Why Big Game Publishers Make Sucky Apps (Hint: It’s You) | Hacker News Reader

Why Big Game Publishers Make Sucky Apps (Hint: It’s You)

wired.com

29 pointspaulschlacter16 comments

A counterpoint:

If you look back at the history of console games (and early PCs, for that matter), the 1980s were littered with examples of games that were ported from the upright arcade consoles to the home market; the home version was often inferior and didn't always take advantage of the different controller available for that device. (This is especially true for the PC ports.) People bought a game for their Atari at home because they'd played it in an upright at the arcade a few years earlier.

Then, Nintendo came in with Super Mario Bros and said, hey, there's a whole different paradigm we can work with here. They came out with Legend of Zelda and said, hey, we can actually save games! (Remember how exciting that was? And how novel?) PC games started actually making use of more of the keyboard (not to mention the processing power).

So... I think we'll be okay on this one.

Edit: this is similar to the point that rollypolly makes below/above.

I'm sorry, this is a tangential point, but I just can't get past the idea that you see saving games as a novel feature of The Legend of Zelda. Saving in adventure games goes all the way back to the original Colossal Cave Adventure. And I, at least, can't think of a major adventure game that didn't have saving.

mario?

It was new to the cartridge-based consoles of the time; I suppose you could say it enabled the "adventure" genre on such devices, which would be unplayable without a save feature. Other games of the time, some of which had rather long play times to get from start to finish, didn't have any way to save, although some tried to fake it by displaying codes after each level that you could later enter in manually.

Do you know of any savable console "adventure" games (or any others) that predate Zelda?

No, but as you can probably guess, I played far more text adventures than I did console games.

In any case, I think what we're really disagreeing about is what qualifies as novel. In your opinion, new to console games is enough to call a feature novel even when that same feature is familiar in PC games.

In my opinion, implementing a standard feature from PC adventure games in console adventure games doesn't qualify as novel. That's especially true when, as you note, saving is a feature required to get nontrivial adventure games off the ground.

Worse thing is that this crap games occupy Top charts of the store (along with ad-ware), so digging for hidden treasures is actually a game of itself. Sometimes you can notice a game in a "Customers also bought" section, sometimes in a "developer" section, but mostly you'll need to search through reviews and charts on the web, filtering out ad-ware and major-ware.

PS: I actually think that some old game ports will sell like hot cakes, just not the ones the publishers think. They make most money on the realtime games on the PC, so they port them to touch devices. What they need to do is to port turn based games.

I've worked for a large publisher. Ports are low hanging fruits that keeps revenues coming in while we're working on bigger things. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Just give it time.

Why would a big publisher like Capcom take the risk on creating an original iPhone game designed for the strengths of the touch screen

Because it turns out that a touch screen is actually a pretty shitty interface for a whole lot of apps.

Gamepads are shitty too and that doesn't prevent consoles to sell in gazillions. My fingers tire after 30 minutes of active gaming and I can't possibly play longer that an hour, my thumbs are burning by that point. And I can play for days (literally) with a good mouse and keyboard.

Developers need to think, not just copy/paste tech tested on PCs and consoles. Or they'll fail spectacularly.

I stopped buying iOS apps from the traditional publishers after being burned by crappy ports, and I suspect many others have as well. I suspect that as soon as the platform stops doubling every year, the been-burned customers will outnumber the naive ones, and sales of these kinds of games will drop.

The problem won't disappear anytime soon though, because even though the platforms will stop doubling in size, there will still be many millions of naive new customers every year who will see these apps and view $5 as a bargain for the slice of nostalgia promised.

I hate straight ports of games that were clearly designed for a gamepad or a mouse/keyboard, the big shame is that there are so many of them when there must be so many untapped touch screen game paradigms out there. This is why I am skeptical when people say that tablets are the future of gaming , either we would have to all re-evaluate the sorts of games we want to play (no more FPS, platformer etc) or we're going to have to start plugging extra peripherals in (at which point we have just re-invented games consoles).

Exactly. I haven't played many of these ported games, but my disappointment has come mostly with the on-screen controls. I don't understand why the writer of this piece mentioned that, but neglected to elaborate on how the key to making these games work is to find innovative new ways to interact with the game (or even consider plugging in external peripherals).

BTW, the classic X-Men arcade game is free in the Amazon Appstore today. Unfortunately, if you're going to try to play on an Android phone, it's going to drive you crazy.

I'm surprised by the lack of peripherals for tablets. An iPad with a stand and a wireless PS3 style controller would be a great semi-mobile game system now that it has such a great display.

But players will buy this lazy shovelware because they know the name of the game. And as long as crap keeps selling, publishers have no incentive to change their behavior.

This situation should scream "Long Tail Opportunity." It means there's a mainstream that's stuck in a local maxima, and that everyone realizes the widespread suckage, but can't see the way up. However, there's a non-mainstream scene somewhere that's developing the next thing. Analogy: music industry and Nirvana.

There's a lot of survivor bias going on.

There were a ton of bad games made years ago, and there are a ton of bad games made now.

But we only remember the good games, and therefor imagine that all games made in the past were good.

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