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I recently worked for one of the biggest mobile game developers. While I game a lot and have been for over 20 years I never played anything on my phone (PC gami

I recently worked for one of the biggest mobile game developers. While I game a lot and have been for over 20 years I never played anything on my phone (PC gaming only) so I was pretty shocked at the state of the industry. They have meetings about making the game more addictive, taking away any chance to get ahead in the game by skill or grind so you must spend, targeting vulnerable groups, making it hard to see how much you actually spent in the game. To have these people paint themselves as oppressed and offended... is exactly what I've come to expect after every online social justice controversy I've witnessed so far. And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

secretsatan 6y ago
It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. You probably just know not to buy them, you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model. I would say to a non computer literate, the state of the pc software industry in general is just as spammy, perhaps even worse as it's much more mature, it is harder to get the worst through google play and the app store.
- trabant00 6y ago
  > It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded. The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    Yet in real life games like Genshin Impact implement most of the techniques you find morally wrong yet the game has actual gameplay and most people playing it have no problem with it. Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.
    - Bancakes 6y ago
      Interesting. Can you name some valid, non-monetary reasons to have lootboxes?
      - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
        In the same way that randomness in a roguelite leads to you feeling really good when you find an item that is cool and that you didn't expect to get, you have that same mechanic taking place when you either save enough in-game currency or use real money to buy a new lootbox and get a new item/character. It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.
        Bancakes 6y ago
        What you described is a planned dopamine release you have to pay for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have lootboxes, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for monetary reasons.
        adnzzzzZ 6y ago
        Well, anything that involves a monetary exchange can be described as "for monetary reasons". I explained to you that a non-monetary reason is similar to the reasoning behind similar mechanics in roguelites, which generally do not ask the player for payment. I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for." Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.
  - secretsatan 6y ago
    Again, you took the time to find the games that allow you to do this and then just say every free mobile game employs the model you don't like
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      At this point, I consider the majority of the mobile gaming space to be indistinguishable from a casino. - Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check - Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun") I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot. Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    <3 EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Thanks for the offer! I'm trying to learn to stop agreeing to things on impulse, so I'll think about it and get back to you no later than Monday. If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        There's a "review queue" of games where you see user feedback and you decide whether to allow the game on the list or deny it, along with a reason why. It's an allow/deny system, basically, except sometimes you have to look at the games to try and tell if they should make the list or not.
  - blub 6y ago
    Or you could use Apple arcade and not worry about it I guess?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Even if I was on iOS, I've learned better than to trust commercial entities with curating mobile games and apps.
koirapoika 6y ago
I have a similar experience. Technical challenges are one thing and they can be interesting, but ethics is more important to me. It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked. After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me. Edit: formatting
- paganel 6y ago
  I have a close friend that worked for such a company targeting the people you mention, they paid him really, really well (more than the big request he had made when they had made the offer, he had hoped they'd say no) but said company also left my friend really, really burned out after just one year (he's no longer with them). I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.
  - DaveSapien 6y ago
    I'm a games designer/developer and I work freelance for other studios. I say NO way more often than I say yes, precisely because of that particular problem. Money is nice and all that, but I've seen first hand the damage that these predatory practices can do to people. AND the attitudes of the people working at these game studios ands its frankly disgusting.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here? Like FAANG level money [0], more? [0] https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
    - paganel 6y ago
      > Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here? I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.
f6v 6y ago
I was making one of those "games in disguise" once, where the game was marketed as an app doing something useful to you. All we talked about was "first day retention" and "3-day retention" and how we keep people opening the app. I mean, if users find the app useful, you don't need to spam them with messages.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I recently set up a new phone and I was shocked that I got a notification from SoundHound. That's one app that has no business trying to "engage" me - it's there for one purpose, identify songs when I want it to. If it's once every two months, that's all the engagement they are getting. There is no retention to be had, and I will not give them any. If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.
  - pocketgrok 6y ago
    Similarly, Hulu started sending me engagement notifications. It has no notification controls so I disabled notifications entirely. Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.
    - justaguy88 6y ago
      Just turn _everything_ off except the strictly nessesary, which for me is just whatever messaging app I use to talk to close friends
atoav 6y ago
I worked as a freelance re-recording mixer for film. Most of my audio collegues told me to stay away from the gaming industry if I can. In theory game engines could be very interesting for telling moods and creating worlds. In practice the salaries are bad and the time tables so crammed, that it is a struggle to keep even basic quality levels. The freedom to find something truly good, new or interesting is rarely there. The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.
- Wurdan 6y ago
  I don't think this is endemic to gaming, it's difficult in all creative media to predict the commercial success of a product. The film industry does the same thing in producing blockbuster productions that are more iterative than innovative and are safe bets, so they can then take gambles on more niche projects. I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.
  - BunsanSpace 6y ago
    I found Hades was squarely in the iterative category. The studio used a very similar forumla as their previous games (Bastion, Transistor, dead ells) then mixed in rogue like elements to give it interesting decisions. Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.
    - allarm 6y ago
      Dead Cells was not developed by Supergiant Games. It was made by Motion Twin.
    - pmarreck 6y ago
      I found dead cells and hades to be entirely different games, at least in the sense that hades did not grab onto me and dead cells did. Also, they don't actually make dead cells, motion twin does
jorvi 6y ago
This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore. A few choice examples: - Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players - EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible - Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime *not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  If this is at all accurate, I am disgusted by the state of the industry.
  - _trampeltier 6y ago
    I guess that's why I don't play new games at all.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      For what it's worth, I don't have this experience at all in the Nintendo ecosystem. Nintendo aren't saints either, they did much of the same bullshit in that Mario Kart app for Android, but all the games I'm playing on the Switch are free from this crap. I can't be 100% certain it's going to stay like that, but if Nintendo becomes another EA, they'll probably be among the last big studios to do so. (I have no affiliation with Nintendo or any other game developers or publishers.)
    - 6y ago
Farbklex 6y ago
The worst side of it is, that it drags the rest of the mobile game ecosystem down with it. Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support? Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it. But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones. Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…
- tubularhells 6y ago
  Google will van your application if you do a filtered Play store search, so make sure it is available on F-Droid and elsewhere.
  - nsb1 6y ago
    ....like...down by the river?? ;)
    - wincy 6y ago
      Original meaning is the FBI van shows up and arrests you, I think it’s morphed to a van shows up and puts a black bag over your head, or your app in this case, and your app gets disappeared. I first saw the term on 4chan in like the mid 2000s.
      - novaleaf 6y ago
        no. parent is sarcastically referring to a (very old now, circa 1990) saturday-night-live skit where the actor always ends up mentioning that he lives "in a van, down by the river" I think parent poster means that there are no other places to put the app/launcher.
junke 6y ago
1. There are predatory practices in mobile game industries 2. The joke makes fun of those practices. 3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).
- ttt0 6y ago
  Have you guys cancelled Karl Marx yet for being a racist and an anti-semite? He's punching down minorities.
  - Twixes 6y ago
    What does Karl Marx and "them guys", whoever "they" are, have to do with mocking predatory practices in mobile games or mobile gamers?
    - ttt0 6y ago
      Besides Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices, it's just an analogy. It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. Or China using feminism to pacify, if not outright genocide Uyghurs[0], for the same reasons. 0) https://archive.is/Xy5g6 https://archive.is/Xy5g6
      - junke 6y ago
        > It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. That would be more like the kind of wake-washing that "you people" (what's the equivalent of marxist? Adam Smith), you Smithes also dislike?
kiplkipl 6y ago
>And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist! You're inventing a stance to get angry about.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Mobile gaming is a completely different forest. If you want to survive in mobile gaming business you have to do monetization, monetization and monetization. I don't think it's going to change. If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kaze404 6y ago
The last two paragraphs in your comment made absolutely no sense to me, sounding almost like a complete non-sequitur. Are mobile game developers painting themselves as oppressed an offended...? Where? What?
- wittyreference 6y ago
  In the Twitter threads where they all pearl-clutched in response to the satire removed in the linked article.
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    Oh ok, I just read the thread. While I don't agree, I really don't think it's any better for a bunch of seemingly mature adults being this upset over someone on Twitter posting a bad take and getting 10 likes. It just screams garbage "anti-sjw" culture which adds nothing of value to any discussion.
pmarreck 6y ago
I like the expression "*ist" as an all-around catchall way to describe people who stereotype groups of other people in any way, shape or form that is loosely correlated with some attribute. Don't be an *ist. (My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)
astkaasa 6y ago
It's tittytainment.
tonfreed 6y ago
I think it's more that a few of them are giving quite large sums of cash to the Godot project. It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.

secretsatan 6y ago

It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. You probably just know not to buy them, you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model. I would say to a non computer literate, the state of the pc software industry in general is just as spammy, perhaps even worse as it's much more mature, it is harder to get the worst through google play and the app store.

trabant00 6y ago
> It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded. The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  Yet in real life games like Genshin Impact implement most of the techniques you find morally wrong yet the game has actual gameplay and most people playing it have no problem with it. Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    Interesting. Can you name some valid, non-monetary reasons to have lootboxes?
    - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
      In the same way that randomness in a roguelite leads to you feeling really good when you find an item that is cool and that you didn't expect to get, you have that same mechanic taking place when you either save enough in-game currency or use real money to buy a new lootbox and get a new item/character. It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.
      - Bancakes 6y ago
        What you described is a planned dopamine release you have to pay for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have lootboxes, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for monetary reasons.
        adnzzzzZ 6y ago
        Well, anything that involves a monetary exchange can be described as "for monetary reasons". I explained to you that a non-monetary reason is similar to the reasoning behind similar mechanics in roguelites, which generally do not ask the player for payment. I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for." Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.
- secretsatan 6y ago
  Again, you took the time to find the games that allow you to do this and then just say every free mobile game employs the model you don't like
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    At this point, I consider the majority of the mobile gaming space to be indistinguishable from a casino. - Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check - Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun") I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot. Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  <3 EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Thanks for the offer! I'm trying to learn to stop agreeing to things on impulse, so I'll think about it and get back to you no later than Monday. If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      There's a "review queue" of games where you see user feedback and you decide whether to allow the game on the list or deny it, along with a reason why. It's an allow/deny system, basically, except sometimes you have to look at the games to try and tell if they should make the list or not.
- blub 6y ago
  Or you could use Apple arcade and not worry about it I guess?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Even if I was on iOS, I've learned better than to trust commercial entities with curating mobile games and apps.

koirapoika 6y ago

I have a similar experience. Technical challenges are one thing and they can be interesting, but ethics is more important to me. It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked. After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me. Edit: formatting

paganel 6y ago
I have a close friend that worked for such a company targeting the people you mention, they paid him really, really well (more than the big request he had made when they had made the offer, he had hoped they'd say no) but said company also left my friend really, really burned out after just one year (he's no longer with them). I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.
- DaveSapien 6y ago
  I'm a games designer/developer and I work freelance for other studios. I say NO way more often than I say yes, precisely because of that particular problem. Money is nice and all that, but I've seen first hand the damage that these predatory practices can do to people. AND the attitudes of the people working at these game studios ands its frankly disgusting.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here? Like FAANG level money [0], more? [0] https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
  - paganel 6y ago
    > Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here? I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.

f6v 6y ago

I was making one of those "games in disguise" once, where the game was marketed as an app doing something useful to you. All we talked about was "first day retention" and "3-day retention" and how we keep people opening the app. I mean, if users find the app useful, you don't need to spam them with messages.

selfhoster11 6y ago
I recently set up a new phone and I was shocked that I got a notification from SoundHound. That's one app that has no business trying to "engage" me - it's there for one purpose, identify songs when I want it to. If it's once every two months, that's all the engagement they are getting. There is no retention to be had, and I will not give them any. If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.
- pocketgrok 6y ago
  Similarly, Hulu started sending me engagement notifications. It has no notification controls so I disabled notifications entirely. Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.
  - justaguy88 6y ago
    Just turn _everything_ off except the strictly nessesary, which for me is just whatever messaging app I use to talk to close friends

atoav 6y ago

I worked as a freelance re-recording mixer for film. Most of my audio collegues told me to stay away from the gaming industry if I can. In theory game engines could be very interesting for telling moods and creating worlds. In practice the salaries are bad and the time tables so crammed, that it is a struggle to keep even basic quality levels. The freedom to find something truly good, new or interesting is rarely there. The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.

Wurdan 6y ago
I don't think this is endemic to gaming, it's difficult in all creative media to predict the commercial success of a product. The film industry does the same thing in producing blockbuster productions that are more iterative than innovative and are safe bets, so they can then take gambles on more niche projects. I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.
- BunsanSpace 6y ago
  I found Hades was squarely in the iterative category. The studio used a very similar forumla as their previous games (Bastion, Transistor, dead ells) then mixed in rogue like elements to give it interesting decisions. Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.
  - allarm 6y ago
    Dead Cells was not developed by Supergiant Games. It was made by Motion Twin.
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    I found dead cells and hades to be entirely different games, at least in the sense that hades did not grab onto me and dead cells did. Also, they don't actually make dead cells, motion twin does

jorvi 6y ago

This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore. A few choice examples: - Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players - EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible - Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime *not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!

selfhoster11 6y ago
If this is at all accurate, I am disgusted by the state of the industry.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  I guess that's why I don't play new games at all.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I don't have this experience at all in the Nintendo ecosystem. Nintendo aren't saints either, they did much of the same bullshit in that Mario Kart app for Android, but all the games I'm playing on the Switch are free from this crap. I can't be 100% certain it's going to stay like that, but if Nintendo becomes another EA, they'll probably be among the last big studios to do so. (I have no affiliation with Nintendo or any other game developers or publishers.)
  - 6y ago

Farbklex 6y ago

The worst side of it is, that it drags the rest of the mobile game ecosystem down with it. Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support? Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it. But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones. Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…

tubularhells 6y ago
Google will van your application if you do a filtered Play store search, so make sure it is available on F-Droid and elsewhere.
- nsb1 6y ago
  ....like...down by the river?? ;)
  - wincy 6y ago
    Original meaning is the FBI van shows up and arrests you, I think it’s morphed to a van shows up and puts a black bag over your head, or your app in this case, and your app gets disappeared. I first saw the term on 4chan in like the mid 2000s.
    - novaleaf 6y ago
      no. parent is sarcastically referring to a (very old now, circa 1990) saturday-night-live skit where the actor always ends up mentioning that he lives "in a van, down by the river" I think parent poster means that there are no other places to put the app/launcher.

junke 6y ago

1. There are predatory practices in mobile game industries 2. The joke makes fun of those practices. 3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).

ttt0 6y ago
Have you guys cancelled Karl Marx yet for being a racist and an anti-semite? He's punching down minorities.
- Twixes 6y ago
  What does Karl Marx and "them guys", whoever "they" are, have to do with mocking predatory practices in mobile games or mobile gamers?
  - ttt0 6y ago
    Besides Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices, it's just an analogy. It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. Or China using feminism to pacify, if not outright genocide Uyghurs[0], for the same reasons. 0) https://archive.is/Xy5g6 https://archive.is/Xy5g6
    - junke 6y ago
      > It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. That would be more like the kind of wake-washing that "you people" (what's the equivalent of marxist? Adam Smith), you Smithes also dislike?

kiplkipl 6y ago

>And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist! You're inventing a stance to get angry about.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Mobile gaming is a completely different forest. If you want to survive in mobile gaming business you have to do monetization, monetization and monetization. I don't think it's going to change. If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Kaze404 6y ago

The last two paragraphs in your comment made absolutely no sense to me, sounding almost like a complete non-sequitur. Are mobile game developers painting themselves as oppressed an offended...? Where? What?

wittyreference 6y ago
In the Twitter threads where they all pearl-clutched in response to the satire removed in the linked article.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  Oh ok, I just read the thread. While I don't agree, I really don't think it's any better for a bunch of seemingly mature adults being this upset over someone on Twitter posting a bad take and getting 10 likes. It just screams garbage "anti-sjw" culture which adds nothing of value to any discussion.

pmarreck 6y ago

I like the expression "*ist" as an all-around catchall way to describe people who stereotype groups of other people in any way, shape or form that is loosely correlated with some attribute. Don't be an *ist. (My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)

astkaasa 6y ago

It's tittytainment.

tonfreed 6y ago

I think it's more that a few of them are giving quite large sums of cash to the Godot project. It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.