TouchArcade Is Shutting Down
toucharcade.com
toucharcade.com
And also almost all advertising revenues have probably become centralized with google search, social media by facebook, and youtube, etc. That combined with rising costs, and higher opportunity cost to instead do something else means these sites are biting the dust.
I don’t care what they search, read or watch.
Who is right? You for not wanting to scroll past 27 sponsored links? Or me for not wanting to have to go through 27 useless links to find what I’m looking for?
But I can distill it down to
1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend).
2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper.
3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it)
4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1).
5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter?
The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant).
This is mostly for fighting spam.
I'll poor one out for TouchArcade (and Joystiq. and Rooster Teeth. Just checked, and gonintendo is still kicking!)
As a consumer, I struggle to find a voice with strong opinion (strong as in ' this game sucks ' and as in ' we found this little gem on itchi.io and it's great' )
Currently there isn’t any site I pay for.
Not TA's fault, but they were pincered on both ends and couldn't do much as the medium they reviewed changed in real time.
But the truth is I don’t care much anymore. I loved TA because they helped me find fun games. And while I’ve found a few from them in the last few years like Peglin most of their coverage is unsurprisingly what most of the industry makes: pay to win with smurfberries advertising laden crap.
I strongly believe the iOS gaming scene died the day IAPs came out.
There is the incredibly rare indie game that you can pay for now, and Apple Arcade. While I enjoy that most of the good games I’ve played before (a plus on the name = existed before). Those that I haven’t played or are new often were obviously designed for IAPs and aren’t that fun when they’re removed.
And I know devs seem to hate it, and I’m not surprised. But it’s the only option I’ve got left.
I’ll miss you, Touch Arcade. You long outlasted the era of greatness for the platform you covered. Thanks for making it as long as you did. One more sign we can’t have nice things because ruthless unnecessarily exploitive capitalism.
Or in the opposite way, the ruthless Korean MMO model matched very well in mobile and you have that same hyper-hardcore audience dropping thousands for a new character in a gacha. You don't need 99% of that console audience paying $10 when that whale is spending $100k/month, consistently.
So it makes sense that the console players, no longer appealed to, left while the newer models found other audiences.
I also understand having some in app purchases.
My gripe is a few games took a really exploitive route with in app purchases. Having extremely aggressive timers and tons of currencies. And they CLEANED UP. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it’s mostly people who pay nothing, children being tricked into paying, and a small number of people who spend an insane amount of money. The whales.
But whatever the mix it made money so every game publisher started racing to turn out identical skinner boxes.
This had two effects. First, that’s what the publishers were interested in so it’s probably a lot harder to get anything else through. Second, because those games are “free“ it changed pricing expectations that games and other apps should be “free“.
So if you wanted to make a good game and sell it at even a really low price, people screamed at you. How DARE you charge $1.99.
By driving down the expected price we ended up at a point where the only things that can make any money at all or either crammed with ads that get shown to you constantly or designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.
Games only have to be good enough to keep people looking at the ads or paying for another set of Smurfberries.
Worst of all even games that were already made and were absolute classics have been ruined. Because they either get updates to add those features (Flight Control) or sequels to change the game to be more like one of those that makes a lot of money (Plants be Zombies 2, Trism 2).
I'm very slowly working on a PC game but I always fancied the idea of also doing a mobile port. It'd be a fun challenge and I know a phone can be more accessible for many. Due to the factors you highlighted I know that's a fool errand in the current state of mobile. Even if I made it a truly free game I wouldn't get many views (let alone downloads), especially compared to all the dopamine inducing hyoercausla games or high budget services. The native stores are just hyper black holes for people like me. So this "mobile Steam" would really help motivate people like me.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/28/aaa-games-iphone-ipad-arent-a...
Meanwhile, before IAP destroyed retail pricing of games, there were some, but now the devices can run great games, it's all IAP dross.
Braid, Civ VI, Disco Elysium, various others show the devices are fine. Genshin Impact shows a casual fan audience is there, most likely in my mind is: phone other than "Max" screens seems too small, and few people realize you can pair your favorite controller to an iPad. (Xbox Cloud Gaming works so well, it's confusing dedicated cloud players exist.)
2) Breakout hits on mobile (Angry Birds, etc.) are usually designed to be played on the go in short sessions, while AAA games usually aren't
3) Switch games come on physical cartridges, can be borrowed/lent/reold, and will keep working (except for online features) over years of firmware updates and hardware revisions
4) Nintendo primed the Switch pump with a stellar collection of exclusive first-party games (many inherited from the Wii U) that are rarely discounted; Apple Arcade is good but can't beat Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Pokémon/etc.
5) Switch offers seamless local multiplayer (Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros.) even with two joy-cons and no TV, fully offline gaming (game cards), and many other well-designed features (even the "parental" on-off button that shuts the console off when you hold it down.) Nintendo delivers what it always has, a terrific home (and handheld) gaming experience.
3. I doubt this has a big impact given empirically my friends who own Switches buy everything though the digital store.
4. Apple has the billions to buy ports of every AAA game on release (not years after like Resident Evil) for years, and IMO they should (and combine it with a big marketing push).
5. That’s true, you won’t beat those features with a phone right now (though they’re within reach for a determined platform owner)
They certainly do. I'm sure they've run the numbers to see how much it would help their bottom line, and the answer might be "not enough." They might also be looking at how Microsoft isn't having an easy time with Xbox (in spite of the popular [34M+ subscribers] and acclaimed Game Pass service, excellent consoles with a terrific AAA game library, exclusive franchises like Halo/Gears/Forza, and owning Bethesda, Blizzard, etc.)
For now, for better or for worse, Apple is making a ton of money from f2p and "mobile" games and doesn't seem to have much incentive to change its course. Every so often they say something about Mac gaming, Apple TV gaming, etc. but not much has changed.
Apple TV could be more competitive as game console, but so far it has been a hard sell for gaming because of 1) lack of system-seller platform exclusives (Apple Arcade is good but can't really compete with Sony and Nintendo's exclusives and franchises), 2) no high-quality game controller in the box, 3) (as you note) not enough recent AAA games.
Apple is dumping billions into Apple TV+ for exclusive shows, trying to compete against Netflix, Amazon, Disney etc.; they might be wary of investing heavily and directly in gaming when iOS gaming is still basically printing money (though the EU might be forcing some changes in Apple's business model.)
Unfortunately you’re right, Apple has a weird history of messing up and half-assing their triple-A approach (remember the Valve partnership? Or the ten years of outdated OpenGL? Etc). I wonder if they hired an exec who helped with the Epic Games Store or MS’s Gamepass or something they would be able to help.
Fwiw nowadays MiniReview is a very good source of games: https://minireview.io
https://www.pocketgamer.com/features/opinion-apples-move-to-...
> Of course, the fact that revenue generated by the per install business isn't funneled through the App Store so Apple can take its 30 percent cut will be another factor in the company's decision.
By coincidence, Apple ended up getting a premium cut of customer acquisition costs on iPhone.
Thanks to the TA team and here’s hoping the best for them.
Notably, websites specialized around gacha mobile games have been doing very well.
> Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What We Are Going to Do. (2018)
https://toucharcade.com/2018/08/01/apple-kills-the-app-store...
Of course, the issue is that communities (and AI slop) will just coalesce the codes into one place, often without credit. I'm guessing this still helps affiliates, but it loses the advantage of more traffic.
There's a few english-first sites talking about gacha, but they are much smaller endeavors. Not much different from a blog managed by 1-2 people that just need a few hundred dollars (if that) to pay for servers.
Essentially the noise is that people are locked into habits in the app stores. It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publishers. The big breakout hit last year was a Monopoly spin off, admittedly well executed, but with absolutely massive marketing pushes.
Steam is squeezing on one side and web games on the other. When the mobile herd simply moves where the marketing dollars lead them who needs reviews?
You're 100% right that it takes massive amounts of money to move the needle for gamers now. It seems like the group I run in, whatever your game is and you're good at, you stay in that lane. Any new additions or versions, you're on right away and excited about.
It takes a lot for the people I know to try a new game and actually spend the time and money to see if they like it. Nobody I know is willing to do that now since the economy is not great and money is really tight all over. The people I know are only going to buy what they know they'll like.
I feel like a lot of this is people sticking with what they know since the market is so saturated like you point out.
Same logic, same fallacy.
One of these is a continual economic...pipeline of the tomatoes being exchanged for money, and being consumed. The other is speculation and collection. Please don't get hung up on the terminology, I'm not an economist.
If by that you are referring to Stardew Valley, while it is indeed inspired by Harvest Moon, it is so much richer and deeper and after playing it I guarantee you won't want to go back . It is like saying why play a modern Roguelike when you can just play Rogue.
The longer I played the less I enjoyed it and it’s hard to put my finger on. Music is great, gameplay is great, relationships are alright. Something always feels off though.
I blame the hard coded cooking aspect of the game tbh. And your animals can’t die. And you can’t save in the mines…
The mines are an easy target to pick on, and I understand why it is like this. The game is first and foremost an indie farming sim, and as someone who really enjoys action JRPGs (having grown up on Summon Night: Swordcraft Story) I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mines. It’s essentially pre-1.12 Minecraft combat (aka spam clicking) against the same 5 enemies, breaking rocks to either get to the nth floor or collect enough of whatever resource to get out and do something more productive. I understand that making it more in-depth would pull the lone dev’s resources from other things and may not even be an interest for them, let alone the mostly casual players, but still a critique I will field.
Probably bigger to me is the relationships. I adore most of the characters, and especially Penny and Sam. It makes romance delightfully difficult when your preferred partner gets with your favorite guy, but that brings me to the problem with the base game. I can’t have a best friend. I want to get full hearts on people without it being strictly romantic, and I am thankful there are so many mods that do touch on this.
Finally, as for urgency, it’s really hard to describe and I’m not sure if it’s the right term. I just feel pressured in SD in ways I don’t in FOMT. Pressured to focus on the game, to plan my time around the game rather than picking it up, playing for the time allotted during a break, and then quicksaving for later. I feel pressured to be profitable, to be efficient, and to be social on top of that. It’s been a good few months since I’ve played FOMT, I admit, while SD was only a few weeks ago, so it may be revealing to play it again and see if I can deduce where these feelings originate.
The way I game now has changed drastically over the years for various reasons. The latest for me is probably just being tired of games that seem 3% different than the last fps/shumps/twin-stick-shooter/metroidvania/...
Flightsims fascinate me, and I used to play the old Microprose sims, but nowadays it's too expensive and time-consuming a niche. DCS is expensive, both the hardware and the modules, and it also requires way too much time.
So I watch a couple of YouTube channels dedicated to DCS, and get to "live" the experience through them.
Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing can only drive an install, but after that, it's the game quality and a person's preferences that decide the LTV.
Marketing is also the process of surveying the market and deciding what to make in the first place.
Yeah although what percentage of mobile users actually play on their phones regularly these days?
It's anecdotal but I haven't played a mobile game in almost a decade now. I played a lot on my iPad 1 and 3.
The app fever of 2010 has passed. Again anecdotal, but I avoid installing apps on my phone as much as I can.
My wife still plays candy crush on her iPad almost every night but has zero interest in any other game.
Mobile gaming might be casual but the touch UI is huge innovation by itself. Touch gaming controls is the real thing that makes the difference in mobile gaming compared to other types of gaming.
It's a marked contrast to the major consoles and other game store platforms which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not just promoting stuff that will be profitable -- but of promoting stuff that's not trash so when you think of a Nintendo Switch you think of amazing Mario games; when you think of a Playstation you think of The Last of Us or Elden Ring or whatever. You know if you crack open Steam that you'll see interesting stuff.
The difference may be the norms set on pricing. Console games are still $30-$70. People complained about the horrible race-to-the-bottom on mobile game pricing in the early days. And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. So the marketplace was overwhelmed by companies who could execute cheap, micro-transaction-addictive games the best. And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be. (With notable exceptions!)
There is a good reason for this. “Premium” mobile games never reliably made that much money, even during the early iOS boom. If you were a publisher it took having quite a few hits to compensate, and Android was more trouble than it was worth for a long time.
A successful MTX game made several orders of magnitude more. (Instead of getting low millions you would be getting hundreds of millions). The process was perfectly satirized in South Park by the “Canadian Department of Mobile Gaming” which like all the best South Park jokes wasn’t nearly as fictional as might be assumed.
Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. Team Fortress 2 is an example of Valve indulging in exactly this on Steam, so it is far from isolated to mobile.
And finally, there's an initiative to outlaw many of the tactics that make it work so well!
https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer...
- Gamers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending.
mobile games do have some confusing tactics like using odd currency amounts (say, 180 in game currency instead of 200 to pull a character), but changing that won't really kill any game.
- Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong.
for premium games with MTX this makes sense. For a f2p mobile game there is no preference.
- Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies.
mobile games tends to be pretty good at dealing with this. Mobile had huge charge-back rates, be it through Google/Apple or CC companies (and probably still do), so it's financially wiser to just help out complaining customers who aren't objectively in the wrong. the digital currency is basically worthless anyway.
- Children are vulnerable to these manipulative tactics.
A classic argument. I don't know how this one will result, but I have seen more and more games launch as 16/17+ rather than 12+ (I dont know if these stores even allow 18+. But I'm sure they would if it means they keep their lootboxes). A few even retroactively increase their age rating. But those are for reasons beyond the scope of children fears.
It's a good step to make console games choose between f2p or premium, but I don't think this (in its current iteration) will clamp down much on the mobile market.
The fact that Roblox and Clash of Clans are cited as examples suggests this will absolutely impact Apple, if there is validity to the claims, because they are and have been the biggest beneficiary of such tactics for more than a decade.
A decade ago they were forced to create parental controls after it was found kids were spending money like crazy in games designed to let kids spend unlimited amounts of money, and today 10x more is spent in those kids games...
For stuff like Clash of Clans, I'm less sure. The impact wouldn't be zero, but I'm expecting it more on the scale of making 100m a month to 90m a month. You'll feel it but it won't really make devs change course.
it's simply the law of large numbers. The early Switch was a goldmine for indies. If you could get a game on in the first 12-18 months, you were nearly guaranteed decent sales. That mine ended about 2 years in, though. Still a big market, but you will probably be buried more often.
Now Go to Steam. Decent storefront based on recommendations, but due to user tagging and the sheer volume of releases you're bound to get some random $2 hentai game everynow and then, no matter how fine tuned your filters on. This is partially because again, steam leaves it to the community to tag, but those weid recommendations are a peek into the surface of how much slop there truly is on Steam. And we don't even talk about how 99% of indies fare on Steam.
Google/Apple's stores are just Steam x 1000. There's millions of apps released per year, nearly impossible to curate manually. And due to the f2p nature, it'd take a lot longer to build a proper recommendation engine. because games optimized towards playtime, not getting $5 out of you ASAP.
But on top of all that: mobile games aren't on that power curve where they peak sales for the firs month then trickle along. Roblox was a highest earner for years and probably makes more revenue over time, not less. So the top selling board doesn't change. And google/apple have negative incentive to change that, because they will keep selling and they will get their cut. Who cares about new titles when the old ones are making hundreds of millions years later?
>And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be.
well, money talks, and Whales can disproportionately talk louder than some complaints online about mobile games. That's all that matters to the company. The best compromise would seem to be to support those games offering console experiences (more and more these days also on console/PC as well) but using a f2p monetization system if that's desirable. it won't change the candy crushes and robloxes, but it does show you can still grab console-oriented players on mobile.
This is purely the fault of enshittifying the mobile gaming experience.
I moved through various genres like Puzzle and Dragons, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc.
Each one of those games was a lot of fun because initially they left a path to play them with skill instead of money. Putting together a set of characters to beat the tough bosses in Puzzle and Dragons required a lot of skill to get the big combos you would need since you were underpowered. Clash of Clans was neat because you couldn't make a castle to protect against everything and someone with some skill could probably get an extra star off you with some work (I was really good at timing the placement of dragons against the algorithms to exploit seams and make higher leveled players cry). I had a Clash Royale deck based on Golems and Lightning that would win about 30% of the time even against players who had super powerful decks (I was casting things before stuff even hit the field in anticipation of what players would do and timing the delay from the system--sure it was high risk but also high reward).
Alas, the siren call of the microtransaction is strong. People who spend money expect to win and complain when they don't. Those games eventually all nerfed any skill-only paths. And then they expanded to make massive purchasing the only real path toward higher levels.
And that led me to stop playing mobile games altogether. There is no point. If a game is money or gacha, it's completely not interesting. If a game has a skill path, it will get nuked post haste as soon as the publisher figures out that it exists.
The only winning move is not to play.
I suppose in all fairness it was well deserved of Epic. Valve had no interest and Epic's 7+ year war with Apple and Google is probably a part of why no other player has tried this method. Hopefully these changes open the door for other vendors to break that monopoly.
I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes better games(Counter-Strike, Dota 2, TF2, new MOBA game - Deadlock)), Epic only has Fortnite and Epic can't beat Valve at revenue, Valve overall makes more money than Epic.
Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple.
And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media for IM, built in phone features for recording/straming playback.
>Epic won't beat Steam at anything
I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space.
Even their steam client app is probably the worst part about Valve from a technical level. I'd be very shocked if Valve did anything with the mobile platform this decade.
I thought somebody would try to make something like mobile Xfire at least for the Android where you could for example; connect with your gamer friends, see what they are playing, invite them to games, share screenshots and short gameplay clips etc. Google Play has some tidbits of that but clearly social gaming is not their focus.
Xfire was powerful beast at the time and I also liked Facebook social gaming features as well. Discord and Steam are good enough for PC but nothing like that exists for mobile social gaming. I still to this day fantasize about having something like Xfire on mobile but like I said somebody should've made it 10 years ago but now it is probably too late or it's not idk, it seems like Apple is relaxing their rules on their iOS walled garden.
>I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space.
Steam's focus is PC, they earn billions from PC gaming so they don't need to worry about mobile.
Also Microsoft wanted to open their mobile games store[1][2] but idk what's with that....they are probably preoccupied with their Xbox and cloud gaming strategy so they can't think about mobile gaming.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/10/microsoft-is-launching-its...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/9/24153245/microsoft-xbox-mo...
They don't really need to worry about anything but being a middleman. But they always seem to know when to tap into untapped markets. That's why I'm surprised. But maybe they are simply complacent as of now.
>Microsoft wanted to open their mobile games store[0] but idk what's with that..
Part of that was definitely from legal battles with Apple over Xcloud so I'm sadly not too surprised it was put on the back burner.cloud was clearly their biggest priority before the economy tanked so they won't worry about native mobile games until they feel secure in cloud.
But yea, Microsoft is seemingly giving up control on consoles and is more or less the de facto desktop (honestly, it's still baffling they didn't make a steam deck first), so I think eventually they will go to mobile. It'll be quite ironic if they end up being late to the party a second time, though (the first being their attempt with the mobile Windows OS).
And it seems like the one time they did face consequences for their fake ads four years ago clearly wasn't enough [1].
All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.
That's because "# of downloads" is a crap metric that's easily gamed (be it by fake ads or bot campaigns or whatnot). A more useful metric would be "# of installs still active after 1/2/4 weeks", that would disincentivize a lot of these scams, but at the cost of Google being able to claim download numbers for the vitality of their app store ("# of app installs a day!!!"), which is why Google doesn't do much against this shit despite the "quality" dragging down the image of the entire Play Store. Unfortunately there is no competition worth the name as the Apple Store is similarly plagued by copycats and fakes, so neither party has an incentive to de-enshittify.
But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.
This video did a very good job of explaining it, to me, someone who never plays mobile games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhajAqI66nU (https://archive.org/details/youtube-NhajAqI66nU).
tl;dr: it's all about getting whales into the game. The type of games people will download based on ad game-play are not the most monetizable (b/c whales). So the main game is a highly monetizable city-builder (which whales spend on), with the ad's minigame somewhere (which at most only has a few minutes of playtime). The ad's mini-game is often developed as a concept for the ad first, then only actually implemented later after A/B testing the ads. It doesn't matter that most people will get frustrated and delete the game when it's not as advertised, because the people who do that aren't whales.