The stores have a serious problem with discovery which makes it unreasonably difficult to find the good original games in the sea of shovelware, but the good stuff IS out there.
People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise. Almost no one pays for premium mobile games, and that’s why no one bothers making them.
People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.
As an aspiring dev, I always tough of mobile as platform limited by it’s past.
We got used to free crappy games because the hardware couldn’t do more. Since then the platform evolved quite a bit, but the equation on people minds stayed the same, mobile games = (free,crappy,gotcha).
Maybe I part of the problem most games I play on mobile are through emulators and quite honestly I do it to burn time not to enjoy the experience for that I would go for my pc, I would like for a change of paradigm and stopped supporting and playing simple gotcha free games, but I think the paradigm will never shift, unless something big breaks out for a couple bucks that creates a trend or even a genre.
People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise.
I wanted to replay Planescape: Torment, and I knew it had a mobile version. Oops, it's not compatible with modern Android. Situations like those teach me to stop bothering with mobile. Then there's the fact that if I want to play the game on a larger screen once I'm home, not only do I not get the desktop version of the game included with my purchase, but there's also no standard, easy way to sync my saves. Like someone else here in this thread, I stick to board game adaptations and things like Slay the Spire (which I've also thoroughly played on desktop).
People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.
The mobile games that bubble to the top and are the most played are often driven by some of the worst business models, so it's not surprising to me when the term becomes a pejorative, even if there are good mobile games out there.
Agree with all of this. People who deride games just because they are mobile are not much better than those people who see video games as being strictly for children
I wish there were more premium games didn’t have egregious ads or micro transactions and respected your time. I pretty much dismiss all free to play games on mobile.
Play Pass is a god send for playing mobile games if you care enough to do so. Not only do you just get a whole bunch of premium games, it also removes ads and microtransactions in a good chunk of free to play games as well (but that usually puts the game balance out of whack - but that also accentuates how shitty some of those games are, being designed fully around them)
They stopped being fun 10-15 years ago. Back then people started figuring out the new touch input for games which lead to many simple, but creative games.
Nowadays, it feels like there exists nothing noteworthy in this space. Most are just boring clones of clones of clones riddled with ads and other garbage. I was unable to find even one game worth installing on my phone the past few years.
I don’t know what I am looking for at this point. I love casual games and play a lot on PC or my Steam Deck and it is so much easier to find something there which isn’t just a cheap money grab.
Mobile gaming has become too money hungry. The OG Angry Birds and Plants Vs Zombies games were enormously fun. They were worth buying. But now I wouldnt touch them with a 10 foot pole with all the microtransactions.
Kimd of funny story though, back when R6 came out I was a seriously good competitive player, but I started to take it a little too seriously and I had pretty bad emotional control skills back then so I decided to cool it and play something else for a while. I decided to play Angry Birds again for a while and just goof. Well I got talking to one of my wifes workmates husbands at a thing and he was like “Im a GAMER!” I said yeah, me too and he got all enthusiastic and asked what I was playing now I said “Ah Im playing Angry Birds right now, I was pla-” and the guy went full 4chan copypasta autist and started giving me a lecture about how that isnt gaming and if I was a real gamer like him Id play something like Siege. “Really, maybe I should get it and you can show me a thing or two” so I got his deets and added him on steam… and I spent an evening casually steamrolling his ass across every map we played while he gradually got less and less condescending over chat as he figured out it wasnt luck and I really was just casually making him look like a total scrub. When he was like “Im gonna go for the night man, have a good one” I just said “Yeah, catch you… Im just gonna play some Angry Birds before bed”
Does the dolphin emulator count? I use it to play luigis mansion on my phone. But other than that the only real “mobile” game I play is runescape. Other than that I don’t really see mobile gaming as, for the lack of a better word, “real” gaming. More just time passers as I wait for something or someone.
Yeah, there are exceptions like Overboard, Storyteller, the Alien Isolation sidekick game or the whole Lifeline space series, but they’re all lost in an ocean of crap.
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