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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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