7 ms·

This is a highly visible manifestation of something that has been going on for years. I have been around mobile games for 20 years (going back to J2ME) and have

This is a highly visible manifestation of something that has been going on for years. I have been around mobile games for 20 years (going back to J2ME) and have never seen interest in the field so low. Essentially the noise is that people are locked into habits in the app stores. It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publishers. The big breakout hit last year was a Monopoly spin off, admittedly well executed, but with absolutely massive marketing pushes. Steam is squeezing on one side and web games on the other. When the mobile herd simply moves where the marketing dollars lead them who needs reviews?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
burningChrome 2y ago
I used to be a huge mobile gaming person, but then a few years ago, I found out several of my mobile games were available on PC so I just stopped gaming on my phone all together. I have several co-workers who also did the same thing. We used to talk all the time about whatever new game was coming out on mobile, but now its all about PC and console titles. You're 100% right that it takes massive amounts of money to move the needle for gamers now. It seems like the group I run in, whatever your game is and you're good at, you stay in that lane. Any new additions or versions, you're on right away and excited about. It takes a lot for the people I know to try a new game and actually spend the time and money to see if they like it. Nobody I know is willing to do that now since the economy is not great and money is really tight all over. The people I know are only going to buy what they know they'll like. I feel like a lot of this is people sticking with what they know since the market is so saturated like you point out.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  I haven’t bought a new game for myself for years. Most of what I play is retro emulation, and what PC titles I do play are ones I already own and have a lot of replay value. Indie titles are far cooler than AAA, but even they don’t speak out to me as often. Why spend $60 on a flop like Hyenas, or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? Especially on mobile, where most games are idle timewasters looking to lock me into a microtransaction loop. I‘d rather boot up a GBA game and spend my time on that.
  - golergka 2y ago
    If you're already pirating games with game emulators, what's stopping you from pirating AAA titles as well? I'm not making any value judgement here, it just feels like you compare apples to oranges.
    - a_t48 2y ago
      Buying a retro game no longer gives money to the developers. It doesn’t support the development of further games, it mostly just puts money in the pockets of collectors and scalpers.
      - golergka 2y ago
        > Buying a tomato in a grocery store no longer gives money to the farmer, because he's already been paid for it. Same logic, same fallacy.
        benoau 2y ago
        Except you don't have to hunt down the descendants of the grocery store or who acquired the company that acquired them that sold it for parts, decades later. With old games the rights holders are scattered and even unknown until they assert a claim they believe they have.
        a_t48 2y ago
        It's not, though. I'm not buying a 30 year old tomato, like I would a 30 year old game. I'm going to keep buying a tomato every week to make my BLT, enabling the grocery store to continually give money to the farmer for more tomatoes. I'm not going to be continually rebuy the same old game on a regular basis. Me buying tomatoes encourages the farmer to grow tomatoes next year, the same is not true for retro games. One of these is a continual economic...pipeline of the tomatoes being exchanged for money, and being consumed. The other is speculation and collection. Please don't get hung up on the terminology, I'm not an economist.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
layer8 2y ago
Then there’s also people opting to watch gaming streams or videos to experience a game, instead of playing themselves.
- the_af 2y ago
  I do this with DCS. Flightsims fascinate me, and I used to play the old Microprose sims, but nowadays it's too expensive and time-consuming a niche. DCS is expensive, both the hardware and the modules, and it also requires way too much time. So I watch a couple of YouTube channels dedicated to DCS, and get to "live" the experience through them.
abecedarius 2y ago
Seems a natural result of monopolist app stores treating software developers as a complement to be commoditized. That relationship was what held me back the most when I was tempted to write for iPod Touch.
golergka 2y ago
I worked in mobile gamedev a long time, and I remember the excitement around 2010, where it really seemed like we got a new, innovative platform which will allow for completely new types of gameplay and turn a lot of casuals into real gamers at the same time. But turned out, the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay just doesn't convert that well. Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing can only drive an install, but after that, it's the game quality and a person's preferences that decide the LTV.
- fidotron 2y ago
  > Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing is also the process of surveying the market and deciding what to make in the first place.
  - golergka 2y ago
    Good point, I should have phrased it differently.
- pier25 2y ago
  > the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay Yeah although what percentage of mobile users actually play on their phones regularly these days? It's anecdotal but I haven't played a mobile game in almost a decade now. I played a lot on my iPad 1 and 3. The app fever of 2010 has passed. Again anecdotal, but I avoid installing apps on my phone as much as I can. My wife still plays candy crush on her iPad almost every night but has zero interest in any other game.
  - jamesgeck0 2y ago
    Anecdotally, when I was in Asia I saw people playing mobile games all over the place. Mobile is the biggest gaming platform by a large margin.
chasing 2y ago
The mobile gaming market is overwhelmed with cheap trash. It's what you see when you open a mobile game store. (I just opened the iOS App Store games section and, apart from Minecraft and Roblox -- which I'm not interested in -- everything on the main screen pretty much looks terrible.) It's a marked contrast to the major consoles and other game store platforms which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not just promoting stuff that will be profitable -- but of promoting stuff that's not trash so when you think of a Nintendo Switch you think of amazing Mario games; when you think of a Playstation you think of The Last of Us or Elden Ring or whatever. You know if you crack open Steam that you'll see interesting stuff. The difference may be the norms set on pricing. Console games are still $30-$70. People complained about the horrible race-to-the-bottom on mobile game pricing in the early days. And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. So the marketplace was overwhelmed by companies who could execute cheap, micro-transaction-addictive games the best. And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be. (With notable exceptions!)
- fidotron 2y ago
  > And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. There is a good reason for this. “Premium” mobile games never reliably made that much money, even during the early iOS boom. If you were a publisher it took having quite a few hits to compensate, and Android was more trouble than it was worth for a long time. A successful MTX game made several orders of magnitude more. (Instead of getting low millions you would be getting hundreds of millions). The process was perfectly satirized in South Park by the “Canadian Department of Mobile Gaming” which like all the best South Park jokes wasn’t nearly as fictional as might be assumed. Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. Team Fortress 2 is an example of Valve indulging in exactly this on Steam, so it is far from isolated to mobile.
  - benoau 2y ago
    > Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. And finally, there's an initiative to outlaw many of the tactics that make it work so well! https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer-game-purchases https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer...
bsder 2y ago
> It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publishers. This is purely the fault of enshittifying the mobile gaming experience. I moved through various genres like Puzzle and Dragons, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. Each one of those games was a lot of fun because initially they left a path to play them with skill instead of money. Putting together a set of characters to beat the tough bosses in Puzzle and Dragons required a lot of skill to get the big combos you would need since you were underpowered. Clash of Clans was neat because you couldn't make a castle to protect against everything and someone with some skill could probably get an extra star off you with some work (I was really good at timing the placement of dragons against the algorithms to exploit seams and make higher leveled players cry). I had a Clash Royale deck based on Golems and Lightning that would win about 30% of the time even against players who had super powerful decks (I was casting things before stuff even hit the field in anticipation of what players would do and timing the delay from the system--sure it was high risk but also high reward). Alas, the siren call of the microtransaction is strong. People who spend money expect to win and complain when they don't. Those games eventually all nerfed any skill-only paths. And then they expanded to make massive purchasing the only real path toward higher levels. And that led me to stop playing mobile games altogether. There is no point. If a game is money or gacha, it's completely not interesting. If a game has a skill path, it will get nuked post haste as soon as the publisher figures out that it exists. The only winning move is not to play.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor. Seemed like such an obvious slam dunk (really just a matter of talking to like, 10-20 indie devs with games on mobile already like Stardew. Then the audience and other devs will follow), but I suppose Steam isn't exactly strap for cash to try. I suppose in all fairness it was well deserved of Epic. Valve had no interest and Epic's 7+ year war with Apple and Google is probably a part of why no other player has tried this method. Hopefully these changes open the door for other vendors to break that monopoly.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  >I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor. I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes better games(Counter-Strike, Dota 2, TF2, new MOBA game - Deadlock)), Epic only has Fortnite and Epic can't beat Valve at revenue, Valve overall makes more money than Epic.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media for IM, built in phone features for recording/straming playback. >Epic won't beat Steam at anything I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space. Even their steam client app is probably the worst part about Valve from a technical level. I'd be very shocked if Valve did anything with the mobile platform this decade.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

burningChrome 2y ago

I used to be a huge mobile gaming person, but then a few years ago, I found out several of my mobile games were available on PC so I just stopped gaming on my phone all together. I have several co-workers who also did the same thing. We used to talk all the time about whatever new game was coming out on mobile, but now its all about PC and console titles. You're 100% right that it takes massive amounts of money to move the needle for gamers now. It seems like the group I run in, whatever your game is and you're good at, you stay in that lane. Any new additions or versions, you're on right away and excited about. It takes a lot for the people I know to try a new game and actually spend the time and money to see if they like it. Nobody I know is willing to do that now since the economy is not great and money is really tight all over. The people I know are only going to buy what they know they'll like. I feel like a lot of this is people sticking with what they know since the market is so saturated like you point out.

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
I haven’t bought a new game for myself for years. Most of what I play is retro emulation, and what PC titles I do play are ones I already own and have a lot of replay value. Indie titles are far cooler than AAA, but even they don’t speak out to me as often. Why spend $60 on a flop like Hyenas, or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? Especially on mobile, where most games are idle timewasters looking to lock me into a microtransaction loop. I‘d rather boot up a GBA game and spend my time on that.
- golergka 2y ago
  If you're already pirating games with game emulators, what's stopping you from pirating AAA titles as well? I'm not making any value judgement here, it just feels like you compare apples to oranges.
  - a_t48 2y ago
    Buying a retro game no longer gives money to the developers. It doesn’t support the development of further games, it mostly just puts money in the pockets of collectors and scalpers.
    - golergka 2y ago
      > Buying a tomato in a grocery store no longer gives money to the farmer, because he's already been paid for it. Same logic, same fallacy.
      - benoau 2y ago
        Except you don't have to hunt down the descendants of the grocery store or who acquired the company that acquired them that sold it for parts, decades later. With old games the rights holders are scattered and even unknown until they assert a claim they believe they have.
      - a_t48 2y ago
        It's not, though. I'm not buying a 30 year old tomato, like I would a 30 year old game. I'm going to keep buying a tomato every week to make my BLT, enabling the grocery store to continually give money to the farmer for more tomatoes. I'm not going to be continually rebuy the same old game on a regular basis. Me buying tomatoes encourages the farmer to grow tomatoes next year, the same is not true for retro games. One of these is a continual economic...pipeline of the tomatoes being exchanged for money, and being consumed. The other is speculation and collection. Please don't get hung up on the terminology, I'm not an economist.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago

layer8 2y ago

Then there’s also people opting to watch gaming streams or videos to experience a game, instead of playing themselves.

the_af 2y ago
I do this with DCS. Flightsims fascinate me, and I used to play the old Microprose sims, but nowadays it's too expensive and time-consuming a niche. DCS is expensive, both the hardware and the modules, and it also requires way too much time. So I watch a couple of YouTube channels dedicated to DCS, and get to "live" the experience through them.

abecedarius 2y ago

Seems a natural result of monopolist app stores treating software developers as a complement to be commoditized. That relationship was what held me back the most when I was tempted to write for iPod Touch.

golergka 2y ago

I worked in mobile gamedev a long time, and I remember the excitement around 2010, where it really seemed like we got a new, innovative platform which will allow for completely new types of gameplay and turn a lot of casuals into real gamers at the same time. But turned out, the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay just doesn't convert that well. Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing can only drive an install, but after that, it's the game quality and a person's preferences that decide the LTV.

fidotron 2y ago
> Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing is also the process of surveying the market and deciding what to make in the first place.
- golergka 2y ago
  Good point, I should have phrased it differently.
pier25 2y ago
> the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay Yeah although what percentage of mobile users actually play on their phones regularly these days? It's anecdotal but I haven't played a mobile game in almost a decade now. I played a lot on my iPad 1 and 3. The app fever of 2010 has passed. Again anecdotal, but I avoid installing apps on my phone as much as I can. My wife still plays candy crush on her iPad almost every night but has zero interest in any other game.
- jamesgeck0 2y ago
  Anecdotally, when I was in Asia I saw people playing mobile games all over the place. Mobile is the biggest gaming platform by a large margin.

chasing 2y ago

The mobile gaming market is overwhelmed with cheap trash. It's what you see when you open a mobile game store. (I just opened the iOS App Store games section and, apart from Minecraft and Roblox -- which I'm not interested in -- everything on the main screen pretty much looks terrible.) It's a marked contrast to the major consoles and other game store platforms which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not just promoting stuff that will be profitable -- but of promoting stuff that's not trash so when you think of a Nintendo Switch you think of amazing Mario games; when you think of a Playstation you think of The Last of Us or Elden Ring or whatever. You know if you crack open Steam that you'll see interesting stuff. The difference may be the norms set on pricing. Console games are still $30-$70. People complained about the horrible race-to-the-bottom on mobile game pricing in the early days. And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. So the marketplace was overwhelmed by companies who could execute cheap, micro-transaction-addictive games the best. And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be. (With notable exceptions!)

fidotron 2y ago
> And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. There is a good reason for this. “Premium” mobile games never reliably made that much money, even during the early iOS boom. If you were a publisher it took having quite a few hits to compensate, and Android was more trouble than it was worth for a long time. A successful MTX game made several orders of magnitude more. (Instead of getting low millions you would be getting hundreds of millions). The process was perfectly satirized in South Park by the “Canadian Department of Mobile Gaming” which like all the best South Park jokes wasn’t nearly as fictional as might be assumed. Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. Team Fortress 2 is an example of Valve indulging in exactly this on Steam, so it is far from isolated to mobile.
- benoau 2y ago
  > Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. And finally, there's an initiative to outlaw many of the tactics that make it work so well! https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer-game-purchases https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer...

bsder 2y ago

> It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publishers. This is purely the fault of enshittifying the mobile gaming experience. I moved through various genres like Puzzle and Dragons, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. Each one of those games was a lot of fun because initially they left a path to play them with skill instead of money. Putting together a set of characters to beat the tough bosses in Puzzle and Dragons required a lot of skill to get the big combos you would need since you were underpowered. Clash of Clans was neat because you couldn't make a castle to protect against everything and someone with some skill could probably get an extra star off you with some work (I was really good at timing the placement of dragons against the algorithms to exploit seams and make higher leveled players cry). I had a Clash Royale deck based on Golems and Lightning that would win about 30% of the time even against players who had super powerful decks (I was casting things before stuff even hit the field in anticipation of what players would do and timing the delay from the system--sure it was high risk but also high reward). Alas, the siren call of the microtransaction is strong. People who spend money expect to win and complain when they don't. Those games eventually all nerfed any skill-only paths. And then they expanded to make massive purchasing the only real path toward higher levels. And that led me to stop playing mobile games altogether. There is no point. If a game is money or gacha, it's completely not interesting. If a game has a skill path, it will get nuked post haste as soon as the publisher figures out that it exists. The only winning move is not to play.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor. Seemed like such an obvious slam dunk (really just a matter of talking to like, 10-20 indie devs with games on mobile already like Stardew. Then the audience and other devs will follow), but I suppose Steam isn't exactly strap for cash to try. I suppose in all fairness it was well deserved of Epic. Valve had no interest and Epic's 7+ year war with Apple and Google is probably a part of why no other player has tried this method. Hopefully these changes open the door for other vendors to break that monopoly.

mrkramer 2y ago
>I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor. I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes better games(Counter-Strike, Dota 2, TF2, new MOBA game - Deadlock)), Epic only has Fortnite and Epic can't beat Valve at revenue, Valve overall makes more money than Epic.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media for IM, built in phone features for recording/straming playback. >Epic won't beat Steam at anything I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space. Even their steam client app is probably the worst part about Valve from a technical level. I'd be very shocked if Valve did anything with the mobile platform this decade.