The mobile games industry is kept afloat by less than 1% of users
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There are plenty of good games out there. The problem is nobody plays them. Then the devs of those games say "Fuck this, I'm out" and go on to start making pay to win games because that's how to get paid making games. It's gotten to the point where the games we play aren't even fun; we just find an easy game that lets us shoot up a shot of dopamine once in a while and settle for that. Or maybe we pick up clash of clans, play "free" for a month, then once we're hooked we pay way more than we'd ever pay for a real game every month just to be competitive. And we still lose, because someone else has more money.
The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby.
Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled.
What? Story time?
Lately I mostly play Rocket League, which is mostly for social reasons (my friends dig it and live too far for me to hang out with), but is enough like a regular sport to have a sense of skill-building, competition and team cooperation.
The witness is sort of like a really fun math course that looks really pretty and teaches in a more interesting way. In real life I only occasionally get to solve interesting problems that I don't yet know the answer to. This scratches that itch in a way I have power over.
Undertale is an emotional story that I have agency in. It's one of my favorite examples of how game mechanics can enhance a traditional story.
Minecraft is a lot of things, but creativity and design are often front and center.
Writing this, I think a lot of games may be about experiencing things in a manner where people have more control than in 'real life'. It's also cheaper and faster than most hobbies. You can even get social status for being particularly skilled at games (see: twitch). Admittedly you probably won't make money playing games, but that's true of art, music, football, open source programming and most other hobbies.
It quickly became clear to me that they intended and succeesed at effectively creating a profit-making skinner box for humans.
Who knew the HS psychology class where we trained a rat to pull a bar for sugar water would later act as an innoculation for lousy games that manipulate their users via classical conditioning methods.
It's sad really because the Blizzard classics (IE Diablo 1/2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1/2) represent the pinnacle of visual storytelling in games.
Just started playing a week ago, already in love. Found out on their forums & reddit a couple days ago they're already planning to stop development because in the 3 months they've been on the market they've lost $40,000.
EDIT: Also, their freemium is non-intrusive (Which is probably why they're sinking). Play for free, upgrade for $10 to be able to play multiple games at once and play rated games.
I was in the alpha and had to delete it from my phone, it was too addictive. It's disappointing to hear that they're having money troubles, their game is pretty unique and deserves a better fate.
IMO, Angry Birds does not make the cut and I don't know of a better iOS game.
Of course, you could always get a Gameboy emulator (even not jailbroken, Google it) and play whatever you want from there.
I also recommend the port of Bike Or Die, which was all the rage in the Palm era when I was growing up. Ios version is OK, although I'm not sure if it's still on the app store. You can probably find an IPA though.
As far as good mobile games that provide more than a bathroom break or subway ride's worth of gameplay, off the top of my head:
* Carcassonne
* XCOM: Enemy Unknown and it's expandalone, Enemy Within
* Hearthstone
* Tomb Raider GO and Hitman GO
* Pinball Arcade
Threes, Year Walk, Device 6, Monument Valley, You Must Build A Boat
I could name a handful more, and that's not counting games that are iOS ports of games on other platforms, or games which are freemium but in ways that aren't intrusive or obnoxious. And I'd put up any of these games against the best games on any other platform, bar none.
Give a few of them a shot, you may be pleasantly surprised!
That said, You Must Build a Boat looks pretty neat, I grabbed a copy and will check it out.
Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, NS Hex, Battle of the Bulge, Agricola, Does Not Commute, This War Of Mine, Spider 2, Tiny Wings, Prune, etc. etc. I've bought 100-200 games, many of them very good.
XCom and Pandemic are the ones that I've spent the most time on. The iPad is a fantastic form factor for board games, and XCom worked better IMHO on iPad than on console or PC.
There's http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios for recommendations. Works well. That said, discovery on the App Store is simply atrocious. Absolutely terrible and a complete embarrassment for Apple since the start. Even recommending games to me that I already own!
Puzzle Games:
You can also play Chess on your phone, it's not what most people mean by fun video games.
At least Tiny Wings is a video game. But, compared to say a side scrolling BMX game on Gameboy it's clearly lacking.
* Monument Valley
* Practically everything by Mika Mobile
* Toy-ish games like Windosill and Wonderputt
* Carcassonne — a classic
* Lots of shmups work wonderfully on iOS; Danmaku Unlimited 2 is a great indie one
* Recently discovered: Furdemption
* .Decluster
* DoDonPachie, DeathSmiles, really anything by Cave
* Shogun: Bullethell
* Rhythm Control 2
* Sword and Sorcery
* the Broken Sword series
* The Shivah
* Machinarium
* Yesterday
* Silent Age
* CLARC
* Osmos
* Auralux
* Kingdom Rush series
* CordyIf you prefer console games or Steam games, these games just aren't made for you. They don't try to appeal to your sensibilities. At all. They are made to appeal to someone else entirely. Sometimes there's overlap between the market segments. I myself am playing Clash Royale a crapton lately, which I'm sure Supercell would consider a happy accident, but they are focused on the general audience, not me.
Your last sentence is at odds with the claim of mobile games being supported by whales. If the popular games were a costly addiction, then they wouldn't derive their revenue from so few users. In fact most people play them as a distraction or hobby and never pay a cent -- hence the need for whales (or ads). They may be an addiction for the majority of people who play them, but they're not costly.
The article contradicts this view, as it looks like 99% of the people don't pay at all.
Except that's not really how it works. You have to make your game good enough to attract the amount of players for which that 1% of paying users can support your development.
Go ahead and try to design a game that focuses on "whales", see how the works out.
This basically describes Las Vegas.
I play 10-20 hours of games a week, all of them on consoles or handhelds that are >10 yrs old.
Do I want to be playing only old games? No, but it's easier to find a Game Boy game that I love than having to poke through a hundred awful mobile games on the various app stores first.
It seems to me that there's a good market for an App that simply curates excellent games and sells them to you.
Anyone know of anything like that? I'd be all over it.
I wish Valve would expand Steam into the mobile gaming market. That would certainly help with the discovery problem, with frequent sales, user reviews, custom tags, and whatnot. Also in my experience, their recommendation engine actually works pretty well.
Obviously they'd have an uphill battle on their hands, as they can't distribute their store app on the Play Store, but the Amazon App Store seems to be doing decent so far despite that handicap.
A friend & I are trying to build a Netflix for mobile games. The app is called GameGif and we believe that mobile game discovery should be about video content.
That's why the unique part on GameGif is that you swipe though short game videos rather than looking at screenshots or reading boring descriptions.
If you have an Android phone, you can check out our Beta here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.betterworl...
If you have an iPhone, you can check out our trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGX8CzbgvbA
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Precisely. And to a large extent I think we're lagging behind the proper realization of what's going on here. A lot of "freemium" mobile games play in the same space as gambling does, and they hook into the same cognitive, behavioral, and reward mechanisms in order to hook people's attention and keep extracting dollars from those who become addicted. Hopefully it's not nearly as damaging as gambling addictions because there seems to be a somewhat slower curve and lower cap on spending, but it's still pretty bad.
I've always assumed the contrary (no games, with markets full of absolutely unplayable and terribly boring "my clash of tower defense sniper sugar pizzeria"-grade crapware), but gave it another thought today. I think now I know why I believed there are "no games" on mobile, while there probably are. The explanation is quite simple I'm not sure why I haven't really noticed this earlier - the genres I generally like are basically unplayable on the mobile form factor. And genres of the games suggested (say, puzzles or platformers) generally aren't really appealing to me.
So, when you hear someone says that there's no games - maybe the reason is just the person's preferences.
There are people who will spend well over $10,000 a year to fulfill their compulsion for their "chosen" game. The advice in the article is actually rather asinine unfortunately:
>"Game creators should begin to look at pushing more sales after install. Swrve suggests this should be done one month after the game has been downloaded. Another way to keep keen players coming back would be to reduce the privileges given in purchases so they will need to buy more to play more."
It's implying that game creators haven't been carefully playing the analytics game since before freemium was a word. Any of these proposed changes will typically have catastrophic effects on the casual user base which could reduce game popularity and then tank the whale usage (depending on how much the game depended on network affects). Freemium games face the problem that TV networks do, there's too much alternative content out there.
>"Although, perhaps restructuring or ditching the freemium model might be the safest bet."
This is the right answer if you want to make good games. Freemium is an excellent model to optimization profit but it typically is directly counter to what can be considered a "good" gaming experience. The freemium games that have been largely successful (Clash of Clans, Hearthstone, Candy Crush, etc.) were all successful because they were easy to play for free, this garnered more popularity, which brought in more "whales" to support their creators.
I see mobile gaming as a race to the bottom, the margins are razor thin for the company, the pay is mediocre for the employees (as well as growth opportunities). Occasionally King comes along and wins it for a year but there are hundreds of these companies out there and the odds aren't good for them.
You probably already know this, but for those that don't, this phrase was borrowed from the casino community. Seems apt, no?
I know it created some friction after a while when the company realized that calling users a synonym for fat, even if internally only and without that intent, was a bad idea (their game also targeted girls making it worse).
Free video-slots that give you "Casino Coins" (CC) that you can redeem for drinks/food.
The free games will be very, very basic (no multiplay or bonus features), and you might earn enough over a few hours for 1 free drink. Limit free game spins to a certain rate per hour.
Pay into the game and you'll get better unlocks. Pay continually and you'll increase a "combo meter" that will tilt things even more in your favor. Pay small extras that let you customize the video slot interface with your favorite characters, hats, sounds, etc. that are tied to your casino account rewards card.
Urgh.
Went there with a friend that spends a lot in slots and we all (party of 8) drank and ate for free because of that for the entire night.
And it isn't just mobile games, not is it just games. There's a race to the bottom in the entire content creation industry.
That said, there are still players who complain about it being too hard to get into the game for new players, but I think Blizz is addressing those issues decently well.
I made a conscious decision to monetize in the game early on so I dodged the monetization ramp challenges. Now it's just a problem of not having enough time to devote to ladder climbing.
Undoubtedly the free marketeers will downvote, but to my mind it's simply not ethical to make money feeding off someone's addiction in that manner. At least drinking, gambling and other compulsions have heavy (but inadequate) regulation. Freemium needs some regulation too.
Buying a monthly sub, at $15 to compare with WoW, or buying the game outright is at least a fair trade. You still get addicted but your business no longer depends on bleeding people dry.
I'm all for free markets but I'm not dogmatic in my support, the people that pay money for freemium games are going to be at a net worse position in life. There is an argument about free choice, whether the person would engage in another 'destructive' behavior, etc. but in the end I just felt the industry was focusing on being hyper-exploitive.
You, for example, have choosen not to work for people anymore who exploit others. Others maybe don't have your morale standards, and others choose to get exploited. Thats their way of life, not yours. You don't have to be part of things you don't want.
Thats what I think of free markets.
It really is no different than how transactions done under compulsion are not fair or voluntary. If you are mentally compelled to participate through psychological manipulation, that is no different than someone pointing a gun at your head and telling you to give them your money, or using socioeconomic influential factors and market capture to force participation in unfair transactions (ie, monopolies).
Most products play off of our own varying degrees of "mental illness" and addiction -- be that video games, coffee, high-calorie content food, cars, clothes, big houses, and so on.
Still, I'd rather be ill with my stuff than healthy without.
I'd definitely consider arguments that western culture has in many ways developed the advertising industry as a means of systemic psychological manipulation. There are a lot of people who make irrational purchasing decisions based on what is on the TV, and there is some degree of exploitation in that behavior.
Practically speaking we want to think that anyone over the age of 18 is a competent rational capable human adult with acceptable brain chemistry, but in practice I'd imagine very few people are perfectly healthy mentally, it is just the degree to which mental illness is apparent. Look at how common depression is, or how diagnostic rates for Autism and ADHD have risen dramatically in the last three decades. That is not to say we have more mentally ill people today, we are just paying more attention to individual psychological profile to deduce that there is much more nuance to mental health than just being insane or not.
And then advocating for government intervention on top of it?
This seems like legislating personal preference to me. Most of the moralistic arguments about game design tropes were already tried in the 80s-90s when the arcade was still a thing, and IMO, they're just as busted now because we're not talking about gambling.
Lower yields are unacceptable to businesses, even if they are part of a normal healthy economy, so they tighten wages for their workers and raise prices for their products (after running out of alternatives). This is a "double squeeze" on the working class. Not only do they have less money to spend, because they're paid less, but their cost of living goes up because every company is raising prices.
Couple that with speculative investors (new yuppies and Chinese nationals hiding money) targeting real estate as long-term rentals pushing potential buyers out of the market. They then renovate this housing into "luxury" and push the affordable housing out. It doesn't matter if these rentals sit empty for a while because the speculative investors are banking on continued property appreciation external of all rational reasons.
So, to sum:
- People are getting less money (relative to inflation)
- Prices are still rising (inflation keeps going)
- Speculation in the housing market is also increasing cost of living
For those people that spend >$10,000 a year, with a few rare exceptions, my expectation is that they live with an absurd debt load and eventually go bankrupt. I don't think this is a root cause but it definitely doesn't help people accrue assets.
John "Rotten" Lydon is a famous example:
I wasted – you’re the first to know this – 10,000 f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pounds in the last two
years on apps on my iPad. I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing,
and I just wanted to up the ante. And like an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve
been checked now. But there's a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken
from me and I’m determined to bring it back.
They're all "music", but they're all very different products.
Ringtones are cheap, disposable, mostly looked down upon, but still popular at the same time somehow.
Live music is seen as requiring a greater level of commitment; perhaps a little more exerting or rough around the edges, strangely pricey, but generally worth the above-and-beyond effort you have to make.
Music albums are ubiquitous, real effort went into many of them and they are not really disposable. There are a lot of sad "me too" attempts to capitalize on other trends created by first-movers. Most people have at least a couple they are into, and connoisseurs can dive into a pile of esoterica to unearth unappreciated artistic gems. Every once in a while, a major production turns out to actually be artistically important too, and people freak out.
What's my point? The "game" in "mobile game" seems pretty weighty, implying a closer kinship with other kinds of games, but, really they're as distant in kinship as ringtones are from "music". They're another product altogether. And ephemeral. And dangerous to tie your long-term longevity to as a content producer.
[edit: typos]
Phones don't just have ring tones anymore. I can listen to just about any song ever published on my cell phone with spotify or pandora or slacker. There's no reason we should only be writing garbage "ringtone" games for mobile.
Nobody is buying non-ringtone games, predominantly because the ubiquitous exploitation of users through ringtone games has driven away any significant gaming crowd.
Nvidia has interestingly been pushing for Android gaming for years, making handhelds and consoles for it, but I'd really wonder how their success is doing. It is a really fascinating behavior that consumers will buy Nintendo games on their handheld for incredibly high relative prices, but balk at spending a quarter as much on the Tegra Store for a more expensive to produce product.
The barrier to entry for Android gaming is lower, but no one is going to develop for the form factor if the unit isn't going to be in a lot of people's hands.
So instead we get games designed for touch that can optionally controlled with a traditional controller. Maybe.
The games brought to Sony Vita and Nintendo xDS have higher budgets and teams targeting the features of the console, so they sell even though the cost is high.
And touch is a pretty shitty input modality for anything beyond puzzle games.
Still, it's not as bad as it could be, at least not in the US or Europe. If you think it's bad that people are encouraged to pay money for things in mobile games here, well, the 'kompu gacha' type stuff is another level of scary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOWFvlBPnk4
It's basically literal gambling in some areas. You don't pay for items or even advantages in game mechanics, you pay for the 'possibility' of getting characters and items. It's between 1 and 5 dollars for a roll of the dice, and the probability of getting a rare character can be less than 0.1%. There are stories of people spending thousands of dollars in a few hours playing these games in a livestream on Twitch or the likes...
Fortunately, this isn't as common in most games on the US app store just yet.
Although, the "shutdown law" in South Korea has caused disproportionate shrinking of game sales, so I am not sure how much regulation is good.
The stores really reward clickbait games and make it nearly impossible to discover good/serious games.
If they're looking at 40 games with 20 million players during one month, they're looking at a specific class of mobile games, not mobile games at large.
Also,
> "A new report is highlighting that risk, showing that almost half of all the revenue generated in mobile gaming comes from just 0.19 percent of users. That means the other 99.81 percent of users aren’t worth anything money-wise to the creators."
Uh, aren't they worth 'half'?
edit: anecdotally, I've probably spent about $100 in the past year on random puzzle games that probably don't end up on the top of lists. Not sure how weird/errant I am though.
99.81% of users don't see the point in buying the $5 "valu-pack" of [insert contrived currency here] to unlock an extra few hours of playtime every day.
Mobile developers get angry and post rants about people being averse to spending as much as a cup of coffee on their abusively designed time sinks.
And other gaming industries are starting to follow suit. There are AAA console/PC titles with microtransactions now, it's ridiculous.
But $12 is nothing to me, and dear in other locales.
There are examples of games that got the freemium model right and are fairly successful as a result, and the pattern is always the same: start with a game with a fun core gameplay loop, do not gate gameplay content or progression behind paywalls, let players spend money on cosmetic/status symbols, or to more quickly progress in areas that could also be progressed more slowly without spending.
Warframe and Path of Exile do this and are seeing a good amount of success as a result.
And this trust is actually far easier to earn if I am making larger purchases, not smaller ones. I'll spend $100 on something if I think it's a high-quality, one-time payment. But I won't even spend $1 on some seedy, risky experiment.
So what do you do within those parameters? You try to make a game that relies on #2 to subsidize #1. The alternatives? Release totally free games (where's the business model?). Release ad-supported games (everyone hates ads!). Release games on a flat subscription model. Or accept that the whales are your actual paying customer base, and make games explicitly for them.
By and large, the mobile gaming industry has concluded that the latter approach is the optimal way to run a profitable business. The result is the shitty, manipulative, cookie-cutter approach to game design that has become so dominant today. But unless and until some of the 99% of us decide that games are worth paying for upfront, this seems to be the world we're stuck in.
Do people hate ad-supported games more than they hate games that nag you to spend money on them constantly?
I can see why they would want to do it, but it just makes me sad that good complete game experiences are going away in favor of infinitely evolving cash trains that will be forgotten as soon as their last server goes out of commission.
While such a structure means that a game developer can earn 10k or more from a single player, it also makes the game worse for those who aren't willing to spend unlimited amounts of money and thus drives some of them away or causes them to decide to not spend any money at all.
If this is not desired, the simple solution is to have an "unlimited pass" that gets you access to all current and future IAP/DLC content that gives a game advantage for either a fixed one-time fee or a fixed subscription fee.
This is probably not often done because the game developers believe that it would be less profitable overall.
I disagree with the recommendations of this article to basically put the screws to the customers until they pay up
> Another way to keep keen players coming back would be to reduce the privileges given in purchases so they will need to buy more to play more.
Keeping happy users that recommend your game/app is the driving force of freemium. Pissing them off just kills the golden goose. All you need is to make certain that if a customer WANTS you to take their money, there is always something to purchase at high and low price points.
1. Game devs have an incentive to make the game crappy unless you pay 2. When it comes time for you to pay, you have to support all the freeloaders.
I would venture a guess that most games could have higher median "fun" and still only charge $2-$5 . Instead of charging one person $10k and 5k ppl nothing.
just my thoughts though, no science/data to back it.
The key point here is that the developers want to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with their customers. They're not just churning out a product and expecting people to give them money for it.
It's strange that so people people whine about mobile games being freemium but nobody mentions League of Legends: A completely free PC game that has made an obscene amount of income on little more than avatar skins.
You also have to buy characters. Like in many "free" games, you can earn currency to buy the characters through playing the game, but you get it very, very slowly. I'm still missing dozens of characters after four years, and that's even paying money for some of them (thanks to gift cards).
Digital information has never, and will never, work like that. The price of movies is not influenced by pirates. The price of music is not influenced by how much radio stations charge to wholesale play it. There is absolutely no limit on supply of said information, the only scarcity is the revenue to produce it.
If you make a game for 100k, it does not matter if you have 10k buyers at $10 each, or 1 million players where 1 in 1000 spend $100, you recoup your costs either way. The only difference is that your 10k player game is seen as "dead" or "unsuccessful" if its competition has 1 million players, and on mobile stores that prioritize install base, the former will always lose in market growth.
But money made and money lost on a game have nothing to do with one another. You lose money when you cannot recoup the developer hours to make it, and you can only gain or break even on money that users spend on it after release. The closest you can get to "losing" money is bullshit MAFIAA propaganda about how all the pirates / freeloaders would have bought the game if it cost money, when we can demonstrably see here, and in almost every other instance, that if you paywall things people want for free they will very often just go for other things rather than stick around paying for yours, and that the conversation rate of pirates / freeloads - especially in mobile gaming - almost certainly does not offset the increased userbase and word of mouth you get from them to attract whale customers.
That's HIGHLY subjective. Lots of things work, doesn't necessarily make them good. How is it great content for free when it's locked behind gem and extreme time gates?
The freemium space is such a mess that you'll download something interesting and it's telling you within minutes that unlocking this tile will take 22hours. Only 17 gems to unlock now! Candy Crush supposedly set levels to be almost impossible without bought boosts, after just a few. Never installed candy crush so can't comment directly. Let's not forget the total piss take that was Dungeon Keeper on mobile.
Yes we've all read the blog posts on how to monetise, and the first purchase is the hardest so get it the day they install etc etc. Taking the piss defines the freemium space.
Older freemium games had a much more ethical balance. Things like Temple Run managed to let you play a decent game for free. Then pay for more. Must have worked well enough as they decided to make a TR2.
I won't even install freemium games any more.
"Pissing them off just kills the golden goose"
Meanwhile pissing off everyone who knows them with the Candy Crush "I want to get a level unlock", "Woo I reached level 2" Facebook spam is fair game presumably?
I've bought several games when I can buy them outright. I wish there were more ports of classics like Bard's Tale, which I bought, to Android - Pirates, RealMyst etc are all ipad/iphone only.
I want a game I can buy, not a bloody subscription. We didn't buy subscriptions or gems for the kids either, no matter how much they whinged.
I used to play MMORPGs and stayed connected - without playing - just to help people in my clan with questions on quests and similar things, as I knew quite a lot about the games. It was time consuming, but it felt rewarding to help other people.
What makes so specially bad the Facebook requests?
If the messages were going to the Candy Crush community i couldn't care less, as they'd at least then be pushing the messages to people interested in that game. Of course that would completely destroy a community with the volume they push.
I'd not mind an ask from guild or MMO community to help out, or even talk about build advice or whatever - if it's a game I played, and I'm in the community I care at least a bit. Asking for help in WoW when I'm in Lotro or vice versa isn't anything other than spam.
It's the same as auto-ding plugins - they're damn annoying unless you're 11. I don't care that you level++, please don't tell me.
I'm sure most the players don't realise how spammy it is, and often there's a pattern in the UX to heavily encourage the FB push by default/mistake, or get extra gems for sharing.
There are literally thousands of those out there. Go ahead and buy them.
Why are people so concerned with what others find entertaining? If freemium games, and their shitty mechanics, aren't for you, don't play them.
Get used to it. It IS a bad thing. Taking advantage of addiction like this is immoral, plain and simple.
"Freemium monetization works: developers get paid and consumers get a lot of great content for free."
And the people who are addicted and end up spending insane amounts of money that they probably can't afford to spend?
Around the time the mobile world got dominated by freemium games, I bought myself a Nintendo 3DS and I have not regretted it. The games are much more expensive up front, but they do offer very elaborate gameplay and long time fun.
Then came consoles, and everyone pretty much ditched arcades and stayed at home. We went from spending buckets of quarters drawn out over the course of an evening, to spending buckets or quartuers all at once every month or two, and taking out a loan to afford the next $400+ console. The arcade model died, because consoles were better in every regard. People wanted to stay home, the games were better and more engaging, the platform and context allowed for games with more depth and value than could ever be achieved in an arcade, and you didn't have to worry about the console eating your quarters. And no more collecting 10 million tickets only to realize that the best item you can redeem them for is a plastic transformers ring.
Then came PCs, and PCs and consoles lived happily together alongside one another for the next decade or two. So how does the story end? Well, arcades are back baby, but in the form of pay-to-win freemium mobile games. They've evolved; now you don't have to go to some sticky floored dungeon to play Time Cop 15. You can do that from the comfort of your own phone. Just plop in $1 every now and then to keep playing. Best of all, game devs found out a way to price discriminate. Poor? Here's some ads and patience. Rich? Push a button and Apple will take care of the rest.
But the games haven't changed. Mobile games are just as shallow as arcade games ever were. But weren't arcades great? Of course they were; those games were a blast. They're a different kind of fun. A kind of fun you can pick up, enjoy, and then leave without another thought. These aren't grand masterpieces like The Witcher 3, or thought bending games like The Stanley Parable. But they were still fun, exciting, and a great way to relax or kill time.
So, my question is, why is everyone so caustic towards mobile gaming? Because it's exploitative? Sure, I can understand that, but so were arcades. If I had to guess, it's perhaps the pervassiveness of the games and the manner in which they present themselves that people find so offensive. See, arcades were at the arcades. You had to drive there, and physically be there for awhile. Mobile games are constantly with you, just one finger swipe away. And they take advantage of that, with notifications and constant come-hither looks to get you to play and spend. Also, arcade machines were upfront about their pricing model. The quarter slot is right there on the front of the machine, and the screen is flashing "Insert Coin". Mobile games advertise themselves as free, and even let you play a little bit before revealing their true payment model. That's deceptive in ways arcades were not.
No real point other than to remind everyone of history. It's clear that mobile gaming shares a heritage with arcades. And it's perhaps clear that they've evolved the model, but perhaps that evolution is not what everyone was hoping for. I'm more curious what the next "console" evolution will be.
If you tried to "1cc" most mobile games, it would take a fixed amount of time while you wait for your gems or energy or whatever to recharge, and you'd spend most of your time refraining from playing. The two models are certainly on the same evolutionary line, but mobile freemium games are a more blatant and direct psychological hack. The "challenge" is from overcoming your inbuilt desires and delaying gratification - exactly the sort of boring, responsible, real-life stuff people play games to avoid.
From what I understand, Vegas voluntarily has rules in place that test this to keep from being regulated?
I remember Mechwarrior Online coming out with GOLD colored mechs for some obscene price and seeing them in game. I want to say they were like five hundred bucks. Wargaming also follows a similar model but I haven't see individual tanks or ships cresting a hundred bucks but there are enough that are in the fifty range and they are plentiful in matches
I'm more than willing to pay for mobile games, but I've been continually disappointed and how shallow the mobile games industry is.
Mobile games currently have much more in common with Flash games (remember when those were all the rage), than the gaming industry. Cheap, and quantity > quality.
However now, that money has dried up. Formerly successful studios that used to make a lot of money are having a hard time making ends meet on their own IP. The cost of user acquisition has gone up way too high, because the biggest players have effectively infinite ad spend.
Sadly there wasn't room in the article to elaborate on what form this might take.
The biggest problem with apps nowadays is that you write it and no one ever hears about it or finds out about it, let alone downloads it, not how to get money out of your users once you have them. That's a much easier problem. The author probably just has no clue.
I might replace 'hardcore users' with 'children who don't know what real games are'
Here is mine https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/5-differences-2/id816500190?...
I've heard from a lot of gamers that would love to purchase a given version of a game outright for ~$15 than to be sapped with free-to-play mechanics. For example, take a look at the feedback on the Torchlight Mobile facebook page from 2015-06-25:
https://www.facebook.com/torchlightmobile/photos/a.885045108...
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
People who pay for consumable in-game resources aren't interested in the same kind of games that I'm interested in. Reading this article made me realize:
If you're not paying for it, it's not designed for you.
You sound like a grade "A" human being.