What counts as a hold
The bench records a sustained hold as any input that must be maintained for longer than one second to keep a state active. Charge attacks that resolve in under a second are counted separately as timing inputs. A hold that lasts as long as the player wants the state — sprint, lean, aim-down-sights, a radial menu held open — is the category at issue.
The distinction matters because holds are the only input type whose cost scales with how long you play rather than how well. A player can improve at a timing window. Nobody improves at holding a shoulder button for forty seconds.
The figures
| Measure | Games | Share of archive |
|---|---|---|
| Contain at least one sustained hold | 178 | 84% |
| Offer a toggle for at least one hold | 40 | 19% |
| Offer a toggle for every hold | 17 | 8% |
| Contain four or more holds | 61 | 29% |
| Contain a hold exceeding 30 seconds in normal play | 44 | 21% |
| Contain no holds at all | 34 | 16% |
The eight per cent figure is the one worth sitting with. Seventeen games out of two hundred and twelve allow every sustained hold to be converted to a press. Each of those seventeen implemented it in a settings screen that already existed, and none of them lost anything in the process.
Where holds concentrate
By genre, tactical shooters are the worst offenders — a median of five holds each — followed by survival games and immersive simulations. Gantry Nine sits at the top of the whole archive with seven and no toggles anywhere.
Turn-based and puzzle games sit at the other end, mostly because there is nothing to sustain. Banner Plateau has none, which is a property of being turn-based rather than a decision anyone had to make.
| Genre | Median holds | Share offering any toggle |
|---|---|---|
| Tactical shooter | 5 | 14% |
| Survival | 4 | 21% |
| Immersive simulation | 4 | 26% |
| Action adventure | 3 | 22% |
| Racing | 2 | 17% |
| Platformer | 1 | 31% |
| Turn-based strategy | 0 | n/a |
Fourteen per cent of tactical shooters offer any toggle at all, in a genre whose median game asks you to hold five things. That combination is not a design philosophy; it is an oversight repeated across a whole category.
Where the toggle option is hidden
Of the forty games that offer a toggle, thirty-one place it in a separate accessibility menu rather than beside the binding it modifies. Testers who needed the option located it unaided in eleven of those thirty-one cases.
The nine games that place the toggle inline — next to the binding, on the same row — were found immediately by every tester who needed them. Red Pillars does this, and it is the single clearest example in the archive of a correct implementation costing nothing.
What a correct implementation looks like
- The toggle sits on the same row as the binding it modifies.
- It is labelled with the action's name rather than a generic "hold to toggle" heading.
- It applies per action rather than globally, so a player can convert lean but keep sprint held.
- It survives a profile switch and a game restart.
- The pause screen shows the current mode, not the default one.
The four-year trend
Median sustained holds per game has moved from 1.2 to 2.5 across four years of benching. Over the same period the share of games offering any toggle moved from fourteen per cent to nineteen per cent. Provision is improving; demand is growing faster.
This is the finding that most often surprises developers who write to us about a review. The number of holds in a modern scheme is not the result of a deliberate decision to be demanding — it accumulates, one system at a time, until the total is nobody's responsibility.
What we ask for
One thing: a per-action toggle, placed next to the binding. Not an accessibility mode, not a difficulty option, not a global switch. The bench has never recorded a game that lost anything by adding it, and one hundred and thirty-eight games in the archive would be materially more playable with it.