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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy, millions of ad-ridden, pay-to-win, copy-pasted virtual casinos, right from the convenience of my PC. Gotta get me one of those beta invites!

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Millions of bad games do not make the few good games bad. You could use the same argument against Steam.

False equivalence. The scale of the problem is not even remotely close.

But the problem is irrelevant. You don’t have to play those bad games, and their point is that bad games don’t make good games worse.

I don’t get why gamers get into this tribal mentality of only one good thing may exist.

How will I know the bad games without wasting time playing them? Should I trust those reviews on the Play Store?

How will you know the bad games on *any* platform without having some kind of trust in the creator or reviewers?

It's a lot easier to trust reviews on a platform that doesn't allow solicited reviews, than one where that is standard practice.

You know full well Steam's library is not at all comparable to what's available on mobile. There are thousands of quality games on Steam. How many mobile games are out there that are quality crafted experiences, and not just endless grinding to squeeze as much money as possible out of the user?

I recall seeing a handful come out ~10 years ago, like The Room and Monument Valley. These days the best ones to come out are PC/console games that just so happened to get mobile ports like Papers Please or Slay the Spire.

Anyone know if there's a curated list of non-exploitative games on android? The only one I've been seriously thinking about buying is Slay the Spire.

https://play.google.com/about/play-pass/

"Introducing Google Play Pass. Your pass to hundreds of awesome games and apps without ads or in-app purchases."

I like that many of them are "just" PC port

Heh, yeah. The best "Android game" I ever played was the Android port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Mobile games are just amazingly bad. I didn't even like Monument Valley. The art style doesn't do it for me, and there isn't much else that one could like about it.

This channel reviews mobile games exclusively:

https://youtube.com/@PocketGamerVideo

https://nobsgames.stavros.io

I remember back in the day there were tons of awesome games for palm pilot. mobile games that seem fun or good always seem to devolve into pay to play to the point I've just given up completely on them.

Even in the early days of the App Store on the iPhone/iPod Touch it seemed like there was so much opportunity for new types of games and experiences that could be made with the new formfactor/input method compared to prior gaming handhelds. Games like Doodlejump and Angry Birds weren't anything revolutionary, but they were at least simple little time killers you could pay a few bucks for and you got a whole experience to slowly make your way through on the train or whatever.

But it seems to model just doesn't work, or at least the cash cow turned out to be virtual casinos/gacha.

Yahtzee Croshaw did a video discussing what went wrong with mobile gaming that I thought was pretty interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q30qZSEnI9Q

Steam has thousands of good games and hundreds of excellent games. Android has, what, less than dozen good games?

I firmly believe they exist, Google Play is just designed to make everything nongarbage impossible to find.

Even if you found all the good ones manually, I bet there aren't more than 20 or 30 worth playing...

Rollercoaster Tycoon has an excellent version of RC2 for tablets (and I suppose phones). There are also plenty of other games on the Play Store that are decent ports from desktop games or even purely mobile.

I've bought a copy of Super Hexagon for Android at some point, and that's still an excellent game. I don't see why you shouldn't be able to play that on desktop as well now that Windows has native Android support.

Then there are games like PUBG mobile that will easily run on cheap laptops with integrated graphics, unlike the full games. Those types of games even come with full controller support.

Sure, the Play Store home pages likes to peddle the stalkerware scamfest that is microtransaction based minigames, but there are actually decent games on the platform.

When it comes to Android apps and games, you get what you pay for. The situation isn't very different on iOS, except that people are more willing to pay for their apps. You don't see a lot of $10 Android games (which are perfectly fine games) featured on the front page because people WANT the free crapware.

If anything, Microsoft preinstalling Candy Crush on Windows should be a signal that the market wants these types of money wasters on their computers, no matter how much techies and "gamers" despise those types of predatory games.

Open Rollercoaster Tycoon is free and cross platform https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2 (been having fun going back to play older simulation games)

OpenRCT2 still requires the original game files according to the README.

Plus, RCT being RCT, if you have access to the original game you can probably just install and run that. I haven't seen an x86 compatible system yet that doesn't run RCT2, especially with Wine and QEMU providing fast enough Windows/instruction set emulation to play 2D games from that era on just about any device.

Or, you know, you could just pay a dollar or more for an ad free version or even get a Play Pass. Of course, if you enjoy playing ad-ridden, pay-to-win, copy-pasted virtual casinos, right from the convenience of my PC then it's totally on you.

Most games don’t give you that option because they make a lot more money on ads and loot boxes than a single payment.

All of the games I own on Android gave me that option. Also, that logic doesn't really make sense because you'll alienate people that don't like ads from even playing your game.

Yeah, it's not a very good proposition right now, but if we have the android platform available for all desktop OS, perhaps companies writing games or other software for the desktop form factor could target android as a universal platform instead of electron. Finally fulfilling Java's promise of write once, run everywhere.

Who knows, maybe we could compile android to web assembly and have android applets on webpages!

Basically the experience of asian MMORPG since 2006.

Source, played MapleStory alot in the past.

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