Not dull exactly, but . . . I think there’s a different view, perhaps a privileged one I have, as an employee at COG that makes all the requests for a back button seem ill-considered. Two things go into that feeling. One is practical, and the other again, a reiteration of why we’re philosophically opposed to a back button. (Reminder: I’m more or less speaking for myself, since we have a FAQ that covers this issue.)
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There’s widely (amongst people who email our support email) an assumption that our team is capable of implementing UI changes on demand. “Can you make your games’ UI do ? It would be really simple to code and implement,” is something I see regularly. Implementing any design change would mean, let’s see . . . at last count we’ve published 101 Choice of Games & Hosted Games titles, combined. At a minimum those games were released on 4 or 5 platforms, and since we’ve added Steam, could be that’s 5 or 6 platforms a given game is on. So tell me again how simple is it to prepare re-releases/updates to what are effectively 500-600 “games?” That’s not to say there will never be a UI update to our games, but that it’s a massive undertaking. We’re not sitting here, tenting our fingers and cackling because we refuse to push that one button which will allow you to change the font size, add a nightmode or . . . add a back button, which is not really a UI improvement but indeed a change in the way CS functions, I’m guessing.
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We have a very strongly established sense of game design. That game design philosophy is not quite proprietary, and we blog/write/talk publicly about what it entails. But needless to say, when a game does things a certain way, it’s probably because we’ve had a hand in ensuring it meets our standards for design. And that philosophy of game design is not readily apparent to the average reader. While different members of the team have slightly different takes on how best to implement that design and what things to encourage in the games we edit, in general, the answer you see on our FAQ as to why we don’t have a back button remains the clearest statement.
Again, going to my experience of fans’ perceptions, I get a lot of emails that say “Oh no! I picked the wrong option.” Well, it’s only “wrong” to the extent that you fat-fingered the option, because you wanted to pick something else. Our game design philosophy is such that we wouldn’t publish a game where one of the options is “wrong.”