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.
If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You're right, console and desktop games that do that are also a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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)
Anecdotally All of my friends who play games hate microtransactions and loot boxes. Some don't care if it's only cosmetic though.
This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.
- 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...