In the last 5-7 years I’ve noticed that mobile games have devolved info always online p2w shit
What the fuck happened?
The only good games on phone are now emulators and a few Foss games
What do you mean, “nowadays”? Mobile games always sucked.
I beg to differ. Angry Bird, cut the rope, where’s my water, Space RPG, FRUIT Ninja, and a whole lot more, are classic mobile games in the beginning. They’re sometimes simple, yes, but at least there’s efforts in it to try to be original.
Nowadays, it’s all Freemium p2w cash grab.
That you didn’t like them doesn’t mean they sucked, look along this thread and you’ll find ppl sharing titles worthwhile back then (me included), ofc, this is not GOTY material, but a game must not be a masterpiece in order to be enjoyable, which ultimately is what all games are for, to be an enjoyable hobby.
For me they have always sucked. The only one I liked a bit was “1112” (also known as Fade), BUT the developer actually cancelled the last episode because they didn’t feel like making it anymore 🤬 So yeah it also sucked big time.
More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventuregames/comments/k3wc7b/the_history_of_1112_an_ambitious_adventure_game/
Adventure games don’t sell too much, and four episodes are a lot if you make them separate purchases. Episode 2 would be purchased only by a fraction of episode 1 users, then episode 3 from a fraction of episode 2 and so on. And the longer the time between episodes, the smaller the chance it would generate new sales because existing users lost interest.
It’s instead much more remunerative to think a fun gameplay mechanic, then create a fake ad around it, buy some assets and create an idle game that plays by itself with the possibility to pay to get it faster. Use the fake ad with the fun gameplay to promote the completely different game and users are dumb won’t complain. Don’t worry if the assets you purchased for your asset flip are unrelated, it’s also allowed to be a completely different genre, for example evony (medieval and swords theme) is using zombies, tanks and machineguns in ads
And the longer the time between episodes, the smaller the chance it would generate new sales because existing users lost interest.
True, but with that particular game what didn’t help either was that there were many years between episodes, it was pretty awful. It’s one thing I really hate about episodic gaming. But Valve already proved it to be a failure, only Telltale And Dontnod still do it (and they do it consistently right, to be fair).
The rest of the gaming industry has gone on to “Early access” which is even more awful. Rather than buying the first part of the story for a lower fee, you now pay top dollar for a game which isn’t even finished and never might be because once you pay them there is no real incentive to actually finish it :)
But really, most categories of mobile games don’t interest me. Arcade and other simple crap like angry birds never interested me even in the 80s. Adventures yes but they’re few and far between on mobile and if they are they’re almost always desktop ports anyway. FPS really really sucks on mobile for me, the input is just too crappy and the screens too small.
Not gonna lie I’m still hitting clash of clans… Paid for maybe 5 months of gold pass but no longer been playing since I was in middle school. Took like 6 years off though
99% of people think all mobile games should be free to use. So they go for P2W to make money.
They wouldnt make anywhere close to the amount they do via P2W if they did an upfront cost.
Gacha games
Now that you mentioned this, I do recall in the early days of mobile games, back when the App Shops were first introduced, there were games that you would pay somewhere between $1 and $5, and you get the whole thing. No in-app purchases, no ads, and no lotteries for special characters or gear. I remember Square Enix had some really good JRPG games that were made specifically for the iPhone and iPad. Chaos Rings and DrakeRider were two games I recall playing, but they were much more expensive compared to the usual games I found. But, when you paid for it, you got the whole game and all.
I think mobile app developers have realized that they could get more engagement and cash from their users if they made games that had a gambling aspect to it. Kinda like the casinos in Vegas, the house always wins, but you keep putting in money on the hopes you get a jackpot.
That being said, there is one freemium game that I do find quite fun, and that is Romancing SaGa Re;univerSe. The thing that makes this freemium game a bit different is that Square Enix is quite generous in their in-game currency. You can actually do quite well without making any in-app purchases.
I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything
The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.
The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same
I’m feeling the same way about Minion Masters. I just play it on my Steam Deck, but it got an Android release recently. They gave away a few of their “DLC” packs (which is how I found it about it), so maybe my experience is a bit atypical, but I’ve just been playing for a week or so and I already have more than half the available cards and enough currency that I can craft any cards I really want to finish a deck.
I haven’t paid a cent. It’s so generous with its freemium model that I’m probably going to buy an in-game currency pack if I’m still playing once my Google Rewards wallet ticks high enough to buy one.
The short answer is, because they make money.
Best mobile games are Nintendo DS games that are completely touch based, which end up feeling like native experiences such as Kirby Mass Attack.
If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.
Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grimdev.grimquest
They are out there but I struggle to find good ones.
There was someone in reddit awhile back that started a community review site because there were so many bad games to sort through. I’ve found some good ones through there
They realized that they don’t have to make good a game, they can make a bad game and just advertise the shit out of it.
At least in Android you can install old games yet, I just installed Nimble Quest and had a blast as of recently.
Sadly because it works, mobile gaming is bigger money-wise than PC and consoles combined, all because people are susceptible to short term dopamine hit your can buy any time, it’s a part of what we call enshittification, making the product less user friendly and make more money, shareholders are happy, your don’t have to
Capitalism ruins everything
I think it’s because most people play mobile games as a way to pass time, rather than to do something actually engaging. So, people don’t typically want to buy mobile games upfront, meaning devs gotta monetize in some other way, like p2w microtransactions.
They always sucked
