Why I don't play mobile games on my smartphone

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games. Some of it is time, I have less of it and a family who wants it, but some of it is the lack of recommendations.<p>There is a sea of terrible games, and that’s especially true on mobile, and in my experience it’s impossible to find the ones I like.<p>When I was younger, my friend group had time to try a lot of games to find the good ones. Once you found a good one, you’d recommend it to other people, and they would do the same to you.<p>That’s how I found the original Fallout. I played all the demos that came with a PC magazine of the time, and one of those demos was Fallout. I found x-com ufo enemy unknown because my cousin played it at my grandparents house. Dune 2 because it was installed in my youth club. Diablo because it was the hottest game at a Net-cafe.<p>With age I’ve lost that recommendation zone. I don’t have time to try games and neither do my friends, so we don’t. Once in a while something will blow up so large that you can’t avoid hearing about it. But finding the gems? How do you even do that? I mean, I guess you could turn to gaming-“journalism”, but that is mainly just advertising.

I have bought some games on my iPhone and some are good, but most aren&#x27;t. They usually are at the level of a nice proof of concept, but lack depth and have very little replay value.<p>The games that I avoid like the plague are the in-app purchase games, especially the ones that are just about buying in-game currency. These games are never good.<p>The sad thing is that the mobile platform should, in theory, be ideal for strategic games and builder games like Anno, Settlers, etc. All implementations of this genre however rely on, after a few hours of playing, increasing build-times of buildings to multiple hours, or days, but allowing you to finish the building instantly with in-game currency. Which is, of course, a crap gaming experience and I am sure the creators know this. It does seem to be a good way to make lots of money, seeing as all games do this now.

I went through a phase of playing pay-to-win games to see how far I could get without paying but really they&#x27;re not games at all. They&#x27;re psychological habit forming devices designed simply to get you to play every day to farm your wheat or bomb your neighbour or whatever. I haven&#x27;t played one in years and don&#x27;t expect to play one ever again. They are a scourge.<p>So I&#x27;m an avid boardgamer (as in Euro games aka boardgamegeek.com) and, for me, the phone and tablet have been an absolute boon as some of those have high quality ports. You&#x27;ll typically pay $5-10 for them but it&#x27;s totally worth it if this is your thing. Honestly I want more of this so I&#x27;ll basically buy any quality implementation of a board game just to encourage more of this.<p>Here are some of the better ones:<p>- Through the Ages (totally playable on a phone)<p>- Agricola (this one probably needs a tablet)<p>- Race for the Galaxy<p>These are of course the usual suspects there too like Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, etc for games on the lighter end.<p>The only IAPs with these are expansions, which I&#x27;m totally fine with.<p>Non-PTW games seem to be largely dead, which is sad. Think Waking Mars. But the market has spoken as there&#x27;s way more money in PTW. But I actually really enjoyed playing the earlier Asphalt games (like 6&#x2F;7 whereas later they went free and heavily upsell you on buying in-game stuff). I&#x27;ve put more hours than I&#x27;d care to admit into Bejeweled HD (the Diamond Mine variant). Years ago I also played a lot of Angry Birds but even those went heavily PTW.<p>I&#x27;ll close by saying this to game developers out there: games can be free that are PTW, have ads or both or they can be non-free with no ads and no IAPs other than purchasing more content. Nothing annoys me more than a game that tries to charge to buy and then you find out it&#x27;s actually PTW or (worse) it started off non-PTW but then they bolt on PTW or ads or they just nag you to death.

&gt; On the smartphone, people don&#x27;t know it any differently and maybe it&#x27;s because of the mentality of the Android users, because as far as I could read from other experiences it&#x27;s different on Apple products. Even there good games cost money and you get a regular product.<p>The situation is pretty much the same on the App Store for most games. There&#x27;s a few high-quality games with an upfront price, but the majority are free-to-play with ads or in app purchases.

<i>&gt;What a game developer would never try with a PC player would be to display an ad for another game.</i><p>It used to be a common tactic with older PC games when the shareware model was popular. Games by id, Sierra, Sirtech to name a few. Also most installers had ads before Steam emerged and made the installing step less visible. GOG still does this in their installers.

I suspect the author doesn’t read his own website on mobile either...

Maybe I’m extreme in my view. But I look at most companies that produce games skewed towards IAP&#x2F;DLC&#x2F;P2W as ethically corrupt.<p>They’re just wasting the talent of game creators to produce these games to pad the revenue of these businesses with no regard for the well-being of players (I’m not one to harp on the whole “only drug dealers call their customers users” thing, but it’s very apt here).<p>I’m hoping sooner-rather-than-later that the ratio of good vs. evil games is skewed towards the former. Unfortunately by that time a lot of execs will have already ran away with the money while leaving a pile of burnt-out developers and players.

I’ve played tens of thousands of games at various stages of development. The only mobile game I consistently play and still enjoy is The Battle of Polytopia (aka Super Tribes). That’s about it.

I remember buying an iPad 1 and then buying a couple games. Back then you paid upfront and they were enjoyable.<p>Then everything became a free to play borefest so now I have almost no games on my mobile devices.<p>What&#x27;s worse, I don&#x27;t even try to discover mobile games worth playing any more. There probably are a few, especially on iOS, but the time needed to wade through the piles of free to play manure to find the occasional game where you pay upfront makes it simply not worth it.

As others have mentioned, as I grow older I play less games. However, I recently purchased an adventure games bundle [0] for the iPad and I&#x27;ve been playing for a couple of hours every night for the past few weeks. There&#x27;s no IAP or ads in those games, just good old one time payment for content thing. I have nothing against playing mobile games, unless it&#x27;s the cancerous ads plus ridiculous IAP business model.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app-bundle&#x2F;dark-futures-bundle&#x2F;id1353419188" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app-bundle&#x2F;dark-futures-bundle&#x2F;i...</a>

I&#x27;m an avid gamer on PC and console (both retro and modern), but not mobile. Mobile games aren&#x27;t games, they&#x27;re thiny veiled clones of addicting progress bars designed to annoy you into buying in app purchases.

I tend to avoid mobile games for all these reasons in the article and some in the comments. I am explicitly a Nintendo fanboy, unapologetically, because their raison d&#x27;être seems to be making fun, positive, memorable experiences wrapped up in games — not just idle distractions (or at least not primarily).<p>This is something I find hard to communicate to people who would rather more games at a cheaper price (Steam, PSN sales) rather than a few games at a higher price (Nintendo, basically).<p>Not that there aren&#x27;t gems on Steam and the App Store&#x2F;Play Store, but hardly enough to call me a fanboy of any such platform.

The cost of mobile gaming has driven me away, which is sad since it would be nice to sit back and relax rather than being stuck in front of a computer.<p>As the article discusses, there are these pay to win models dominating Android. I recently looked into a Switch where many appealing titles cost CAD$80 and the number of interesting titles below CAD$40 (where I usually draw the line) doesn&#x27;t justify the cost of the console. I do not think of myself as particularly cheap either, and have spent money on DLC that expand game play.<p>The article also mentions grinding an incentive to pay to win. While this is undoubtedly true, I also suspect that this reflects a general shift in gaming in general. The shift towards open world games and games that offer a creative element, as well as a shift away from reflexes and puzzle solving as being the source of challenge, has made resource gathering an important element to games. Alas, resource gathering is a lot like leveling up in an RPG: it can be tremendous fun in the beginning, yet it transforms into a slog as the game becomes more challenging. I can understand why mobile gamers are willing to pay real cash to get around grinding, even though the cynic in me refuses to understand why they don&#x27;t see it as manipulative.

Can anyone recommend a good mobile strategy game that doesn&#x27;t rely on in-app purchases?

In addition of what the author said, the ergonomics of playing console or computer desktop games on a smartphone are usually bad. I&#x27;ll get my Bluetooth controller and then complain that the screen size is too small. Then I&#x27;ll project the display to my TV somehow and...I might as well be playing on a console.<p>As for the majority smartphone games, I haven&#x27;t many that don&#x27;t have sketchy F2P&#x2F;P2W mechanics. I will quite often try games but then end up deleting them the minute I see them start to introduce timers and other pay-inducing mechanics.<p>The closest I got to keeping a native smartphone game was Another Eden but I eventually encounters got tough enough where I needed to start paying to get through some encounters or else face a nasty grind.

That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m getting started on game development with mobiles games. It might seem to be an overrun market but the amount of actual games is small and the amount of actual good games is even smaller. I don&#x27;t know who all these people are that play &quot;pay to upgrade building to level 4&quot; games but there are a lot of people looking for just fun games instead of horrible p2w games.<p>There are also some good games which use virtual d-pads etc. which i find horrible. There are enough gameplay mechanics yet to be discovered for touch screens.

The fact that Blizzard is rereleasing Classic Wow this Summer should be a strong indicator of where modern games stand, even if it&#x27;s in the MMORPG genre.

I&#x27;ve been searching for a decent 4X game on mobile that can be played in portrait mode. Just can&#x27;t find one. I feel like on mobile, going landscape is a failure of the interface. It&#x27;s tricky though, as I&#x27;m comparing it to more desktop oriented 4X games like Stellaris (which I&#x27;ve been playing recently) and Master of Orion (II III and the more recent remaster)

One of the major problems with the app store model is that we’re entirely dependent on gatekeepers to do anything. It’s bad enough that the stores themselves are roadblocks when it comes to making improvements (like better search to weed out the crap). It’s insane when you consider that the gatekeepers make lots of money when apps do questionable things.

I emulate old console games on my phone quite often. Games actually designed for the phone are mostly a hot pile of shit, which is a shame because there are gems out there like The Room series but it&#x27;s not worth wading through the garbage to find them.

There are only two games on my phone, Word with Friends and a port of the first cd-rom game I ever played: The Seventh Guest.<p>Most phone games I’ve tried are no more fun than a slot machine or for paid games they don’t have a demo or the demo wasn’t fun.

I won&#x27;t play your mobile game, because a 4-6 inch touch screen is a terrible input device. About the only thing I have found even close to tolerable are turn-based JRPGs, and it&#x27;s still terrible to not have a real d-pad and buttons.

Personal recommendation: Stardew Valley<p>Paid app, no microtransactions or ads.<p>Similar to the original Harvest Moon games.

What&#x27;s with the text in those screen shots? Yikes! I&#x27;d pay just to have a nice anti-aliased font!<p>Reminds me of the 3x5 font from Mike Koss&#x27;s &quot;The Terminal&quot; emulator on the Apple ][ from 1981.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120206091422&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mckoss.com&#x2F;jscript&#x2F;tinyalice.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120206091422&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mckoss.com...</a>

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