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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

I recently worked for one of the biggest mobile game developers. While I game a lot and have been for over 20 years I never played anything on my phone (PC gaming only) so I was pretty shocked at the state of the industry. They have meetings about making the game more addictive, taking away any chance to get ahead in the game by skill or grind so you must spend, targeting vulnerable groups, making it hard to see how much you actually spent in the game.

To have these people paint themselves as oppressed and offended... is exactly what I've come to expect after every online social justice controversy I've witnessed so far.

And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

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I worked as a freelance re-recording mixer for film. Most of my audio collegues told me to stay away from the gaming industry if I can. In theory game engines could be very interesting for telling moods and creating worlds. In practice the salaries are bad and the time tables so crammed, that it is a struggle to keep even basic quality levels. The freedom to find something truly good, new or interesting is rarely there.

The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.

I don't think this is endemic to gaming, it's difficult in all creative media to predict the commercial success of a product. The film industry does the same thing in producing blockbuster productions that are more iterative than innovative and are safe bets, so they can then take gambles on more niche projects.

I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.

I found Hades was squarely in the iterative category. The studio used a very similar forumla as their previous games (Bastion, Transistor, dead ells) then mixed in rogue like elements to give it interesting decisions.

Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.

I found dead cells and hades to be entirely different games, at least in the sense that hades did not grab onto me and dead cells did.

Also, they don't actually make dead cells, motion twin does

To each their own tbh, and I am glad that both games enjoy the success.

I am the complete opposite, I liked both, but Hades easily is the winner for me (and I am saying that as one of the very very early dead cells backers). Because they managed to refine the roguelike gameplay to almost-perfection, but the storytelling and writing are on a whole other level compared not only to other roguelikes, but a lot of games in general.

I'm going to try to pick up Hades again. Perhaps notably, the previous games like Bastion didn't grab me for whatever reason, but it might be because I needed to let go of some preconceived gaming notions I had as a traditional action-RPG lover.

Bastion is a bit different. I liked the music and art a lot, but the story was kinda basic (despite the great delivery), and the gameplay was just "satisfactory" imo. In Hades, gameplay itself takes the prime spot, despite the rest of the aspects being also great. With Hades, you can enjoy the game even if you don't care about the storytelling or art at all. With Bastion, that would be a really questionable proposition to play it just for gameplay.

My advice for Hades is to give it about 2-3 hours of try, and then decide if you want to play more. Mostly because it takes about an hour or two until the game gives you all the essentials before releasing you into the world where you can play it "for real". Sort of like a less extreme version of Red Dead Redemption 2, which requires you playing 10+ hours to finally to be able to play it "for real" (referring to having to get to chapter 2 or so, before you can free roam and enjoy sidequests and start doing things at your own pace).

Dead Cells was not developed by Supergiant Games. It was made by Motion Twin.

> Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.

There's lots of indie games that don't have those issues.

But, the problem with making games is the same problem with art or music or opening a coffee shop or becoming a doctor or nurse: it's something that people want to do, and so supply will overwhelm demand until conditions and pay get bad enough to outweigh the romantic appeal.

Programmers in the game industry are treated much worse on average, than programmers working on in-house CRUD apps.

(Similarly, I assume working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX must be comparatively bad. Not necessarily absolutely bad, but compared to what the people working there could get elsewhere.)

I was a 17 year old "whiz kid" with my own game studio, I was a beta tester of the original Mac and one of the OS developers for the 3D0 and the first PlayStation. After living through the EA Spouse era I left games for good. I don't play them and I refuse to support the industry in any manner at all. I have grown to believe the Gaming Industry embodies the harshest legal exploitation possible, and frankly I damn them all to hell.

Sounds like you have an interesting perspective. Was there any specific events that led to you changing your opinion? What do you think about the future of the games industry?

Actually, it was working at one specific studio I will not name. The working conditions were absurd - a low rent building with no ceiling between the workers and the roof, the roof had birds that routinely crapped on people's heads and not a single thing was done about it. The building was surrounded by homeless camps, and going to lunch was both risky and overly expensive as the places to eat were all high end hipsters joints. The studio owners openly discussed how much money they were making (tens of millions) while being aggressive dicks to all their staff. At one point there was an "engine crisis" and one of the lead engineers fixed the situation by bringing in his own home made game engine from before being hired, and he recreated the in-production game himself over the weekend to prove his engine could handle the situation - the studio owners refused to pay him for his engine and threated legal action if he took it back.

That was it. I was openly showing management displeasure and they found a reason to fire me soon thereafter. I went into VFX and never looked back.

As far as a future for the games industry - they need a whole #I_was_enslaved_too movement. I won't even get into the difficultly in getting anyone in the game industry to recognize the need for better industry ethics across the board - in every aspect, every nook and every cranny of the industry it is corrupted pretty extreme.

That sounds like a nightmare. I'm glad you got out.

It's so sad to hear these stories. Game development has such great potential to be a stimulating workplace in the mix of tech, storytelling and art. On paper it is a fantastic blend. Alas, everyone I've spoken to that's been in the industry has similar horror stories to share. The workforce seems to be regarded as expendable. Investments dictates strategy that ends up being anti-consumer. Maybe this is the same thing that happens in TV or music, when you have big money combined with an endless supply of dreamers that wants to be part of it no matter what?

For someone who is interested in making games (like yours truly), the only viable way forward appears to be the hobbyist/indie route. To ever get discovered without a herculean effort and a massive dollop of luck seems quite unlikely though.

Put your creative energies into interactive digital art. Seriously. Museums are hungry for digital art, and the "digital artists" out there are not very sophisticated, technologically. Exercise your intellectual art mind-fuck muscles a bit and you could make a name in the serious art world.

The worst side of it is, that it drags the rest of the mobile game ecosystem down with it.

Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support?

Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it.

But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones.

Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…

On iOS Apple launched Apple Arcade to combat this and I must say, those games are pretty good. I seem to recall Google launching a similar service?

Name/Type of Game + Open Source

Google will van your application if you do a filtered Play store search, so make sure it is available on F-Droid and elsewhere.

....like...down by the river??

;)

Original meaning is the FBI van shows up and arrests you, I think it’s morphed to a van shows up and puts a black bag over your head, or your app in this case, and your app gets disappeared. I first saw the term on 4chan in like the mid 2000s.

no. parent is sarcastically referring to a (very old now, circa 1990) saturday-night-live skit where the actor always ends up mentioning that he lives "in a van, down by the river"

I think parent poster means that there are no other places to put the app/launcher.

Right I know the van down by the river sketch with Chris Farley, but the parent post is almost definitely using the verb “vanned” to mean the app will get disappeared.

No, I the phone just autocorrected 'ban' to van. You people can be really fucking strange at times..

Hey, it's SV. Living in a van down by the river is the new dream.

I have a similar experience. Technical challenges are one thing and they can be interesting, but ethics is more important to me.

It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked.

After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me.

Edit: formatting

I have a close friend that worked for such a company targeting the people you mention, they paid him really, really well (more than the big request he had made when they had made the offer, he had hoped they'd say no) but said company also left my friend really, really burned out after just one year (he's no longer with them).

I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.

I'm a games designer/developer and I work freelance for other studios. I say NO way more often than I say yes, precisely because of that particular problem. Money is nice and all that, but I've seen first hand the damage that these predatory practices can do to people. AND the attitudes of the people working at these game studios ands its frankly disgusting.

Games industry could learn alot from Weapons design and manufacture, and the Nazis. Moral reprehensible tasks can be split up into lots and lots of smaller tasks, until the responsibility is diluted enough. This is very amateurish process design- its not that hard to make a murderous golema who nobody feels responsible for.

Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here?

Like FAANG level money [0], more?

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/

> Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here?

I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.

This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore.

A few choice examples:

- Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players

- EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible

- Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime

*not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo

I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!

If this is at all accurate, I am disgusted by the state of the industry.

I guess that's why I don't play new games at all.

For what it's worth, I don't have this experience at all in the Nintendo ecosystem. Nintendo aren't saints either, they did much of the same bullshit in that Mario Kart app for Android, but all the games I'm playing on the Switch are free from this crap. I can't be 100% certain it's going to stay like that, but if Nintendo becomes another EA, they'll probably be among the last big studios to do so.

(I have no affiliation with Nintendo or any other game developers or publishers.)

Neither do I. I don't enjoy multiplayer games, so my experience is exclusively single-player with the occasional co-op session thrown it every couple of years.

I was making one of those "games in disguise" once, where the game was marketed as an app doing something useful to you. All we talked about was "first day retention" and "3-day retention" and how we keep people opening the app. I mean, if users find the app useful, you don't need to spam them with messages.

I recently set up a new phone and I was shocked that I got a notification from SoundHound. That's one app that has no business trying to "engage" me - it's there for one purpose, identify songs when I want it to. If it's once every two months, that's all the engagement they are getting. There is no retention to be had, and I will not give them any.

If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.

Similarly, Hulu started sending me engagement notifications. It has no notification controls so I disabled notifications entirely.

Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.

Just turn _everything_ off except the strictly nessesary, which for me is just whatever messaging app I use to talk to close friends

It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. You probably just know not to buy them, you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model. I would say to a non computer literate, the state of the pc software industry in general is just as spammy, perhaps even worse as it's much more mature, it is harder to get the worst through google play and the app store.

> you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model

It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot.

Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.

EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.

Thanks for the offer! I'm trying to learn to stop agreeing to things on impulse, so I'll think about it and get back to you no later than Monday.

If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.

There's a "review queue" of games where you see user feedback and you decide whether to allow the game on the list or deny it, along with a reason why. It's an allow/deny system, basically, except sometimes you have to look at the games to try and tell if they should make the list or not.

Or you could use Apple arcade and not worry about it I guess?

Even if I was on iOS, I've learned better than to trust commercial entities with curating mobile games and apps.

> It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc.

The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded.

The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.

> The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more.

This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.

At this point, I consider the majority of the mobile gaming space to be indistinguishable from a casino.

- Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check

- Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun")

I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...

Yet in real life games like Genshin Impact implement most of the techniques you find morally wrong yet the game has actual gameplay and most people playing it have no problem with it.

Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.

Genshin Impact is an example of a game where the gameplay is intrinsically designed to facilitate the monetization though - it's taking what would be perfectly alright gameplay, and making it _really shitty_, so they can monetize.

A Genshin Impact that cost full price but had no 'original resin' garbage, no running the same boss a dozen times (but only 4 times a day unless you pay!) to 'ascend' a character, that didn't gate most of the actually effective characters behind gacha pulls, might actually be a decent game. Probably wouldn't have made as much money though.

Clearly most people aren't bothered by it as it's an extremely popular game that has remained popular months after release. If it was just a quick low quality cash grab people would have moved on, but they haven't. So you have to come to terms with the fact that reality is rejecting your particular perspective on the issue.

How do you know people haven't moved on? Have you got Genshin Impact analytics that the rest of us don't? It's free and getting lots of installs as you'd expect - how do you know if people are sticking with it?

It's a perfectly fine game for the first quite-a-few-hours and then suddenly turns into an appalling grindfest (and yes, the 'quality' is clearly front-loaded, the game drops off a cliff once you get to Liyue)

Does it seem like a game that's consistently getting millions of views on videos about each update is experiencing some kind of serious decline in popularity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrH9vMZBwAk

Most people who attend casinos aren’t bothered by gambling mechanics either. Says nothing for the quality of gambling as gaming, though.

That isn't a clear cut answer to the game being played, they can play it and not be happy with some of the games practices, we really don't know unless a study is done.

Anecdotally All of my friends who play games hate microtransactions and loot boxes. Some don't care if it's only cosmetic though.

Popularity doesn't mean that it's good or that the monetization is reasonable. I happen to have seen sales figures for one of the top slot machine apps on one of the major mobile app stores and their revenue was as good or better than GI.

It sounds like you're saying something that's popular can't be bad?

If something is consistently popular it means enough people like it or aren't bothered by it enough to be a problem. The popularity of these games that you really don't like is a signal that your view of the world in regards to this issue is lacking and incomplete.

This only follows if the playerbase are expected to have full knowledge of the dark patterns at play but don't care about them. It's more likely they have no objection because they aren't aware.

Genshin Impact is notorious for preying on it's users and monetizing everything they possibly can. The only difference from other similarly monetized games is that they included an actual fun game - although they stole plenty of assets and animations apparently, e.g. from Niers Automata (ironic because that game is the epitome of a game that was clearly made with love and has no microtransactions).

Interesting. Can you name some valid, non-monetary reasons to have lootboxes?

In the same way that randomness in a roguelite leads to you feeling really good when you find an item that is cool and that you didn't expect to get, you have that same mechanic taking place when you either save enough in-game currency or use real money to buy a new lootbox and get a new item/character.

It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.

You have just described gambling exactly. The problem is, in most places it's illegal for minors to gamble and it's likely that the majority of Genshin Impacts players are minors.

What you described is a planned dopamine release you have to pay for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have lootboxes, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for monetary reasons.

Well, anything that involves a monetary exchange can be described as "for monetary reasons". I explained to you that a non-monetary reason is similar to the reasoning behind similar mechanics in roguelites, which generally do not ask the player for payment.

I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for."

Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.

Because, in the end, you end up paying real money, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making that choice as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

In a roguelite you end up paying real time, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

> you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible

Citation needed. Old rougelikes/rougelites are designed to optimise for subjective fun, which naturally translates to more time spent. If something is fun, it's obvious that people will keep playing for longer. What's wrong is using dirty psychological tricks to bypass that and go directly for increasing the time spent on the game.

My argument is that roguelites are fundamentally using a psychological trick via RNG-gating content to make people play the game for a longer amount of time. That's built into the genre. And that this trick is the same as the one used by lootboxes. People have a problem with one and not with the other for very complicated reasons, but they're fundamentally the same, and thus it's a mistake to single out one and not the other.

I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying. Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Also, I've not come across many roguelites which have a strong RNG component in their progression path. Roguelites are inherently random but their progression mechanics are generally quite regular on any given playthrough. All the ones I've played you progress quite linearly just by playing the game, not grinding for a chance to process. The worst I've heard of is one FTL's ship unlocks which involves getting two or three good rolls in a playthrough, which players (mostly 100% speedrunners) do complain about. Certainly nothing to the level of what is very common in lootboxes (where a massive grind for a less than 1 in 100 chance is common).

>I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying.

Games with RNG-gated content have a strong incentive to make progressing take as much time as possible, because the more time it takes the more people play the game, and the more people play the game the more they'll naturally advertise it to their friends.

>Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

> Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

They have an incentive to make the path where you're paying as interesting as possible, and make the path where you're not as painful/boring as possible (while dangling the idea of the interesting bits in front of you)

No roguelike ever had a locked chest that wasn't meant to be open. Lootboxes aren't meant to be open unless you pay.

Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time. That is the same as a lootbox in a game that lets you buy lootboxes with in-game currency at a slower rate than if you paid for them, such as the example I gave with Genshin Impact, where you can open lootboxes while paying nothing but the game is also structured to incentivize you to pay.

Games that are designed to suck hundreds of hours of your time and cause addiction are nearly as bad as games designed to tempt minors and vulnerable people into gambling. I'm not sure why you're bringing up the former as a defense of the latter.

I bring it up because the majority of people who have a problem with mobile games do not have a problem with roguelites. Either you have a problem with both or with none. I'm firmly in the none camp, it seems like you're in the both camp. Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake.

I've read the entire comment chain and the myopic focus on roguelites makes me feel like there's something that isn't being said.

Roguelites are designed for huge replayability so of course there's an element of randomness and difficulty in place of pure linear progression. Personally I don't see exploitative gambling/addiction mechanics in a game like Spelunky or Risk of Rain or Dead Cells.

It's utterly disingenuous to put these on the same level of cynical mobile titles that rub their exploitation in your face and continually blueball you with arrays of counters, timeout mechanics, fake currencies (backed by real money), and loot boxes. It's absurd to draw equivalence to the practice of exploiting 'whales' and young children, to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.

If Spelunky or some other roguelite had a mobile version that monetized every element of gameplay and made it 'freemium' then it would be another scummy mobile game, and would warrant the comparison. But not until then.

No that's you putting words into my or OP's mouth.

I don't have a problem with roguelikes, but I do have a problem with mobile games.

One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun, the other one is to extract as much money as humanly possible from their users.

The fact that they might use some of the same building blocks doesn't mean that end result is similar.

Just like playing poker and uno might use some similar mechanics (cards) that doesn't make them equal games. One is regulated the other one isnt.

Or you throwing dice in monopoly and craps

>One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun

It's not though, it's RNG-gating content and therefore not really optimize to provide gameplay experience and fun, it's hiding gameplay behind RNG, just like it happens with lootboxes. You happen to not be bothered by this fact because you enjoy the good feelings that come with finding new and unexpected items, but understand that the same feeling exists with the lootbox system, it just asks for money instead of time (which you have to spend to explore all the content when a game is RNG-gated).

Your dislike of one over the other is arbitrary and unreasonable, which is fine. But if you're going to ascribe moral value to things I'm not going to take you seriously because it's clear you haven't thought about it enough.

When it comes to compulsive gambling, the monetary risk is an integral part. People who suffer from it get their fix not by winning but by putting things on the line. This is why gambling is almost universally regulated, and yahtzee is not. It's mind poison for some people.

Saying that "time" is a currency sounds good on paper, but in this case it doesn't work. Those whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars on loot boxes would not have spent an equal amount of time otherwise.

It's predatory, and it's bad.

But it's not gating content. You still go forward, whatever you get or don't get.

It just means that most of your runs will be different. And will enable you to do different things (maybe you get staff of freezing and freeze the lake, or maybe levitating boots and walk on water .)

Non of that gates you, just provides flavor, and different runs.

Sure some things are better and some things are worse, but my fondest memories is getting a win with hilariously bad drops.

In mobile games you cant proceed, until you buy crystals, or wait down the increasingly long timer, or simply can't kill a boss without a powerup from cash store.

"Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake."

You're right, console and desktop games that do that are also a problem.

> Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time.

I am pretty sure that I have seen no such thing in Nethack, nor would I expect to see it in Rogue - the "rogue" part of "roguelike". Lootboxing roguelikes/lites are a subset of the genre, so it's not fair to use the entire genre as a defense of this practice.

So you would equate a digital blackjack game without real money involved to actual casino blackjack? I don't know if it's an expression in english, but it seems to be a case of "degrees in hell". Contributing to video game addiction isn't great, but intentionally siphoning money out of the wallets of whales is downright evil.

Again, you took the time to find the games that allow you to do this and then just say every free mobile game employs the model you don't like

The last two paragraphs in your comment made absolutely no sense to me, sounding almost like a complete non-sequitur. Are mobile game developers painting themselves as oppressed an offended...? Where? What?

In the Twitter threads where they all pearl-clutched in response to the satire removed in the linked article.

Oh ok, I just read the thread. While I don't agree, I really don't think it's any better for a bunch of seemingly mature adults being this upset over someone on Twitter posting a bad take and getting 10 likes. It just screams garbage "anti-sjw" culture which adds nothing of value to any discussion.

Mobile gaming is a completely different forest. If you want to survive in mobile gaming business you have to do monetization, monetization and monetization. I don't think it's going to change.

If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.

I like the expression "*ist" as an all-around catchall way to describe people who stereotype groups of other people in any way, shape or form that is loosely correlated with some attribute.

Don't be an *ist.

(My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)

1. There are predatory practices in mobile game industries

2. The joke makes fun of those practices.

3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players

You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).

Have you guys cancelled Karl Marx yet for being a racist and an anti-semite? He's punching down minorities.

What does Karl Marx and "them guys", whoever "they" are, have to do with mocking predatory practices in mobile games or mobile gamers?

Besides Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices, it's just an analogy.

It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. Or China using feminism to pacify, if not outright genocide Uyghurs[0], for the same reasons.

0) https://archive.is/Xy5g6

>Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices

I really doubt this, The only communist game devs I know are ZA/UM (Disco Elysium (amazing game)) and they are as far from being exploitative game devs as you can get.

> It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever.

That would be more like the kind of wake-washing that "you people" (what's the equivalent of marxist? Adam Smith), you Smithes also dislike?

I don't get it. I can't parse what you've said at all, please clarify

Karl Marx was jewish lmao.

I know. But still:

> Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

It's from his book "On the Jewish Question". If I didn't knew any better, I'd say that it was written by a Strasserist or something like that.

And I'd imagine that most left-wing people would strongly object to this.

I think it's more that a few of them are giving quite large sums of cash to the Godot project.

It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.

>And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

You're inventing a stance to get angry about.

It's tittytainment.

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