4 ms·

The significant difference here is that back in the 1980s and 1990s there was the real valuable commodity of shelf space being taken up by garbage games. Someth

The significant difference here is that back in the 1980s and 1990s there was the real valuable commodity of shelf space being taken up by garbage games. Something that would result in unhappy customers buying some random product on the shelf, and bad implications for the company that stocked said product. In contrast with PC and Mobile it's all virtual. There's reams of trash out there and it can be ignored and there's less downside to it existing. However, it is still a problem, one that remains somewhat poorly unsolved, with huge effort being put into storefronts to serve as gate keepers to help direct people to good product and not the mass of trash out there. TBH I think the millions of very bad games did kill the mobile market. Traditional game developers have near completely abandoned it. There's some alt universe version of that mobile market out there that is more healthy than it is now if different choices were made. Similarly the PC market didn't used to be anywhere near as healthy as it is now. When I was younger developers had abandoned the PC market as well and the console market was thriving. Storefront curation is something that has brought more health into the PC space.

mock-possum 3y ago
If the Apple Store had the same return policy as Steam, I would buy *a lot* more mobile games on iOS. Unfortunately paying for mobile games is a gamble that I’m not willing to take most of the time. It takes heavy personal recommendations from friends or an exceptionally compelling gameplay video to convince me.
- Tomte 3y ago
  I never had a problem returning apps or games. But that's with Germany's "Widerrufsrecht" (right to revocation), admittedly.
kmeisthax 3y ago
The problem with the mobile market is that microtransaction laden dopamine traps dominate the stores. People who are looking for a game that isn't a glorified gambling-free real-money casino go elsewhere, so the people making these games just assume the only thing that will sell are games designed to extract money out of ADHD cases and children. Apple seems to be trying to push against this, what with Resident Evil getting an iOS port and them shipping phone hardware with decent GPUs in them. Then again, we've seen this happen before. Every few years someone releases a mobile game that's really high quality, it gets ignored, and then it disappears off the App Store[0]. The mobile app stores are really hostile to anything that doesn't get frequent updates, which means the developer needs recurring revenue, and the only way to do that with a game is to shove your game full of microtransactions to spend on and release it as "free" to "play". Steam has about the same amount of garbage that iOS and Android's app stores get, but people still sell older games there. I can drop $70 on a pay-once game and be somewhat[1] confident that it isn't going to disappear. Same thing with the console stores. Hell, on console you can still buy physical media and enjoy first-sale rights, which is the last bastion of consumer protection in this awful industry. There's also the elephant in the room that mobile phones are just... not very good for certain genres. The Atari 2600 was the same way - it was designed to do Pong and not much else. Most of the games on the system were absolutely heroic efforts to bend H-Blank graphics to their absolute limit. In the case of phones, a lot of action games just need physical controls. Dropping the player into a 3D environment means they need at least two analog controls for camera and movement, which already means a good chunk of your screen is going to be covered in touch control overlays. Any finger-friendly alternate scheme you can think of (e.g. tap to walk, swipe to turn camera) is going to impose upon your game design because players now have their hands tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the one thing mobile does do well? Menu driven games, where you pick from a list and tap things. That's basically RPGs and card games. Those all involve mechanics that measure "character skill" rather than "player skill", and character skill is something that the game retains complete control over. So you can sell power quite easily. The one thing that mobile does well is also the one thing that's absurdly easy to monetize. This post was brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends. [0] Or worse, Apple breaks iOS compatibility and even redownloading the app you bought no longer works. The most egregious example being them changing their signature algorithm in a point update and forgetting to resign delisted software. [1] Yes, I know, you don't actually own anything unless you pirate it. And game developers can still horrifically disrespect their own work by tying it to an online server that they can just shut down to turn that $70 to $70/year ala Madden.

mock-possum 3y ago

If the Apple Store had the same return policy as Steam, I would buy *a lot* more mobile games on iOS. Unfortunately paying for mobile games is a gamble that I’m not willing to take most of the time. It takes heavy personal recommendations from friends or an exceptionally compelling gameplay video to convince me.

Tomte 3y ago
I never had a problem returning apps or games. But that's with Germany's "Widerrufsrecht" (right to revocation), admittedly.

kmeisthax 3y ago

The problem with the mobile market is that microtransaction laden dopamine traps dominate the stores. People who are looking for a game that isn't a glorified gambling-free real-money casino go elsewhere, so the people making these games just assume the only thing that will sell are games designed to extract money out of ADHD cases and children. Apple seems to be trying to push against this, what with Resident Evil getting an iOS port and them shipping phone hardware with decent GPUs in them. Then again, we've seen this happen before. Every few years someone releases a mobile game that's really high quality, it gets ignored, and then it disappears off the App Store[0]. The mobile app stores are really hostile to anything that doesn't get frequent updates, which means the developer needs recurring revenue, and the only way to do that with a game is to shove your game full of microtransactions to spend on and release it as "free" to "play". Steam has about the same amount of garbage that iOS and Android's app stores get, but people still sell older games there. I can drop $70 on a pay-once game and be somewhat[1] confident that it isn't going to disappear. Same thing with the console stores. Hell, on console you can still buy physical media and enjoy first-sale rights, which is the last bastion of consumer protection in this awful industry. There's also the elephant in the room that mobile phones are just... not very good for certain genres. The Atari 2600 was the same way - it was designed to do Pong and not much else. Most of the games on the system were absolutely heroic efforts to bend H-Blank graphics to their absolute limit. In the case of phones, a lot of action games just need physical controls. Dropping the player into a 3D environment means they need at least two analog controls for camera and movement, which already means a good chunk of your screen is going to be covered in touch control overlays. Any finger-friendly alternate scheme you can think of (e.g. tap to walk, swipe to turn camera) is going to impose upon your game design because players now have their hands tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the one thing mobile does do well? Menu driven games, where you pick from a list and tap things. That's basically RPGs and card games. Those all involve mechanics that measure "character skill" rather than "player skill", and character skill is something that the game retains complete control over. So you can sell power quite easily. The one thing that mobile does well is also the one thing that's absurdly easy to monetize. This post was brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends. [0] Or worse, Apple breaks iOS compatibility and even redownloading the app you bought no longer works. The most egregious example being them changing their signature algorithm in a point update and forgetting to resign delisted software. [1] Yes, I know, you don't actually own anything unless you pirate it. And game developers can still horrifically disrespect their own work by tying it to an online server that they can just shut down to turn that $70 to $70/year ala Madden.