and return to.
Cloud gaming could offer the next leap in convenience, but only if paired with content and design that welcomes new players.
Convenience isn’t anti-creative. It’s what allows creativity to reach people. The companies that master it will shape the future of play.
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As I wrap up my tenure as CEO of Thunderful Group, I’ve finally had a bit more time to play. A few nights ago I tried to play Battlefield 6 RedSec, the new free-to-play shooter. It took more than an hour before I even reached the title screen: downloading the game, installing Windows updates, updating Nvidia drivers. When it finally launched, I stared at a black screen for twenty seconds, then another minute of “compiling shaders.” A technical setup followed, then a series of dramatic but meaningless videos, before I landed in a start menu so cluttered it felt like a cockpit checklist.
I’m used to this. Most players are. We’ve learned to accept that friction is part of gaming. But step back for a moment: what other form of entertainment asks this much effort before it begins?
If you open Spotify, you’re listening to something in seconds. YouTube loads faster than your mind changes. Games, in contrast, still behave like software from another era: intricate and a little arrogant in how much they demand from you.
We’ve grown up in an industry built by people who don’t mind fiddling with settings, downloading patches, and understanding why shaders compile. For most of us, the friction is invisible because we’ve internalized it. But for anyone outside that circle—especially the billions who don’t play yet—it’s a wall.
Searching for Convenience
The last real convenience moment in games happened more than fifteen years ago. Mobile touchscreens and the app stores made it effortless to start playing. You saw a game, tapped a button, and seconds later you were in. No boxes, no drivers, no setup. For a brief moment, games felt as accessible as music or film.
But mobile convenience didn’t spread to the rest of the industry. The reason isn’t technical—it’s cultural. The people who build games already find them convenient enough. We entered the industry through a love of depth; games that reward skill, patience, and problem-solving. That mindset provided incredible experiences, but also an echo chamber. We design too much for people like ourselves, not for the ones still on the outside looking in.
Granted, not every game should chase convenience. Some experiences are meant to be demanding, difficult, or intentionally inconvenient, and that’s part of their appeal. But we’ve let that mindset bleed into almost everything, designing for experts where we don’t have to.
Other industries learned this lesson long ago. In the early 1900s, grocery stores kept customers behind a counter while clerks fetched the goods. Then came the self-service model—the convenience store— which turned access itself into innovation. These days, Amazon has made shopping nearly frictionless: one click, next-day delivery. Netflix has us watching in seconds. YouTube is the same for short-form video, and Uber for getting across town.
Convenience has become a competitive art form everywhere but in games. We celebrate creative ambition, technology, and spectacle—but rarely discuss how to make playing effortless. If you map the industry onto a standard adoption curve, most PC and console games still target innovators and early adopters: people who don’t mind complexity. To keep growing, we need to reach the early and late majority—players who just want to play.
The irony is that our tools have never been better suited for frictionless experiences. Cloud gaming, cross-platform accounts, seamless payments—they’re all here. Tech companies have spent decades removing friction: “one click,” “tap to play,” “no setup required”.
Meanwhile, what we call “depth” is often just unnecessary complexity. For some players, this complexity feels empowering and elite. For everyone else, it’s a locked door. It’s time we unlock that door.
The High Cost of Inconvenience
In the United States, roughly sixty percent of adults play video games. That’s impressive, until you flip the number around. Four in ten do not. This is one of the most connected and affluent markets in the world—where almost everyone owns a screen, has broadband, and streams video daily. Access isn’t the barrier.
Games ask for time, effort, and attention before they offer fun. They need accounts, downloads, updates, settings, and onboarding. Many still ask for considerable money upfront, adding financial risk to the time investment. Too many people simply opt for something easier.
All of this leads to slowing growth, rising acquisition costs, and increasingly fierce competition over the same limited pool of experienced players. Convenience isn’t a luxury—it’s the growth strategy that will determine how we capture the next billion people.
Steam, Unpowered
No platform illustrates the problem better than Steam. It’s a marvel of scale and infrastructure, yet its user experience still assumes deep familiarity. Pages are dense with options, pop-ups, and jargon. Even buying a game can feel like managing a software deployment. Steam has become the standard for PC gaming, but also the clearest example of how the industry’s best tools often serve experts first.
Consoles do a little better, but not by much. Their stores are cleaner, yet updates, patches, and online license checks still interrupt the flow. Even “instant play” titles often require gigabytes of downloads before anything actually starts.
When I launched Battlefield 6 RedSec, I hoped for an instant free-to-play experience. What I got was a technical obstacle course. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have minded, but today I don’t have the patience.
This isn’t about singling out platforms or developers. It’s a reflection of a culture that still treats the path to play as a secondary concern. Other forms of entertainment have learned the obvious lesson: the easier something is to start, the more people it attracts.
The Cloud Gaming Promise
If the last big leap in convenience came from mobile, the next might come from the cloud. Cloud gaming isn’t just a new technology and distribution channel; it promises to be the purest expression of convenience the medium has ever seen.
The major players are betting heavily on it. Microsoft’s xCloud, Amazon’s Luna, and also Netflix, represent massive infrastructure investments in a clear vision: make games as accessible as video streaming. See it, click it, play it instantly on any device.
Unfortunately, in practice, today’s cloud services still fall short. You still bounce through logins, clunky hubs, and authentication checks. Cloud gaming today is more convenient than traditional installs, but it hasn’t reached the frictionless experience it advertises.
If that promise is fully realized, it changes everything. No downloads, no updates, no hardware requirements. True “click and play” for a billion people who’ve never installed Steam.
The promise is clear, yet getting there requires more than technology. Google’s Stadia had competent streaming, but targeted hardcore players—not the audience most keen on effortless access. The technology wasn’t the main problem; the strategy was. It was like inventing the microwave, then marketing it to chefs.
But here’s what matters most: the distribution innovation only unlocks massive growth if paired with content innovation. Cloud removes friction from access, but it can’t remove friction inside the game. Outside of the intentionally hardcore games, we need to create experiences with better onboarding, shorter time-to-fun, and designs that respect players who might step away for weeks and come back without remembering the control schemes.
Convenience here is a mindset. It’s about providing experiences where curiosity instantly turns into play, without requiring patience or prior expertise. That’s how we reach the players still waiting for their first “click and play” moment.
Putting Convenience on the Agenda
Convenience doesn’t sound glamorous. But it might be the most underused competitive edge in modern games. The industry spends billions chasing innovation in content and technology, while the path to play remains stuck in the past.
That can change. It starts with naming the problem. Imagine if every creative review, every publishing roadmap, and every executive strategy included one question: is this convenient for players? If the answer is no, fix it.
To be clear, convenience isn’t the opposite of creativity, it’s what allows creativity to be experienced. It’s time to flip our mindset: make convenience a design discipline, a strategic pillar, and even a cultural value. A great story, world, or mechanic means nothing if players never understand how to get in—or struggle to make it past the first five minutes.
I never did enjoy Battlefield 6 RedSec that night. After an hour of setup, I played one round, quit, and opened HBO Max instead. I’m someone who’s spent thirty years in this industry, someone who helped build games that millions played. If the path to play loses me, what chance does it have with someone who’s never fired up Steam?
This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.
Thought leading, nice!
Well written and clearly thought out.