[keerthiko]

You're comparing the wrong genres. StarCraft (age of empires, etc) is an RTS where you have a god view. Screen shakes make little sense when you, the player are removed from any of the characters and the terrain in play. From a usability perspective, these games also have a ton of information the player needs to process in a teeny amount of time. Screenshake would seriously mess with the player's ability to stay focused on what needs to prioritized. Hell, pro SC2 players even turn off ragdolls and environmental particle effects so that there's even less "noise". Does that mean Blizzard artists were compensating for poor gameplay when they implemented those?

Meanwhile, "arcade" style games like platformers, bullet hells, puzzles (tetris etc), turn based card games, etc need to juice up the moments when important things happen (because these aren't games full of subtlety moment to moment), and don't have a crazy amount of complex information on the screen that gets sacrificed in a screenshake.

To note, Hearthstone and Diablo III both have plenty of screenshake, although I believe you can turn them off (and many indie games heavy on screen shake offer this option too).

Juice is indeed very important to make games "feel" good, but perhaps more devs need to ask "is the juice worth the squeeze?" to not turn off players like you.