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.
Games used to take a looong time to load before flash storage, so people would go get a coffee or something while loading. Before main menus, it would just drop you into the game while you were away, potentiality missing something. So they added the “press any key” pause to wait until you’re back.
For some reason they kept this until today.
It’s also a holdover from arcade games, which would have an ‘attract mode’ when there was nobody playing.