Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?
Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I’m horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.
It’s worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it’s just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.
They were derivative of things that had existed on other platforms for years. They never really found their own strengths before they were overrun by cash grabs that all look the same
I’m already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.
See, that’s the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
I’m not saying the very olds had it best, I’m saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it “bug squashing” and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.
These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.
And renting time on someone else’s machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.
And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I’d call to ban booster packs too.
And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn’t have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can’t have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.
I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.
But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.
Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.
So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.
I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.
And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.
We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.
I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.
Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!
I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.
I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.
You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.
Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.
This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.
Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I’m not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.
As for wanting physical gacha banned… well, you’re assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don’t, particularly. They can be fun. I don’t mind them. I don’t buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.
I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don’t have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You’re gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.
Oh, wow, we’re there now?
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?
It’s happening and you’re not ready.
Well, either that or Thunderdome. We’ll see.
Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I’m horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.
It’s worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it’s just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.
Can also get an emulator and enjoy all the classics of yore. Chronotrigger holds up, for example
I’m not their parent, but I guess your argument makes sense.
I’d love to install PiHole for them at one point because it gets rid of all those ads in mobile games.
1-5€ per upgrade you mean.
1-5€ per cosmetic you mean
Balatro has an Android version which is great
That’s my go-to on the plane
This is why I just set my kid up with an emulator and a huge list of games.
There were never any good phone games. That past of the industry was immediately filled with micro transactions and gambling esque mechanics.
The first angry birds had no microtransactions at all. Nor did the first plants vs zombies. They were good phone games imo
They were derivative of things that had existed on other platforms for years. They never really found their own strengths before they were overrun by cash grabs that all look the same
Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I’ve been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.
For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.
Horrified, you will be. I’m telling you.
The next balatro (at least in terms of game being played into the ground by Northernlion) is nubby’s number factory.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3191030/Nubbys_Number_Factory/
Almost every asset has a gradient, or is a low poly model.
EDIT : Overwhelmingly Positive (4,480 reviews)
2000s are back baby. The only thing that sucks is that I don’t feel 90s retro really took off, the 80s just had a double helping.
The 90s nostalgia is all the boomer shooters, Thief and Deus Ex style immersive sims, and indie games with a PS1 or N64 style aesthetic.
Also Hypnospace Outlaw.
Who Rules Barter Town?!?
Not Macromedia, I’ll tell you that.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time
I’m already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.
See, that’s the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
I’m not saying the very olds had it best, I’m saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it “bug squashing” and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.
These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.
And renting time on someone else’s machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.
And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I’d call to ban booster packs too.
And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn’t have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can’t have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.
See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You’re gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.
Been happening since books were new technology and it’ll keep happening.
I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.
But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.
Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.
So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.
I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.
And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.
We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.
Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!
I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.
You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.
Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.
This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.
Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I’m not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.
As for wanting physical gacha banned… well, you’re assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don’t, particularly. They can be fun. I don’t mind them. I don’t buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.
I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don’t have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You’re gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.