They usually are free to play with predatory monetization mechanics. That was especially back in 2016 when thanks to these games, the mobile gaming revenue outpaced PC and console gaming revenue.
I think it’s cultural differences. In the west, we abhor pay to win and predatory aspects. But in Korea, China and other countries in that region, players demand it.
So then it comes down to which market region you’re targeting. If you’re not a NA/EU mobile developer, how do you choose? 🤷♂️ Can’t keep everyone happy.
Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.
I played a new gacha game 2 nights ago that was so overloaded with crap to do I found myself not even playing the game but just clicking the stupid rewards buttons for everything i “accomplished” and I hated it. I continued to play for another 4 hours… thankfully, once I closed the game, I removed it. I also didn’t pay a dime outside my wasted time.
Idk. I got extraordinarily drunk in Vegas, put a twenty in a dollar slot machine, thought I would get 20 pulls, pulled once, lost all my money, them never touched a slot machine again.
Lmao this was my experience as well. What a waste. At least I know casinos are not on my list of things to do when I go places now.
Most mobile game developers just want to attract whales. People who spend thousands of dollars in their app. They don’t care about everyone else because they don’t make any money off anyone else.
For some games, 20% of players spend $1800 or more a year. One of those people spent $90k.
So if your game sucks for everyone else, it’s not a big loss.
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Mobile games are the equivalent of those “100 great games pack”-type CDROMS you’d find in the electronics section of stores in the late 90s/early 2000s. Not many invest serious money and time into gaming on a tablet or phone like they do on a console or PC, because games on phones and tablets are more like an afterthought. Something to do in between group chats and work emails.
Shoutout to Slay the Spire, Balatro, and Slice & Dice. They all cost a bit (around 10€) but are excellent ports of the originals and among the best mobile games. Slice & Dice even started out as a mobile game and was ported to PC later.
Pixel Dungeon
Also Peglin.
Vampire survivors and among us are free on mobile.
Add craft the world to the list too
Cultists Simulator has a mobile port too
Plus mini metro, terraria, don’t starve, wild rift, and TFT (last two are free to play, and only have cosmetic transactions)
Wild Rift is my poor man’s League (although the skins are way more expensive than on PC). Don’t have a PC to play League on and WR is a good, chill alternative. Plus, I can play with my SO
Adding Dead Cells to the list. Handles surprisingly well with touchscreen
Meteorfall
Also Minecraft and Stardew Valley.
I feel like the best time for mobile games was back around 2009/2010 when touchscreen just became good and most stuff was either free or paid and without intrusive ads and monetization or other predatory bullcrap.
I recently tried Angry Birds 2, and I was baffled it would only take a few levels before I had to buy my way to more “ammunition” to keep playing. The original used to be good, I even wouldn’t have minded if there was like an ad between games, or if it was just buy-to-play, but even that isn’t an alternative option anymore. And they also pulled the original from the stores, I thought they had re-released it before, but couldn’t find it either. And also when I first opened the game there was so much shit on screen that it was even difficult to navigate to just even find the actual game, it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.
Agreed. There was a fantastic time for mobile games before things went downhill.
I have a strong memory of being in an apple store, finding a display iPad, and becoming enraptured by Plants vs Zombies. I would eventually get my own and put dozens and dozens of hours into the game.
Then EA took it over and turned it into trash.
Mobile very quickly turned into a race-to-the-bottom. When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out. So in order to get players in the door, you gotta make it f2p. And in order to maximize profits for a f2p game, you gotta employ all the worst dark patterns, because that’s what all your competitors are doing too.
And this has led to a feedback loop of consumer expectations. People understand that this is just what mobile is now, so people who want anything else have given up on mobile and are instead buying games on other platforms. Releasing a premium title on mobile is basically just trying to sell to the wrong audience.
When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.
If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.
I think that there’s more to it than that.
My own guesses are:
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I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.
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Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.
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This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]
They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.
So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.
kagis
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Smartphone dependency over time
Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.
Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.
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I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.
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Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.
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Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.
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There used to be thousands of good developers making respectable games. Most of them failed financially, and many of the survivors sold out later anyway.
I use MiniReview (https://minireview.io/) to have better sorting options for games on Google’s Play Store, you can specifically sort for screen orientation, monetisation (or lack of), genre, ads or not, etc
A couple of major factors:
Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.
Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).
Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.
There are good mobile games, but you typically have to pay for them.
Making a good game is hard. Making brainrot garbarge is easy, and people play it just as much. So what is the point? I knew a guy who was cheap as fuck. I didn’t know his girlfriend as well, but people said she was pretty much the same. Once i remember he made fun off someone spending like 60 dollars on a video game and he said he’s not a “gamer”. A few month later we talked about some video games that we liked and i didn’t really include him in that conversation because of what he said before.
He chimed in and said that he’s been playing clash of clans since release. Now i hardly even know what coc is, except mobile pay to win garbage (imo) so without even thinking, i asked if that game is even playable without spending money. He said oh no, he spends around 500 buchs a month. We were all shocked a bit, and he realised how ridiculous that is and immediately threw his girlfriend under the bus saying that she spends at least 1k a month for candy crush.
They’re trash because they’re free.
Traditional games need to be good, so people buy them.
You don’t need to buy mobile games. But developers need to eat. So the money needs to be extracted from the people while they play.
So you need to implement microtransactions and design the entire game around making them necessary for success.
But most people stop playing a game at some point when they’ve beaten it, or are getting bored ot it.
So you need to make your game addictive instead.The same principle applies to so many things (for example news).
If you don’t pay for it up front, the entire thing will be designed around extracting money from you during use.
Which means it needs to be designed to draw you in and keep you addicted. Delivering quality content is literally worthless.Mobile games are designed like junk-food: take it out, eat some junk, then put it away to go do something else, throw away the bag or seal it for a quick snack later. Normal games are designed like a full meal: sit down somewhere with good atmosphere, nutritious, good conversation, get full and go home with plenty of leftovers and good memories
If you own an iPhone just get Apple Arcade through Apple One, it’s really worth it if you game on your phone. No predatory monetisation, regular self-contained games, plenty of high quality titles.
Or do the trial, find some games you like, then buy them for a couple bucks when the trial ends
Most of the games in AA that I played have been reworked to remove monetisation while their regular App Store versions offer freemium model only.
