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Comment by rrowland | Hacker News Reader

This article and the comments here saying "This is common knowledge in the industry" and "I'm getting tired of people saying this is a bad thing" are a beautiful illustration of why mobile games suck and freemium is destroying the industry.

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.

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As a side note, if anybody wants to support a couple awesome indie devs (and play a sick mobile game) check out http://subterfuge-game.com/

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.

The most accurate (and amusing) description of that game I've heard is that it is a "backstabbing simulator".

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.

Except really it doesn't. While it might be unique it's clearly not what the market wants. I found the tutorial lengthy and confusing. The game doesn't have mass market appeal. Did anybody really expect this game to do well?

Not everybody wants to be entertained the same way that you do. In fact I think the market has shown us that most people like simple games that they can play for a few minutes at time, that don't involve much strategy or twitch skill that we would associate with previous video games. They've also voted with their wallets for the freemium model.

You need good games before people can buy them. List 5 fun mobile games relative to say good game-boy games ex: Metroid II: Return of Samus, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Dragon Warrior I & II, etc.

IMO, Angry Birds does not make the cut and I don't know of a better iOS game.

You can't compare most mobile games to "action"-y portable games like that, because a phone largely doesn't control the same way. Strategy and turn-based games tend to work better.

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

It's telling that three of those five were developed for other platforms first, and ported to mobile after they became successful. In my experience, the majority of mobile games that are both decent and professional work like that: they're only ported once they've proven to be big sellers. Developing a good game specifically for mobile is a huge risk.

Tomb Raider Go is a mobile-first title. It's Tomb Raider meets Monument Valley.

I meant Carcassonne, XCOM, and Hearthstone. (One could make an argument for Pinball Arcade, since it uses classic tables, but I feel like the game experience is probably different enough to call it more than a straight port.)

I would say the only one that wasn't developed mobile-first was XCOM (and it shows -- tap targets are smaller, and there's lots of scrolling text and wasted screen space). Hearthstone was developed simultaneously for iPad and PC (they share an interface; the iPhone version is somewhat cramped); Carcassonne is a board game but the iOS version [0] is an excellent rendition of the game that makes great use of the touchscreen while adding a good one-player mode.

[0]: https://carcassonneapp.com

Ok, here's 5 non-freemium iOS games that I would put up with every game you listed (and this is speaking as someone who loves a lot of the old gameboy games):

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!

Of those I've only played Threes. I do not question your self report, but it's likely that there's a big difference in how we enjoy games, because for me there's an immense chasm between the quality and the experience of any Metroid game and a game like Threes. From my perspective it would be like someone comparing a home cooked meal to a tic-tac.

That said, You Must Build a Boat looks pretty neat, I grabbed a copy and will check it out.

I don't know, right now there's not a single mobile game I'd rather play over Rocket League, Stardew Valley, or Civ V.

Monument Valley takes 2-3 hours. Interesting sure, but many people would consider that a huge waste at say 20$. People used to complain when free demos where that short.

I definitely agree, but Monument Valley only costs $4. The DLC is another $2. I'm totally OK with the length considering how inexpensive it is.

But there are TONS of great games on iOS!

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:

Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, NS Hex... are board 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.

You may not be aware, but you don't have the one true opinion on what constitutes a fun video game.

That's the thing, it's about voting with your dollars so majority opinion 'wins' and most people don't consider press A to be a fun game worth paying for.

These are Android, but some that I really enjoyed (I would put any of these on par with those game-boy games):

  * the Broken Sword series
  * The Shivah
  * Machinarium
  * Yesterday
  * Silent Age
  * CLARC
  * Osmos
  * Auralux
  * Kingdom Rush series
  * Cordy

The games are there, you just have to dig. Phones and tablets lend themselves really well to bullethell and other shmups(of which I love):

   * .Decluster
   * DoDonPachie, DeathSmiles, really anything by Cave
   * Shogun: Bullethell

They have also done remakes of popular shmups like R-Type and popular Neo Geo shooters. There is plenty of depth in and fast action in these games. Tapping rhythm games are awesome like:

   * Rhythm Control 2

There's also adventure games:

   * Sword and Sorcery

Not to mention the Secret of Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango have been remade for iOS. I also know a guy was super into Street Fighter tournaments and really like Street Fighter IV on his iPad. The platform has already been proven as a viable gaming platform. Very few people other than serious gamers want to pay more than a few bucks for "just an app".

Monument Valley is pretty good.

Monument Valley is indeed very good, but you can beat it in 2-3 hours so it's more akin to watching a movie than having a game you can play a few minutes per session several times a day.

Tiki towers was also good. I haven't played enough recently to have too many more, but I would recommend Cause of Death (not on app store anymore, can download from hipstore and copy episodes over on a jailbroken device), as a text based game that was really well thought out.

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.

True. The puzzles were and still are fun, just wish there were more of them. Almost makes me want to program a clone, allow people to mod it, just to play some more of the same-style puzzles...

Totally agree, the depth of most mobile games is extremely lacking. That said, I would recommend "Kero Blaster" by Daisuke Amaya (Cave Story guy). It's a similar run 'n gun, but very fun if you're into that genre.

I really liked the Chaos Rings games, and the Final Fantasy remakes. Square Enix did a bang-up job. I'm on android now, but years ago I also loved the concept for Sword and Poker. Thats at least 5 games there. All (save for Sword and Poker) had a production value on par with most games for the Gameboy.

I'd actually love a definitive list like this. In my experience, there aren't many. Here are mine:

* 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

There's The Lost Monos. May or may not be a masterpiece, but give it a try.

It's not too hard to find five fun mobile games. Here are a few: Super Hexagon, Downwell, Threes, Kero Blaster, Canabalt.

Hearthstone is excellent.

Heartstone is one of those free-2-play games with pay-2-win model. I see that many fail to see this just because it was made by a respectable PC developer. Heartstone is no different from Clash of Clans. It may be slightly less evil, but still falls into the same category.

I like Hearthstone and Ascension. The latter is not a CCG - you buy expansions like, say, Carcasonne, and the deck is "combined".

I had a lot of fun with Pandemic, but on the whole I agree.

80 days is one of the finest games I've ever played.

This is the crux of it. This thread is overfilled with comments from people who don't like free to play games... It's like reading complaints about daytime soap operas from people who prefer Daredevil. Daredevil fans don't even know what good looks like to a soap opera fan.

If 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.

I'd agree that not everyone likes the same kind of game. But people are being 'trained' to like these types of games, so you are going to find skewed results.

When I played games I realized it was for those rewards of accomplishment. I felt good about myself for a few minutes when I beat some hard level. Its worse when you are not getting those rewards elsewhere in your life.

While most games have some degree of this, there are many games that are designed for other purposes as well. Mobile just happens to be the most soul-sucking thanks to it's profit model.

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.

I pretty much quit playing any/all Blkzzard games after a month of WOW.

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.

> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby.

The article contradicts this view, as it looks like 99% of the people don't pay at all.

The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change.

>The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change.

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.

"Go ahead and try to design a game that focuses on "whales", see how the works out."

This basically describes Las Vegas.

And yet Vegas is massively appealing to the other 99.9% of people.

Also why buy the "SUPER FLAMING SHOTGUN 9000" for $9.99 if there aren't mobs of non paying players to blow up? It's sort of like google, the non paying players are the product here.

That's not how it works. Without the 99% that don't pay, you don't get the 1% that do pay.

Only because they don't know about it. If you had a way to market to them you really wouldn't need the other 99%. There's probably enough data out there to do just that, too.

Well, except that a lot of the worst F2P mobile games are competitive multiplayer. If you cut out all the freeplay minnows, the whales don't have enough people to play against.

Doesn't that make the original statement a tautology? If the market doesn't care about the 99% that play but don't pay, of course video games are nothing but a costly addiction.

No, because in markets where most people pay, they aren't optimized to be costly addictions. Mainstream video games charge every player $50 one time, instead of charging 1 player $5,000 and 99 players $0.

They pay with their time. That's not cheap!

"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never."

What does that mean? As far as I can tell, it's either saying that advertising has no effect whatsoever on the success of a product (which is obviously nonsense), or it's some weird circular prosperity-gospel thing where you declare that only good people/films make money, so any person/film that makes money is by definition good.

Its replaced smoking as a quick shot of dopamine and an alternate reward system for a lot of people I know.

Although smoking is cheaper and better for your health.

Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled.

> Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled.

What? Story time?

Let's be fair here. Bejewelled is the crack-cocaine of simple addictive games. Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball are mere gateways to Bejewelled.

Bejewelled is a near perfect Skinner Box, I had a serious 'addiction' to it for a while, managed to avoid spending on it but can see how others didn't.

Entertainment is a tough business to be in in general. There are plenty of good songs out there no one listens to. Mobile games suck for more reasons than the present most profitable business model and I don't think the industry is at risk of being destroyed any more than otherwise with or without a freemium model. I know plenty of people argue that freemium is what allows the mobile game industry to exist in the first place.

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.

> There are plenty of good games out there.

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.

Every genre is covered with high-quality mobile games. They have to adapt to different form factor and player habits, but they do exist. The huge problem is discoverability. You have to specifically ask for your genre and you'll get some good recommendations.

> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby.

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.

This explains why I don't play mobile games anymore. They are boring and it's way too obvious to me when the mechanics are designed around money and it immediately becomes pointless to play.

Stardew Valley is such a refreshing game. It's the antithesis of freemium mobile crap, and I wish the otherwise talented mobile devs would focus on games like that.

It looks very similar to the Harvest Moon series of games. Definitely taking a look at it now.

Seems like the problem is mobile games discovery.

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 just came across your post while I'm working on a possible solution for your problem.

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.

I came across this one on HN a while ago, and have found the recommendations to be quite good: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.an...

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.

I imagine the kind of market data needed to curate effectively is held closely (private) by the companies and devs involved. See also: music services and their recommendation engines being universally lame.

pockettactics.com is probably what you want. They concentrate on the more interesting stuff: RPGs & roguelikes, strategy / tactical wargames, 4x's, boardgame conversions. Very little of what they feature is the "free-to-play" ilk.

it does suck. but that doesn't mean a majority of mobile games are a costly addiction. And even granting you that, it sounds a lot like the text-message-addiction commentary in the early 00s.

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