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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

>monetization of mobile games is invariably psychotic

How did this happen? I get that the average cell phone user is relatively easy to bilk, but it seems that the oasis's of honest fair games are incredibly sparse.

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The Nintendo Switch is a glimpse into what iOS/Android gaming could have been if there weren't such an extreme race to the bottom in that market, modern phones run circles around the Switches decade-old processor but the Switch has real actual proper games and your far more powerful phone just has casinos pretending to be games.

Switch also has actual button input which is ergonomically much nicer than non-physical buttons that are in the way of your game content

That's true, but the market is surprisingly willing to put up with bad touch controls. Genshin Impact has made billions of dollars by being the closest thing to Zelda BOTW on mobile, but of course BOTW is a game you buy once and Genshin is a "free" casino. Even mobile first person shooters are wildly popular despite being miserable to play if you're used to other platforms. There is a willingness to play these games on a phone, but seemingly only if the cost of entry is zero dollars, even though that means there will be much worse monetization woven into the game.

> There is a willingness to play these games on a phone, but seemingly only if the cost of entry is zero dollars

This is the issue that drove the rise of the mobile games as they are today.

Android users in particular were extremely reluctant to pay for games up-front.

> Last week I found myself in one of those "good news, bad news" situations. The good was that more than 100,000 people were enjoying the new Android version of our game. The bad news was that only about 10 percent of them paid for it

https://archive.ph/mRkJw

> Once a player has installed the game on his phone, the handset senses which resolution the phone can handle and downloads the appropriate skin.

I am mystified. Why does the game install not include the current skins?

Probably because the size of the full-resolution "skins" are of significant size, which may be an issue on phones with limited storage - especially if they implement custom assets to fit each size rather than just scaling. Which also may happen to be correlated to the sort of phones who won't use the highest quality versions in the first place.

Android has a max APK size of 100MB + another 4GB (iirc) of asset blob + overlay patch you can ship through the play store. Google was historically against delivering large apps like games and left it up to the app developers to serve bulk assets themselves as a post install step.

If you have to serve asset downloads yourself as a post install, making the total download smaller both improves UX and also saves you money on CDN costs.

I'd have thought 4GB was ample for phones back in 2012.

And unfortunately the few proper AAA games that have come to iOS recently have completely bombed. Assassin's Creed Mirage supposedly sold only 3000 copies on iOS in its first month and RE:Village and RE4 Remake didn't fair much better.

To be fair they are limited to iPhone 15 Pro and M1 iPad or above which narrows the market a lot for now, but it still seems like a hard sell to developers and users without something changing. Controls and storage space alone are huge issues for users, Each of those three games take up more than half of a base 15 Pro on their own. For the price of a controller and 512GB iPhone you might as well buy an iPhone 15 Pro AND a Switch or Steam Deck which will have vastly more games and expandable storage to boot.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Disappointing-AAA-game-sales-o...

There was a period early in iOS's existence when people were willing to pay up-front for relatively inexpensive games that had none of the mobile nonsense typical today.

For example, Tiny Wings was the number one iOS game in 2011 and cost two bucks.

In 2010, Plants vs. Zombies was a pay up-front iOS game that cost three dollars.

Today, PvZ is cross platform and free, but filled with Skinner Box nonsense.

I simply refuse to play “free“ games. I’ll pay outright or not play at all.

Then you can get Apple Arcade, but free is a better model for the game developer because you paying $30 outright is nothing compared to a Saudi prince deciding to play your f2p game.

(Yes, that's the actual design principle.)

I remember those days when I first had an iPod touch (basically an iPhone without the cellular features). I loved exploring through all the different little games out there, and they were usually only a few bucks. A few years later came the rise of in-app purchases, and then we all know how things went from there.

Perhaps one of several reasons is the failed promise of the App Store. If Apple had cultivated a different dynamic between consumers and developers we would have a different landscape of market segments today. Instead they created (or allowed to set in) the consumer expectation that an expensive app was two dollars.

Consider the alternative: richer people, the few of them, but your game, other people pirate your game.

Now instead, you find a way to get the amount of dollars a person can pay extracting cents from the people who used to pirate a game, and hundreds from those who have money.

It’s bad for the game, but great for the developers’ pocket.

EDIT: for example, Nintendo made 3.7B in 2023, King made 2.7B or so it seems. Nintendo is one of a kind, companies like King are a dime a dozen.

The app store ate its own tail. When Apple first started pushing for games, many of the most "polished" cost about $9.99. apparently this was too high for consumers considering these were marketed along side $0.99 or free games that might be ad/dark pattern supported.

Meanwhile consider other consoles. Games are all the same price around $60. The cheap/simple games are like $15. The pricing supports different business models although certainly in recent years the $60 releases are falling prey to gambling mechanics and other dystopian decisions.

(Close to) No regulation. And because humans have issues restricting themselves and in consequence also don't do that as part of organizations, things are bound to iterate towards the most exploitative money generating business. It happens on all platforms that don't prohibit certain business models. Smartphones just have a leg up due to pricing boundaries early on which forced the companies to look for other ways to make more money sooner than on other platforms where you could still sell titles for higher prices.

I also start to wonder if all that can still be called "entertainment" and "downtime", or if that becomes less and less the case. After all, they do fulfill a certain purpose for humans, and if that is not the case anymore it will have an impact on other parts of our lives.

Apple maintained weird anti-gaming policy throughout the iPhone revolution, I assume in twisted hope that videogames become a depreciated type of activity in this world. That created vacuum to be rapidly filled with parasocial-gambling-pornography content and it started raking in cash.

Google and Apple only really got one try at creating an app store, so they took a punt at what they thought was a workable design and what they thought were sensible commercial decisions at the time.

They decided to commoditise their complement - why muck about with business partnerships and curation to produce a hundred $50-$70 games and lock out homebrew developers, when opening the floodgates lets you give your customers a wider selection and lower prices?

Hell, they probably imagined market forces or something would allow quality mobile games to sell for $50 via the app store, and that they were doing small developers a favour by not locking them out of the platform.

I doubt they knew, at the time, that they were going to be buried in micropayment casino mechanics and free-to-play, pay-to-win dross.

Is the outcome crap? Yes, 100%. But I can see how back in 2008 when Steam was in its infancy, PC game piracy was rampant, consoles locked out homebrew games and every PC software producer needed had to roll their own sales/payments/distribution/updates infrastructure if they wanted to get paid, they thought the design improved on the status quo.

Because it could happen. Having an ultra-low-friction means of collecting payment enabled this practice.

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