8 ms·

This article and the comments here saying "This is common knowledge in the industry" and "I'm getting tired of people saying this is a bad thing" are a beautifu

This article and the comments here saying "This is common knowledge in the industry" and "I'm getting tired of people saying this is a bad thing" are a beautiful illustration of why mobile games suck and freemium is destroying the industry. There are plenty of good games out there. The problem is nobody plays them. Then the devs of those games say "Fuck this, I'm out" and go on to start making pay to win games because that's how to get paid making games. It's gotten to the point where the games we play aren't even fun; we just find an easy game that lets us shoot up a shot of dopamine once in a while and settle for that. Or maybe we pick up clash of clans, play "free" for a month, then once we're hooked we pay way more than we'd ever pay for a real game every month just to be competitive. And we still lose, because someone else has more money. The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby.

taurath 11y ago
Its replaced smoking as a quick shot of dopamine and an alternate reward system for a lot of people I know.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Although smoking is cheaper and better for your health. Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled.
  - softawre 11y ago
    > Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled. What? Story time?
  - HCIdivision17 11y ago
    Let's be fair here. Bejewelled is the crack-cocaine of simple addictive games. Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball are mere gateways to Bejewelled.
    - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      Bejewelled is a near perfect Skinner Box, I had a serious 'addiction' to it for a while, managed to avoid spending on it but can see how others didn't.
randomgyatwork 11y ago
When I played games I realized it was for those rewards of accomplishment. I felt good about myself for a few minutes when I beat some hard level. Its worse when you are not getting those rewards elsewhere in your life.
- Joof 11y ago
  While most games have some degree of this, there are many games that are designed for other purposes as well. Mobile just happens to be the most soul-sucking thanks to it's profit model. Lately I mostly play Rocket League, which is mostly for social reasons (my friends dig it and live too far for me to hang out with), but is enough like a regular sport to have a sense of skill-building, competition and team cooperation. The witness is sort of like a really fun math course that looks really pretty and teaches in a more interesting way. In real life I only occasionally get to solve interesting problems that I don't yet know the answer to. This scratches that itch in a way I have power over. Undertale is an emotional story that I have agency in. It's one of my favorite examples of how game mechanics can enhance a traditional story. Minecraft is a lot of things, but creativity and design are often front and center. Writing this, I think a lot of games may be about experiencing things in a manner where people have more control than in 'real life'. It's also cheaper and faster than most hobbies. You can even get social status for being particularly skilled at games (see: twitch). Admittedly you probably won't make money playing games, but that's true of art, music, football, open source programming and most other hobbies.
  - EvanPlaice 11y ago
    I pretty much quit playing any/all Blkzzard games after a month of WOW. It quickly became clear to me that they intended and succeesed at effectively creating a profit-making skinner box for humans. Who knew the HS psychology class where we trained a rat to pull a bar for sugar water would later act as an innoculation for lousy games that manipulate their users via classical conditioning methods. It's sad really because the Blizzard classics (IE Diablo 1/2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1/2) represent the pinnacle of visual storytelling in games.
rrowland 11y ago
As a side note, if anybody wants to support a couple awesome indie devs (and play a sick mobile game) check out http://subterfuge-game.com/ http://subterfuge-game.com/ Just started playing a week ago, already in love. Found out on their forums & reddit a couple days ago they're already planning to stop development because in the 3 months they've been on the market they've lost $40,000. EDIT: Also, their freemium is non-intrusive (Which is probably why they're sinking). Play for free, upgrade for $10 to be able to play multiple games at once and play rated games.
- tclmeelmo 11y ago
  The most accurate (and amusing) description of that game I've heard is that it is a "backstabbing simulator". I was in the alpha and had to delete it from my phone, it was too addictive. It's disappointing to hear that they're having money troubles, their game is pretty unique and deserves a better fate.
  - sodafountan 11y ago
    Except really it doesn't. While it might be unique it's clearly not what the market wants. I found the tutorial lengthy and confusing. The game doesn't have mass market appeal. Did anybody really expect this game to do well?
justinhj 11y ago
Not everybody wants to be entertained the same way that you do. In fact I think the market has shown us that most people like simple games that they can play for a few minutes at time, that don't involve much strategy or twitch skill that we would associate with previous video games. They've also voted with their wallets for the freemium model.
- Retric 11y ago
  You need good games before people can buy them. List 5 fun mobile games relative to say good game-boy games ex: Metroid II: Return of Samus, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Dragon Warrior I & II, etc. IMO, Angry Birds does not make the cut and I don't know of a better iOS game.
  - daniel-cussen 11y ago
    There's The Lost Monos. May or may not be a masterpiece, but give it a try.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Monument Valley is pretty good.
    - ativzzz 11y ago
      Monument Valley is indeed very good, but you can beat it in 2-3 hours so it's more akin to watching a movie than having a game you can play a few minutes per session several times a day.
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        Tiki towers was also good. I haven't played enough recently to have too many more, but I would recommend Cause of Death (not on app store anymore, can download from hipstore and copy episodes over on a jailbroken device), as a text based game that was really well thought out. Of course, you could always get a Gameboy emulator (even not jailbroken, Google it) and play whatever you want from there. I also recommend the port of Bike Or Die, which was all the rage in the Palm era when I was growing up. Ios version is OK, although I'm not sure if it's still on the app store. You can probably find an IPA though.
betenoire 11y ago
it does suck. but that doesn't mean a majority of mobile games are a costly addiction. And even granting you that, it sounds a lot like the text-message-addiction commentary in the early 00s.
whitegrape 11y ago
Entertainment is a tough business to be in in general. There are plenty of good songs out there no one listens to. Mobile games suck for more reasons than the present most profitable business model and I don't think the industry is at risk of being destroyed any more than otherwise with or without a freemium model. I know plenty of people argue that freemium is what allows the mobile game industry to exist in the first place. Your last sentence is at odds with the claim of mobile games being supported by whales. If the popular games were a costly addiction, then they wouldn't derive their revenue from so few users. In fact most people play them as a distraction or hobby and never pay a cent -- hence the need for whales (or ads). They may be an addiction for the majority of people who play them, but they're not costly.
kartan 11y ago
> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby. The article contradicts this view, as it looks like 99% of the people don't pay at all.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    That's not how it works. Without the 99% that don't pay, you don't get the 1% that do pay.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      Only because they don't know about it. If you had a way to market to them you really wouldn't need the other 99%. There's probably enough data out there to do just that, too.
      - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
        Well, except that a lot of the worst F2P mobile games are competitive multiplayer. If you cut out all the freeplay minnows, the whales don't have enough people to play against.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change. Except that's not really how it works. You have to make your game good enough to attract the amount of players for which that 1% of paying users can support your development. Go ahead and try to design a game that focuses on "whales", see how the works out.
askafriend 11y ago
This explains why I don't play mobile games anymore. They are boring and it's way too obvious to me when the mechanics are designed around money and it immediately becomes pointless to play.
padobson 11y ago
Seems like the problem is mobile games discovery. I play 10-20 hours of games a week, all of them on consoles or handhelds that are >10 yrs old. Do I want to be playing only old games? No, but it's easier to find a Game Boy game that I love than having to poke through a hundred awful mobile games on the various app stores first. It seems to me that there's a good market for an App that simply curates excellent games and sells them to you. Anyone know of anything like that? I'd be all over it.
- rhizome 11y ago
  I imagine the kind of market data needed to curate effectively is held closely (private) by the companies and devs involved. See also: music services and their recommendation engines being universally lame.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  I came across this one on HN a while ago, and have found the recommendations to be quite good: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.an... I wish Valve would expand Steam into the mobile gaming market. That would certainly help with the discovery problem, with frequent sales, user reviews, custom tags, and whatnot. Also in my experience, their recommendation engine actually works pretty well. Obviously they'd have an uphill battle on their hands, as they can't distribute their store app on the Play Store, but the Amazon App Store seems to be doing decent so far despite that handicap.
- xzi 11y ago
  pockettactics.com is probably what you want. They concentrate on the more interesting stuff: RPGs & roguelikes, strategy / tactical wargames, 4x's, boardgame conversions. Very little of what they feature is the "free-to-play" ilk.
- maraloiu 11y ago
  I just came across your post while I'm working on a possible solution for your problem. A friend & I are trying to build a Netflix for mobile games. The app is called GameGif and we believe that mobile game discovery should be about video content. That's why the unique part on GameGif is that you swipe though short game videos rather than looking at screenshots or reading boring descriptions. If you have an Android phone, you can check out our Beta here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.betterworld.gamegif https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.betterworl... If you have an iPhone, you can check out our trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGX8CzbgvbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGX8CzbgvbA Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
sillysaurus3 11y ago
"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never."
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  What does that mean? As far as I can tell, it's either saying that advertising has no effect whatsoever on the success of a product (which is obviously nonsense), or it's some weird circular prosperity-gospel thing where you declare that only good people/films make money, so any person/film that makes money is by definition good.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby. Precisely. And to a large extent I think we're lagging behind the proper realization of what's going on here. A lot of "freemium" mobile games play in the same space as gambling does, and they hook into the same cognitive, behavioral, and reward mechanisms in order to hook people's attention and keep extracting dollars from those who become addicted. Hopefully it's not nearly as damaging as gambling addictions because there seems to be a somewhat slower curve and lower cap on spending, but it's still pretty bad.
drdaeman 11y ago
> There are plenty of good games out there. I've always assumed the contrary (no games, with markets full of absolutely unplayable and terribly boring "my clash of tower defense sniper sugar pizzeria"-grade crapware), but gave it another thought today. I think now I know why I believed there are "no games" on mobile, while there probably are. The explanation is quite simple I'm not sure why I haven't really noticed this earlier - the genres I generally like are basically unplayable on the mobile form factor. And genres of the games suggested (say, puzzles or platformers) generally aren't really appealing to me. So, when you hear someone says that there's no games - maybe the reason is just the person's preferences.
- veli_joza 11y ago
  Every genre is covered with high-quality mobile games. They have to adapt to different form factor and player habits, but they do exist. The huge problem is discoverability. You have to specifically ask for your genre and you'll get some good recommendations.
Aleman360 11y ago
Stardew Valley is such a refreshing game. It's the antithesis of freemium mobile crap, and I wish the otherwise talented mobile devs would focus on games like that.
- simcop2387 11y ago
  It looks very similar to the Harvest Moon series of games. Definitely taking a look at it now.

taurath 11y ago

Its replaced smoking as a quick shot of dopamine and an alternate reward system for a lot of people I know.

madaxe_again 11y ago
Although smoking is cheaper and better for your health. Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled.
- softawre 11y ago
  > Honestly, I know people who have ended up homeless over bejewelled. What? Story time?
- HCIdivision17 11y ago
  Let's be fair here. Bejewelled is the crack-cocaine of simple addictive games. Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball are mere gateways to Bejewelled.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    Bejewelled is a near perfect Skinner Box, I had a serious 'addiction' to it for a while, managed to avoid spending on it but can see how others didn't.

randomgyatwork 11y ago

When I played games I realized it was for those rewards of accomplishment. I felt good about myself for a few minutes when I beat some hard level. Its worse when you are not getting those rewards elsewhere in your life.

Joof 11y ago
While most games have some degree of this, there are many games that are designed for other purposes as well. Mobile just happens to be the most soul-sucking thanks to it's profit model. Lately I mostly play Rocket League, which is mostly for social reasons (my friends dig it and live too far for me to hang out with), but is enough like a regular sport to have a sense of skill-building, competition and team cooperation. The witness is sort of like a really fun math course that looks really pretty and teaches in a more interesting way. In real life I only occasionally get to solve interesting problems that I don't yet know the answer to. This scratches that itch in a way I have power over. Undertale is an emotional story that I have agency in. It's one of my favorite examples of how game mechanics can enhance a traditional story. Minecraft is a lot of things, but creativity and design are often front and center. Writing this, I think a lot of games may be about experiencing things in a manner where people have more control than in 'real life'. It's also cheaper and faster than most hobbies. You can even get social status for being particularly skilled at games (see: twitch). Admittedly you probably won't make money playing games, but that's true of art, music, football, open source programming and most other hobbies.
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  I pretty much quit playing any/all Blkzzard games after a month of WOW. It quickly became clear to me that they intended and succeesed at effectively creating a profit-making skinner box for humans. Who knew the HS psychology class where we trained a rat to pull a bar for sugar water would later act as an innoculation for lousy games that manipulate their users via classical conditioning methods. It's sad really because the Blizzard classics (IE Diablo 1/2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1/2) represent the pinnacle of visual storytelling in games.

rrowland 11y ago

As a side note, if anybody wants to support a couple awesome indie devs (and play a sick mobile game) check out http://subterfuge-game.com/ http://subterfuge-game.com/ Just started playing a week ago, already in love. Found out on their forums & reddit a couple days ago they're already planning to stop development because in the 3 months they've been on the market they've lost $40,000. EDIT: Also, their freemium is non-intrusive (Which is probably why they're sinking). Play for free, upgrade for $10 to be able to play multiple games at once and play rated games.

tclmeelmo 11y ago
The most accurate (and amusing) description of that game I've heard is that it is a "backstabbing simulator". I was in the alpha and had to delete it from my phone, it was too addictive. It's disappointing to hear that they're having money troubles, their game is pretty unique and deserves a better fate.
- sodafountan 11y ago
  Except really it doesn't. While it might be unique it's clearly not what the market wants. I found the tutorial lengthy and confusing. The game doesn't have mass market appeal. Did anybody really expect this game to do well?

justinhj 11y ago

Not everybody wants to be entertained the same way that you do. In fact I think the market has shown us that most people like simple games that they can play for a few minutes at time, that don't involve much strategy or twitch skill that we would associate with previous video games. They've also voted with their wallets for the freemium model.

Retric 11y ago
You need good games before people can buy them. List 5 fun mobile games relative to say good game-boy games ex: Metroid II: Return of Samus, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Dragon Warrior I & II, etc. IMO, Angry Birds does not make the cut and I don't know of a better iOS game.
- daniel-cussen 11y ago
  There's The Lost Monos. May or may not be a masterpiece, but give it a try.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Monument Valley is pretty good.
  - ativzzz 11y ago
    Monument Valley is indeed very good, but you can beat it in 2-3 hours so it's more akin to watching a movie than having a game you can play a few minutes per session several times a day.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      Tiki towers was also good. I haven't played enough recently to have too many more, but I would recommend Cause of Death (not on app store anymore, can download from hipstore and copy episodes over on a jailbroken device), as a text based game that was really well thought out. Of course, you could always get a Gameboy emulator (even not jailbroken, Google it) and play whatever you want from there. I also recommend the port of Bike Or Die, which was all the rage in the Palm era when I was growing up. Ios version is OK, although I'm not sure if it's still on the app store. You can probably find an IPA though.

betenoire 11y ago

it does suck. but that doesn't mean a majority of mobile games are a costly addiction. And even granting you that, it sounds a lot like the text-message-addiction commentary in the early 00s.

whitegrape 11y ago

Entertainment is a tough business to be in in general. There are plenty of good songs out there no one listens to. Mobile games suck for more reasons than the present most profitable business model and I don't think the industry is at risk of being destroyed any more than otherwise with or without a freemium model. I know plenty of people argue that freemium is what allows the mobile game industry to exist in the first place. Your last sentence is at odds with the claim of mobile games being supported by whales. If the popular games were a costly addiction, then they wouldn't derive their revenue from so few users. In fact most people play them as a distraction or hobby and never pay a cent -- hence the need for whales (or ads). They may be an addiction for the majority of people who play them, but they're not costly.

kartan 11y ago

> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby. The article contradicts this view, as it looks like 99% of the people don't pay at all.

Houshalter 11y ago
The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bachmeier 11y ago
  That's not how it works. Without the 99% that don't pay, you don't get the 1% that do pay.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    Only because they don't know about it. If you had a way to market to them you really wouldn't need the other 99%. There's probably enough data out there to do just that, too.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Well, except that a lot of the worst F2P mobile games are competitive multiplayer. If you cut out all the freeplay minnows, the whales don't have enough people to play against.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >The market only cares about people that do pay. Those 99% might as well not exist and nothing would change. Except that's not really how it works. You have to make your game good enough to attract the amount of players for which that 1% of paying users can support your development. Go ahead and try to design a game that focuses on "whales", see how the works out.

askafriend 11y ago

This explains why I don't play mobile games anymore. They are boring and it's way too obvious to me when the mechanics are designed around money and it immediately becomes pointless to play.

padobson 11y ago

Seems like the problem is mobile games discovery. I play 10-20 hours of games a week, all of them on consoles or handhelds that are >10 yrs old. Do I want to be playing only old games? No, but it's easier to find a Game Boy game that I love than having to poke through a hundred awful mobile games on the various app stores first. It seems to me that there's a good market for an App that simply curates excellent games and sells them to you. Anyone know of anything like that? I'd be all over it.

rhizome 11y ago
I imagine the kind of market data needed to curate effectively is held closely (private) by the companies and devs involved. See also: music services and their recommendation engines being universally lame.
lewisl9029 11y ago
I came across this one on HN a while ago, and have found the recommendations to be quite good: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.an... I wish Valve would expand Steam into the mobile gaming market. That would certainly help with the discovery problem, with frequent sales, user reviews, custom tags, and whatnot. Also in my experience, their recommendation engine actually works pretty well. Obviously they'd have an uphill battle on their hands, as they can't distribute their store app on the Play Store, but the Amazon App Store seems to be doing decent so far despite that handicap.
xzi 11y ago
pockettactics.com is probably what you want. They concentrate on the more interesting stuff: RPGs & roguelikes, strategy / tactical wargames, 4x's, boardgame conversions. Very little of what they feature is the "free-to-play" ilk.
maraloiu 11y ago
I just came across your post while I'm working on a possible solution for your problem. A friend & I are trying to build a Netflix for mobile games. The app is called GameGif and we believe that mobile game discovery should be about video content. That's why the unique part on GameGif is that you swipe though short game videos rather than looking at screenshots or reading boring descriptions. If you have an Android phone, you can check out our Beta here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.betterworld.gamegif https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.betterworl... If you have an iPhone, you can check out our trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGX8CzbgvbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGX8CzbgvbA Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

sillysaurus3 11y ago

"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never."

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
What does that mean? As far as I can tell, it's either saying that advertising has no effect whatsoever on the success of a product (which is obviously nonsense), or it's some weird circular prosperity-gospel thing where you declare that only good people/films make money, so any person/film that makes money is by definition good.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

> The majority of popular mobile games are a costly addiction, not a hobby. Precisely. And to a large extent I think we're lagging behind the proper realization of what's going on here. A lot of "freemium" mobile games play in the same space as gambling does, and they hook into the same cognitive, behavioral, and reward mechanisms in order to hook people's attention and keep extracting dollars from those who become addicted. Hopefully it's not nearly as damaging as gambling addictions because there seems to be a somewhat slower curve and lower cap on spending, but it's still pretty bad.

drdaeman 11y ago

> There are plenty of good games out there. I've always assumed the contrary (no games, with markets full of absolutely unplayable and terribly boring "my clash of tower defense sniper sugar pizzeria"-grade crapware), but gave it another thought today. I think now I know why I believed there are "no games" on mobile, while there probably are. The explanation is quite simple I'm not sure why I haven't really noticed this earlier - the genres I generally like are basically unplayable on the mobile form factor. And genres of the games suggested (say, puzzles or platformers) generally aren't really appealing to me. So, when you hear someone says that there's no games - maybe the reason is just the person's preferences.

veli_joza 11y ago
Every genre is covered with high-quality mobile games. They have to adapt to different form factor and player habits, but they do exist. The huge problem is discoverability. You have to specifically ask for your genre and you'll get some good recommendations.

Aleman360 11y ago

Stardew Valley is such a refreshing game. It's the antithesis of freemium mobile crap, and I wish the otherwise talented mobile devs would focus on games like that.

simcop2387 11y ago
It looks very similar to the Harvest Moon series of games. Definitely taking a look at it now.