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.
“Nowadays” ? They’re just getting good! Did you mean to say, “why are mobile games that suck, so popular” ? It’s because they’re accessible and usually F2P .
Oh yeah. I get it. I guess that’s why I stopped playing those long ago 🙂
I’m a huge mobile gamer though. It’s amazing what we can play on our phones with an xbox controller. It’s better than the pc experience for me because I can map the controller how I want to and am not stuck with the defaults.
Tons of amazing games coming this year.
ZZZ
wuthering waves
Azur Promelia
Etc.
You can remap controllers on pc though, like at a system level if you use steam. I remember having to go through a whole rigamarole to customize controls for a mobile game that didn’t support controller, I had to use a weird third party tool that interpreted the controller input as virtual screen touches. It almost kinda worked lmao
I remember way back trying to play genshin on my pc and it wouldnt let me map the right button trigger to attack , like i like it and I was like, i’m just going back to mobile.
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.
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.
Probably the only good mobile games are ports of console/pc games. There are some surprising ports, like the KOTOR games, medieval 2 total war, and lots of square enix’s older catalogue. Fortnite, genshin impact, and pubg are probably the biggest games on mobile right now. But yeah nothing really worth going out of your way for, or even bother with at all, if you already have a gaming pc or steam deck.
Maayybee the only real usecase is if you are going backpacking and want to bring some games into the backcountry with you without lugging a steam deck along lol. Digital board games like Root and Wingspan would work well there and have pass around modes if you are with friends. Just remember to bring a battery bank with you, or a portable solar cell.
I truly don’t understand how people are playing games like Fortnite or Genshin on a phone and enjoying themselves. That’s probably the single worst possible interface to play the game on, that’s like showing up to a counterstrike tournament with a racing wheel. I can’t even play Minecraft on my phone without getting extremely quickly frustrated and Minecraft doesn’t give half a shit about your reaction time or accuracy most of the time. If you want me to play an FPS on a touch screen I’m just gonna take the L and save myself the trouble, it’s not happening.
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.
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
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.
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Touch screens don’t lend themselves to Snake the way buttons did, so the only good mobile game is now functionally unplayable.
The only good new mobile games are on Apple Arcade, which is behind a paywall. It sucks but what can ya do.
greed
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.
“Nowadays” ? They’re just getting good! Did you mean to say, “why are mobile games that suck, so popular” ? It’s because they’re accessible and usually F2P .
Take angry birds for an example,
It used to be a good game, you had your level, Maine an optional micro transaction.
Now the modern angry birds is an ad riddled mess
Oh yeah. I get it. I guess that’s why I stopped playing those long ago 🙂
I’m a huge mobile gamer though. It’s amazing what we can play on our phones with an xbox controller. It’s better than the pc experience for me because I can map the controller how I want to and am not stuck with the defaults.
Tons of amazing games coming this year. ZZZ wuthering waves Azur Promelia Etc.
You can remap controllers on pc though, like at a system level if you use steam. I remember having to go through a whole rigamarole to customize controls for a mobile game that didn’t support controller, I had to use a weird third party tool that interpreted the controller input as virtual screen touches. It almost kinda worked lmao
I remember way back trying to play genshin on my pc and it wouldnt let me map the right button trigger to attack , like i like it and I was like, i’m just going back to mobile.
I forget that games like genshin exist lol
The short answer is, because they make money.
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
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.
At least in Android you can install old games yet, I just installed Nimble Quest and had a blast as of recently.
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.
Probably the only good mobile games are ports of console/pc games. There are some surprising ports, like the KOTOR games, medieval 2 total war, and lots of square enix’s older catalogue. Fortnite, genshin impact, and pubg are probably the biggest games on mobile right now. But yeah nothing really worth going out of your way for, or even bother with at all, if you already have a gaming pc or steam deck.
Maayybee the only real usecase is if you are going backpacking and want to bring some games into the backcountry with you without lugging a steam deck along lol. Digital board games like Root and Wingspan would work well there and have pass around modes if you are with friends. Just remember to bring a battery bank with you, or a portable solar cell.
I truly don’t understand how people are playing games like Fortnite or Genshin on a phone and enjoying themselves. That’s probably the single worst possible interface to play the game on, that’s like showing up to a counterstrike tournament with a racing wheel. I can’t even play Minecraft on my phone without getting extremely quickly frustrated and Minecraft doesn’t give half a shit about your reaction time or accuracy most of the time. If you want me to play an FPS on a touch screen I’m just gonna take the L and save myself the trouble, it’s not happening.
Fdroid app store has a lot of frankly amazing indie games.
Pirate freecell Solitaire. is fantastic.
Also, Warframe has an iOS version(not a port), is working on an android version, and its now fully crossplay compatible.
There doesn’t seem to be a Pirate freecell. Do you mean Pirate Solitaire?
Yeah that’s what i meant.
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
Whales spend tens of thousands of dollars on p2w bullshit. It’s all unregulated gambling.
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.
Threes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vo.threes.exclaim&hl=en_US
You must build a boat: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eightyeightgames.ymbab&hl=en_US
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
https://minireview.io/
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.