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> Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth. I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their develope

by chasing 13y ago

> Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth. I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price. Mobile games can have great depth. Just like PC/console games can be extremely simple and trivial. (Depth doesn't come from complex mechanics or controls, btw. In fact, those things are often used to mask how shallow a game really is.)

phaus 13y ago
I agree that the ability to use complex control system isn't necessarily an indicator of depth, but it certainly opens up a lot of possibilities. There are entire genres that have always been and will always be terrible on touchscreen devices. Perhaps you are also right that most developers won't even try to make a real game, due to the difficulty in getting customers to pay for them. Now that its more profitable to milk small amounts of money out of non-gamers, I think the rest of us are going to eventually get stuck playing the kick starter lottery in order to see real games hit the market.
saraid216 13y ago
> > Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth. > I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price. Chicken, meet egg. :( This is why I hate the mobile space for gaming.
- mabhatter 13y ago
  to be fair, you have to make the game for the market. If the market will only bear $2 then you need to make a simpler game... not "play the horses" that you can beat them into spending more money. That's why the App Store and Mac market in general was full of much smaller game companies for so long. People were putting "more love than money" into games. But along come the big companies that want to sink half a million dollars and then complain that they won't get it back. that's not reasonable expectations... but they're too rich to be told that.
Sssnake 13y ago
Depth doesn't come from complex controls, but complex controls are almost always needed to be able to play a game with any depth.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  It's hard for me to gauge whether this is true or not. There are some amazing deep games like chess and bridge that have extremely simple controls. Do these counterexamples disprove the rule, or are they rare outliers?
  - jamiek88 13y ago
    Mario. Sonic. Doom. Complex controls?
    - ChrisClark 13y ago
      On a phone, yes, they can be harder to control.
    - orangecat 13y ago
      In this context, yes. Precision jumping and strafing-while-turning-while-firing are basically impossible with touchscreen controls; at least I've yet to see them done well.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      The missing element for all three of those (which are action games) is latency. With mobile touch-screen controls the game has to somehow register a button-press as soon as a button-press is made. But it must also never (to a first approximation) register a button-press when a button-press was not requested (e.g. an accidental brush of a finger against the screen). It's hard enough to do this anyways, but the "input device" does no favors for the game developer either. There's a reason that input devices on consoles and computers have evolved over the years into the shapes they have, they are meant to be easy to hold in a certain position (so that you always know where the buttons are) and perhaps more important, they have tactile features that allow your finger to quickly find and stay near the buttons. It's the reason that buttons and the D-pad are not fully-flush with the shell, even though that might have been more stylish. Imagine trying to play Super Mario World with a NES-shaped rectangular controller where there are no tactile buttons. This might have worked if you only needed Left, Right, Jump, but even that game required all of the following for the best gameplay: Left/Right, Up/Down (for pipes and to literally scroll the screen up), Jump, Run/Hold/Fireball, Spin Jump, Pause, Drop Stored Item and Shoulder Left/Right (to scroll the screen). And if the input wasn't right you'd either jump into a spike you had meant to run under or accidentally run off a cliff you'd meant to jump past. The controls on Mario seem complex only because they were so completely intuitive when you were actually playing them but I assure you they were far more difficult to implement than you think. It's not until you start playing platformer games with horrible controls that you can realize the great job done by the development teams at Sega (for Sonic) and Nintendo.

by chasing 13y ago

phaus 13y ago

I agree that the ability to use complex control system isn't necessarily an indicator of depth, but it certainly opens up a lot of possibilities. There are entire genres that have always been and will always be terrible on touchscreen devices. Perhaps you are also right that most developers won't even try to make a real game, due to the difficulty in getting customers to pay for them. Now that its more profitable to milk small amounts of money out of non-gamers, I think the rest of us are going to eventually get stuck playing the kick starter lottery in order to see real games hit the market.

saraid216 13y ago

> > Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth. > I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price. Chicken, meet egg. :( This is why I hate the mobile space for gaming.

mabhatter 13y ago
to be fair, you have to make the game for the market. If the market will only bear $2 then you need to make a simpler game... not "play the horses" that you can beat them into spending more money. That's why the App Store and Mac market in general was full of much smaller game companies for so long. People were putting "more love than money" into games. But along come the big companies that want to sink half a million dollars and then complain that they won't get it back. that's not reasonable expectations... but they're too rich to be told that.

Sssnake 13y ago

Depth doesn't come from complex controls, but complex controls are almost always needed to be able to play a game with any depth.

tedsanders 13y ago
It's hard for me to gauge whether this is true or not. There are some amazing deep games like chess and bridge that have extremely simple controls. Do these counterexamples disprove the rule, or are they rare outliers?
- jamiek88 13y ago
  Mario. Sonic. Doom. Complex controls?
  - ChrisClark 13y ago
    On a phone, yes, they can be harder to control.
  - orangecat 13y ago
    In this context, yes. Precision jumping and strafing-while-turning-while-firing are basically impossible with touchscreen controls; at least I've yet to see them done well.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    The missing element for all three of those (which are action games) is latency. With mobile touch-screen controls the game has to somehow register a button-press as soon as a button-press is made. But it must also never (to a first approximation) register a button-press when a button-press was not requested (e.g. an accidental brush of a finger against the screen). It's hard enough to do this anyways, but the "input device" does no favors for the game developer either. There's a reason that input devices on consoles and computers have evolved over the years into the shapes they have, they are meant to be easy to hold in a certain position (so that you always know where the buttons are) and perhaps more important, they have tactile features that allow your finger to quickly find and stay near the buttons. It's the reason that buttons and the D-pad are not fully-flush with the shell, even though that might have been more stylish. Imagine trying to play Super Mario World with a NES-shaped rectangular controller where there are no tactile buttons. This might have worked if you only needed Left, Right, Jump, but even that game required all of the following for the best gameplay: Left/Right, Up/Down (for pipes and to literally scroll the screen up), Jump, Run/Hold/Fireball, Spin Jump, Pause, Drop Stored Item and Shoulder Left/Right (to scroll the screen). And if the input wasn't right you'd either jump into a spike you had meant to run under or accidentally run off a cliff you'd meant to jump past. The controls on Mario seem complex only because they were so completely intuitive when you were actually playing them but I assure you they were far more difficult to implement than you think. It's not until you start playing platformer games with horrible controls that you can realize the great job done by the development teams at Sega (for Sonic) and Nintendo.