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
Whales spend tens of thousands of dollars on p2w bullshit. It’s all unregulated gambling.
They always sucked.
deleted by creator
I’m fairly sure those were paid tho
deleted by creator
I mean the high quality paid games are still around, and I’m reasonably sure new ones are still being made. They’re not a lost art, just not as popular as free games
They’re making the same argument people make about music. There’s plenty of good music out there of all genres. Radio just doesn’t play it and you have to go out of your way to find what you like.
That’s just the wages of living in a huge postmodernist society that produces a vast amount of media. We no longer have centralized institutions (or rather they’re losing relative importance) so you have to go looking through the depths of either recommendation algorithms or topical forums
I find that to be a good thing. The less centralized institutions that can control what we do the better. I say that while social media is the biggest it’s ever been.
I don’t know man, I had my fair share of fun with a pair of Nyan Cat games, the original Plants Vs Zombies, Nimble Quest (I just got this again on Android and cracked the heck out of it with Lucky patcher, and still suck lol), Tiny Wings, Angry Birds and I could be missing some others.
These were originally the exception, but all eventually followed the rule.
Infinity blade
Oh yeah, I fired up my old iPhone 6s to play the Infinity Blade II, no regrets!
Galaxy On Fire 2 was great, but Elite Dangerous on PC later kicked the absolute crap out of it.
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.
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.
Weird take, imo. Mobile games are probably the best they’ve ever been. They were traditionally a place for rampant p2w garbage gacha machines, and while those are still there, the platform has actual decent games nowadays. Real PC games are being ported to mobile and the platform is being taken seriously. Even in the world of micro transactions and gacha games, there are far more that are actually decent as games then there ever has been.
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Now and I’ve been really impressed with it. The entirety of the Riot games are good games with reasonable microtransactions. Vampire Survivors, my go-to “I am offline” game, is the exact same game on mobile as PC, save the fact that it’s free and you have a choice to watch ads for marginal farming speedups (which can be disabled if you buy literally any of their ~$1.50 DLC expansions, which are hilariously large considering their price). Fucking Warframe is coming to/already on (?) mobile.
I genuinely can’t say mobile games have ever been in a better place than today, despite the existence of the shovelware P2W games that continue to roll out.
I’ll side with OP from a slightly different perspective here, because you’re not wrong but neither is OP. First and foremost I think the word missing here is innovation – mobile games in their very initial start were exactly what you are describing, but mobile games that OP are talking about took some time to find freedom to innovate. The very first mobile games, almost all of them, were PC ports. Solitare, poker, mahjong, snake, tetris… These were all games that had existed for years and were just now put into a 160x128 res screen and played with a circular slider (first iPod), or whatever the specs of the Blackberry was back then. Few unique games were created for these devices.
By late 2009 the iPod Touch 3g had released. It was this and the following few years where OP is talking about, where not only were old games like Spy Hunter being remade, and funnily enough, I’m pretty sure Rockstar also released a few GTA’s on this device. But there were also entirely new games like Doodle Jump, Canabalt, and to a lesser extent Pocket God. (Well, relatively new and unique, at least.) These of course paved the way for Temple Run and honestly I had so many amazing mobile games back then that remembering them all would be a trip down memory lane far too long for today.
Anyway, my point and I’m assuming OP’s point is that it’s harder to find truly unique and “new” experiences in the mobile game world. The idea of Talking Tom when he first came out was something truly unlike anything else available. Not that it was particularly good, or that being unique makes it good, but rather there were more games willing to take a risk on being different.
And yes, of course back then there were plenty of shovelware games trying to pine off another apps success. I think it’s simply a difference of mindset, for the good games that are available today generally seem to follow the same principles – a good game comes first, and if you accomplish that the expenses pay themselves. For your examples, the only games that didn’t already exist were semi-MH Now (Pokemon Go/Ingress, but I agree they are unique and fun) and the Riot mobile games. I agree that the other games you mentioned are good as well, I’d even include the fact that there are other full PC/console games like Monster Hunter Stories 1 and 2, Final Fantasy, and plenty of others.
But none of these were made specifically with the attributes of mobile gaming in mind. Where are the disjointed IRL vs. on screen games like Panoptic! There’s so much potential for mobile phone games of really wild and unique stuff, but it’s easier to make money by iterating and porting existing things to the platform.
I found a little list that was fun:
- Jetpack Joyride,
- Plants vs Zombies
- Real Steel World Robot Boxing,
- Real Steel HD,
- Pacific Rim,
- Ultimate Robot Fighting,
- Cut the Rope
- Fruit Ninja
- Flappy Bird,
- Where’s My Water?,
- Crossy Road,
- Asphalt 8,
- Call of Mini Zombies, Call of Mini Infinity,
- Clash of Clans Real Steel Champions,
- Transformers Battle Masters,
- Geometry Dash,
- Minecraft Pocket Edition,
- Hungry Shark Evolution,
- LEGO Hero Factory Invasion from Below, LEGO Hero Factory Brain Attack,
- Beach Buggy Racing.
- Hovercraft Takedown,
- Table Top Racing,
- Smash Hit,
- Riptide GP, Riptide GP Renegade,
- Mechanic Escape,
- Robo5,
- BombSquad.
- Draw a Stickman Epic Free,
- Zombie Tsunami,
- Badland,
- Hill Climb Racing 1,
- My Singing Monsters,
- Despicable Me Minion Rush,
- Bad Piggies HD,
- Star Warfare Alien Invasion. Star Warfare Payback,
- Pixel Gun 3D,
- Block City Wars,
- Pac-Man 256,
- The Impossible Game,
- Gravity Guy.
- Laser Air Hockey
- That one game where you’re a 2D spider-man swinging
Enshittification, the rise of micro transactions in mobile games over actual in-game mechanics that make the game interesting etc
Trust capitalism to ruin everything
Nowadays? Mobile games have always sucked. All the way back to snake on your old Nokia. That game sucked too. It’s just now the games suck and they’re packed full of microtransactions.
deleted by creator
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
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
Have they ever been good? The sad thing I can tell you as a mobile dev(not game though) is that people on Android don’t want to pay for apps or games, on iOS it’s a bit better but still way worse than PC or PlayStation. There’s also rampant piracy on Android, both from users but even more so from shady app clones Google ignores. As a result free to play, always online with microtransactions is basically the only way to make money
The Pathless is pretty awesome
Sky: Children of the Light is splendid
Horn is pretty neat but I guess its 12 years old now
Baba is You isn’t originally a mobile game but it has a native version which is pretty excellent
To answer your question, its as others have mentioned: catching a whale is more lucrative than appealing to the average consumer. The entire micro transactions industry (which mobile gaming is built upon and makes it the most profitable portion of the gaming industry by a mile) is all about milking your customers for everything they have without them realising it. Why did we reach this point? Unregulated capitalism, probably.
Money
You get what you pay for. If you download a free game, then of course it’s going to be full of pay-to-win microtransactions. Although there are issues with greed in some larger games run by big companies, the reality is that game devs deserve to earn a living too, and that means at some point a game needs to be paid for.
There are still plenty of good quality mobile games out there, they just don’t tend to be free to download. Back when I had more free time, I actually got good usage out of the Play Pass on Android, which was £5 a month and gave me access to a catalogue of excellent mobile games with no microtransactions at all, the vast majority of which were single-player, offline games. Literally the only reason I’m not still subscribed is I just don’t have time to play mobile games at the moment - the chances of me subscribing again over the summer when I’m not at uni is high.
You also don’t get what you pay for when it comes to mobile. Had some games get delisted so it’s not even downloadable anymore and even though I kept it on my phone I can’t run it because it fails the license check. Mobile game isn’t worth spending money on.
Best mobile games are Nintendo DS games that are completely touch based, which end up feeling like native experiences such as Kirby Mass Attack.
The only good games on phone are now emulators and a few Foss games
Always has been.
bang
Nah, angry birds used to be good and supercell stuff was OK before it went down the shitter
I was ok with the Angry Birds franchise right up until the shitty kart racing game they pumped out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more wretched collection of bare-faced advertising and micro transactions as that fucking piece of shit.
The game was crammed full of new pop songs, and when one would play the game would display a link to buy it from iTunes. I couldn’t let my kid play it, it was just too egregious.
Haven’t touched any of those games since. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed the original.
That kart game was genius programming, give you a few initial levels where it let you think that you’re driving the kart, that you’re winning because of your skills, then start the real routine of “autopilot simulator programmed to lose until you activate the paid power ups”
Edit: and I can’t believe that more than ten years passed from the release of that “game”, I remember I was playing it on my BlackBerry Z10, i can see why many itt are saying “always has been shitty” - just a year before they weren’t shitty. Gameloft released games like “9mm” and “batman the dark knight” that for just one dollar were console like experiences. And beach buggy racing, and riptide.
