4 ms·

> I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad. Yet games for handheld consoles lik

by creshal 11y ago

> I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad. Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ (supposedly, I wasn't too impressed by most…). If you tell someone you spent $200 on, say, Android apps, you're going to get funny looks. It's circular reasoning at its finest: Paying that much money for mobile games is unreasonable, therefore you only get garbage games, therefore paying that much money for mobile games is unreasonable.

Finnucane 11y ago
Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.
- creshal 11y ago
  Which is the ass-backwards financing problem the author was talking about: It would be much more reasonable for everyone involved to have a clear, up-front cost structure (even Bethesda DLCs are less scummy than the average Android app's in-purchases). Yet, consumers are not willing to do that.
  - Godel_unicode 11y ago
    I think it's a little bit the momentum of the industry, but mostly it's straight up economics. If exploiting game theory allows you to in-app purchase your way to AAA-game revenue without putting in AAA-game resources, why wouldn't you?
  - nas 11y ago
    I don't see how it helps his point, maybe I don't understand his argument. The iOS and Android game market had payment built into the system very early, unlike the web. Given the quality of the average mobile game, I don't see how that is an argument for building payments into web standard. The market is filled with trash games, mostly designed to trick users into in-app payments. Quality games with real effort put into them are being squeezed out.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  and some people are spending hundreds of dollars on in game purchases. Which has lead to the perverse situation we're in now where all the free games are engineered to be near unplayable without in app purchases. See Dungeon Keeper or Clash of Clans or a million clones.
jalfresi 11y ago
I think I paid £12 for X-COM when it came out on iOS. It was great and totally worth every penny. I don't really see the problem here; nobody is preventing games companies (or app makers in general) from charging more. The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too; they want huge numbers of downloads and huge profits, and unfortunately that means they may actually have to put some WORK into it; not only in the content they produce but in determining the best price point. But apparently, as a potential customer, thats MY fault. I think there is a misplacement of entitlement here.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ A 3DS comes with at least 6 different (convenient!) buttons and a thumbstick. This affects the quality of the games. Not just the existing games, but the games that potentially could exist. The phones, with their one available input, lend themselves to games where you can only do one thing (or at least, where at any given moment you can only do one thing), like endless runners (jump), angry birds (shoot), or farmville (harvest). You can divide the screen into areas that respond to touch differently, but then you run into the problem that people's fingers are enormous compared to a phone screen.

by creshal 11y ago

Finnucane 11y ago

Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.

creshal 11y ago
Which is the ass-backwards financing problem the author was talking about: It would be much more reasonable for everyone involved to have a clear, up-front cost structure (even Bethesda DLCs are less scummy than the average Android app's in-purchases). Yet, consumers are not willing to do that.
- Godel_unicode 11y ago
  I think it's a little bit the momentum of the industry, but mostly it's straight up economics. If exploiting game theory allows you to in-app purchase your way to AAA-game revenue without putting in AAA-game resources, why wouldn't you?
- nas 11y ago
  I don't see how it helps his point, maybe I don't understand his argument. The iOS and Android game market had payment built into the system very early, unlike the web. Given the quality of the average mobile game, I don't see how that is an argument for building payments into web standard. The market is filled with trash games, mostly designed to trick users into in-app payments. Quality games with real effort put into them are being squeezed out.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
and some people are spending hundreds of dollars on in game purchases. Which has lead to the perverse situation we're in now where all the free games are engineered to be near unplayable without in app purchases. See Dungeon Keeper or Clash of Clans or a million clones.

jalfresi 11y ago

I think I paid £12 for X-COM when it came out on iOS. It was great and totally worth every penny. I don't really see the problem here; nobody is preventing games companies (or app makers in general) from charging more. The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too; they want huge numbers of downloads and huge profits, and unfortunately that means they may actually have to put some WORK into it; not only in the content they produce but in determining the best price point. But apparently, as a potential customer, thats MY fault. I think there is a misplacement of entitlement here.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ A 3DS comes with at least 6 different (convenient!) buttons and a thumbstick. This affects the quality of the games. Not just the existing games, but the games that potentially could exist. The phones, with their one available input, lend themselves to games where you can only do one thing (or at least, where at any given moment you can only do one thing), like endless runners (jump), angry birds (shoot), or farmville (harvest). You can divide the screen into areas that respond to touch differently, but then you run into the problem that people's fingers are enormous compared to a phone screen.