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Comment by PlzSnow | Hacker News Reader

The 30% decline mirrors my behavior and certainly that of my friends. Anecdotal I know. Increased time spent watching streaming video, especially "let's play" gaming type videos/eSports.

Blaming in-game-purchasing is a red herring. It's easy and human-nature to blame your pet hate for problems. See Trump and immigrant-blaming.

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Many IAPs are designed to prevent you from playing the game unless you pay. It doesn't seem unreasonable to blame that for some reduction in playtime.

Take a game like Alphabears. I'd spend hours playing this, except there are at least three differet cooldown timers that are avoided with cash.

You need "honey" to enter events. You can buy unlimited honey for $4.99 (This is fine, I see this as a demo-mode limitation with a price for the full game.)

But then you use "bears" for each round, and your bears nap after each round. You can wake your bears with coins. Some rounds need coins to enter. You can't buy unlimited coins, you eother let them build up slowly over time or pay cash every time you need some.

It's potentially a great game but the IAPs make it really hard to play more than a couple of events a day.

(I tried to buy the first IAP, unlimited honey, but it failed so I'm not sure how much difference that would make).

Your argument about IAP is true and I also think it's hated too much. It's not a problem in itself. But there are really too many games which focus too much on just increasing IAP instead of delivering gaming content. My interest in playing mobile grows every day. But I see less and less opportunity for it. Hearthstone and maybe Fallout Shelter are the only two examples that are playable in my eyes, and both also try to convince you to spend unreasonable amounts of money on IAP content.

I hope it's a learning process for the development community.

Fallout shelter isn't much of a game.

I felt Fallout Shelter was horrible. There's no real skill involved, only time, and spending money just speeds up the game. Alright fair enough if the mechanics are fun, but it's really just looking at a person's bars, identifying what he's good at, and putting him in the right room where he's most productive. You keep some guys at the door for security, put weapons on them... then you wait, and wait. Expand. Wait and wait. Expand. Every now and then you send or recall a person from scavenging. There's no real story, nothing to explore, the game isn't very complex. Combat is a game of tag. I can see why it's popular, but I can't see why it's a good game. And as you say it's riddled with IAPs (although kudos that there's none of the constant popups, share with friends, watch an ad etc crap), despite being supposedly one of the most significant releases this year. Absolutely disappointing.

Yes, there are much better games on the planet. But not on Android, afaik. For a game to be "playable" it doesn't need to be great, right?

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