Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.

Most mobile game developers just want to attract whales. People who spend thousands of dollars in their app. They don’t care about everyone else because they don’t make any money off anyone else.

For some games, 20% of players spend $1800 or more a year. One of those people spent $90k.

So if your game sucks for everyone else, it’s not a big loss.

Mobile games are the equivalent of those “100 great games pack”-type CDROMS you’d find in the electronics section of stores in the late 90s/early 2000s. Not many invest serious money and time into gaming on a tablet or phone like they do on a console or PC, because games on phones and tablets are more like an afterthought. Something to do in between group chats and work emails.

Shoutout to Slay the Spire, Balatro, and Slice & Dice. They all cost a bit (around 10€) but are excellent ports of the originals and among the best mobile games. Slice & Dice even started out as a mobile game and was ported to PC later.

I feel like the best time for mobile games was back around 2009/2010 when touchscreen just became good and most stuff was either free or paid and without intrusive ads and monetization or other predatory bullcrap.

I recently tried Angry Birds 2, and I was baffled it would only take a few levels before I had to buy my way to more “ammunition” to keep playing. The original used to be good, I even wouldn’t have minded if there was like an ad between games, or if it was just buy-to-play, but even that isn’t an alternative option anymore. And they also pulled the original from the stores, I thought they had re-released it before, but couldn’t find it either. And also when I first opened the game there was so much shit on screen that it was even difficult to navigate to just even find the actual game, it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.

There used to be thousands of good developers making respectable games. Most of them failed financially, and many of the survivors sold out later anyway.

A couple of major factors:

Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.

Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).

Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.

I use MiniReview (https://minireview.io/) to have better sorting options for games on Google’s Play Store, you can specifically sort for screen orientation, monetisation (or lack of), genre, ads or not, etc

Mobile very quickly turned into a race-to-the-bottom. When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out. So in order to get players in the door, you gotta make it f2p. And in order to maximize profits for a f2p game, you gotta employ all the worst dark patterns, because that’s what all your competitors are doing too.

And this has led to a feedback loop of consumer expectations. People understand that this is just what mobile is now, so people who want anything else have given up on mobile and are instead buying games on other platforms. Releasing a premium title on mobile is basically just trying to sell to the wrong audience.

There are good mobile games, but you typically have to pay for them.

Making a good game is hard. Making brainrot garbarge is easy, and people play it just as much. So what is the point? I knew a guy who was cheap as fuck. I didn’t know his girlfriend as well, but people said she was pretty much the same. Once i remember he made fun off someone spending like 60 dollars on a video game and he said he’s not a “gamer”. A few month later we talked about some video games that we liked and i didn’t really include him in that conversation because of what he said before.

He chimed in and said that he’s been playing clash of clans since release. Now i hardly even know what coc is, except mobile pay to win garbage (imo) so without even thinking, i asked if that game is even playable without spending money. He said oh no, he spends around 500 buchs a month. We were all shocked a bit, and he realised how ridiculous that is and immediately threw his girlfriend under the bus saying that she spends at least 1k a month for candy crush.

They’re trash because they’re free.
Traditional games need to be good, so people buy them.
You don’t need to buy mobile games. But developers need to eat. So the money needs to be extracted from the people while they play.
So you need to implement microtransactions and design the entire game around making them necessary for success.
But most people stop playing a game at some point when they’ve beaten it, or are getting bored ot it.
So you need to make your game addictive instead.

The same principle applies to so many things (for example news).
If you don’t pay for it up front, the entire thing will be designed around extracting money from you during use.
Which means it needs to be designed to draw you in and keep you addicted. Delivering quality content is literally worthless.

capitalism and greed

If you own an iPhone just get Apple Arcade through Apple One, it’s really worth it if you game on your phone. No predatory monetisation, regular self-contained games, plenty of high quality titles.

Mobile games are designed like junk-food: take it out, eat some junk, then put it away to go do something else, throw away the bag or seal it for a quick snack later. Normal games are designed like a full meal: sit down somewhere with good atmosphere, nutritious, good conversation, get full and go home with plenty of leftovers and good memories