I quite agree. The SNES was a part of my childhood. Some of my favorite games to this day were on that platform. Donkey Kong Country 2, Mega Man X 1-3, Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, to name a few.
Now that you mentioned this, I do recall in the early days of mobile games, back when the App Shops were first introduced, there were games that you would pay somewhere between $1 and $5, and you get the whole thing. No in-app purchases, no ads, and no lotteries for special characters or gear. I remember Square Enix had some really good JRPG games that were made specifically for the iPhone and iPad. Chaos Rings and DrakeRider were two games I recall playing, but they were much more expensive compared to the usual games I found. But, when you paid for it, you got the whole game and all.
I think mobile app developers have realized that they could get more engagement and cash from their users if they made games that had a gambling aspect to it. Kinda like the casinos in Vegas, the house always wins, but you keep putting in money on the hopes you get a jackpot.
That being said, there is one freemium game that I do find quite fun, and that is Romancing SaGa Re;univerSe. The thing that makes this freemium game a bit different is that Square Enix is quite generous in their in-game currency. You can actually do quite well without making any in-app purchases.
I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything
The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.
The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same
I’m feeling the same way about Minion Masters. I just play it on my Steam Deck, but it got an Android release recently. They gave away a few of their “DLC” packs (which is how I found it about it), so maybe my experience is a bit atypical, but I’ve just been playing for a week or so and I already have more than half the available cards and enough currency that I can craft any cards I really want to finish a deck.
I haven’t paid a cent. It’s so generous with its freemium model that I’m probably going to buy an in-game currency pack if I’m still playing once my Google Rewards wallet ticks high enough to buy one.
PS3 is my favorite too. I love that era of gaming. I emulated some I missed out on like Asura’s Wrath, Shadows of the Damned, and Lollipop Chainsaw and they really hold up well still with the art style chosen being more cartoon than realiatic for its time. And I’ve hopped in for short sessions in Red Dead Redemption.
I beg to differ. Angry Bird, cut the rope, where’s my water, Space RPG, FRUIT Ninja, and a whole lot more, are classic mobile games in the beginning. They’re sometimes simple, yes, but at least there’s efforts in it to try to be original.
That you didn’t like them doesn’t mean they sucked, look along this thread and you’ll find ppl sharing titles worthwhile back then (me included), ofc, this is not GOTY material, but a game must not be a masterpiece in order to be enjoyable, which ultimately is what all games are for, to be an enjoyable hobby.
If you're a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you're competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they're only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it's gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.
Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.
You get what you pay for. If you download a free game, then of course it’s going to be full of pay-to-win microtransactions. Although there are issues with greed in some larger games run by big companies, the reality is that game devs deserve to earn a living too, and that means at some point a game needs to be paid for.
There are still plenty of good quality mobile games out there, they just don’t tend to be free to download. Back when I had more free time, I actually got good usage out of the Play Pass on Android, which was £5 a month and gave me access to a catalogue of excellent mobile games with no microtransactions at all, the vast majority of which were single-player, offline games. Literally the only reason I’m not still subscribed is I just don’t have time to play mobile games at the moment - the chances of me subscribing again over the summer when I’m not at uni is high.
You also don’t get what you pay for when it comes to mobile. Had some games get delisted so it’s not even downloadable anymore and even though I kept it on my phone I can’t run it because it fails the license check. Mobile game isn’t worth spending money on.
Same problem that is crippling every human interaction on earth.
Money and greed.
It all goes to "we can do a good thing that will help people or that people will enjoy" or "we can make crap/do horrible things and get another 5 bucks off each of em", and the latter is always chosen.
Not gonna lie I’m still hitting clash of clans… Paid for maybe 5 months of gold pass but no longer been playing since I was in middle school. Took like 6 years off though
Not a hot take at all. It was revolutionary for the first year it was released and then was quickly surpassed on every front by any company that put slightly more effort (and more cost) into any part of the switch: graphics, sensors, controllers, expandability, etc. Pretty stock for any Nintendo product, because they only focus on hardware that be produced mass-market and get good profit margins on. Which means it’s often made with current-to-dated components that can get overlooked because it’s the only platform you can play Nintendo games on. Also, not sure why they are so allergic to ergonomics, all the way back to the NES controller, the least comfortable controller of its peers
Honestly beating that game at such a young age shows a lot of problem solving capability. However getting angry at games is a habit you want to nip in the butt asap.
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