When I was in high school, before smartphones, I would sit on the left side of the classroom, put my flip phone in my left hand next to my thigh, and play Tetris one handed. I’d have my pencil in my right hand to make it look like I was taking notes and would pause periodically to look up and look like I was paying attention. It got me through the vast majority of classes haha.
I had a game watch around 5th grade. It was LCD and had a tiny little joystick at the bottom of the screen. It would play imitations of games like Pac Man and Space Invaders. Apparently I wasn’t ghosty enough because it got confiscated pretty quickly.
A little while back, Netflix started putting out some games through its app. No further microtransactions, just a game (I think). It gets some good-hearted efforts like Valiant Hearts: Coming Home and Oxenfree. I feel like the best thing for genuine mobile games could be some kind of App Store that curates just to things like that, and disconnects from the past of cheap crap.
Imagine a popular subscription service like Game Pass tying into well-built story-based games, for instance. I think it could work out well.
I’ve wrestled with Mobile games for years. As a player, I love the idea of playing games on my phone. But most phones games outside of flash like games (Angry Birds) weren’t fun.
So I tried to make them myself.
After 5 years of trial and error my conclusion was thus. Phones are a bad platform for games. Not because they aren’t capable, they are extremely capable. But because they have no proper inputs.
Games are built for the common input method. PC games have a keyboard and mouse mode. Console games are built with a controller. And mobile games need to use touch.
The problem with touch, is that it’s a bad input method for all games. Very good for simple visual games, but for the rest, you are touching a textureless, featureless, tiny surface, with no tactile feedback. This means that anything more complicated than angry birds or bejeweled will be difficult to play if it doesn’t play itself.
It’s possible to make games for phones. But due to the design constraints, the game needs to be simple, or not time dependent. Strategy games, puzzle games, board games will work, but action games, or shooters are doomed to be worse than their competitors on non-mobile platforms.
I didn’t have a console or PC growing up, so the only games I played were flash games on school computers. When I got a smart phone I mostly switched to mobile games. So I like mobile games. Not all of them, there’s a lot of garbage out there. But there’s some good ones. It’s a great platform for indie games and I love it when a game actually takes advantage of the touchscreen as an input, rather than simply trying to emulate a controller. I especially love the multiplayer games. It was so awesome in highschool whenever we had a break, we’d just look at each and break out whatever the hottest game was locally and play a round.
I have a Steam deck now and I’m more busy, so don’t play mobile games as often as I used to, but there’s a few that still play pretty often: Pubg mobile, Bombsquad, True surf, Shredsauce. Pubg mobile in particular I don’t think gets enough credit for how well they pulled off mobile controls. Insanely customizable, and with gyro turned on, I would rather play an fps on a phone then with a gamepad anyday. Even with the steam deck, the extra weight makes quick, precise movements with the gyro more clumsy than on my phone.
I really respect mobile gaming. There are a lot of good and entertaining games.
They are really accessible to most of the population even in third world countries, and the communities are generally really nice. I’ve found them to be nicer than PC gaming communities at least.
It’s really really incredible how good people can get at certain games and I like how a lot of their communities are run on mobile. A lot of the mobile gaming youtubers even edit their videos on mobile.
Games like COD Mobile and all of the SuperCell games are examples with great communities and games that don’t have any ads. Sure they still be toxic, but it doesn’t compare to communities like Overwatch.
There are also a lot of beautiful games out there. Mobile gaming is a now niche gaming space where the game has to actually be fun or else it won’t grow all that much.
They can’t just buy their way into being popular through the name of the IP or through beautiful graphics. The mentality of Art Style over Graphic Fidelity is still alive on mobile. Look at games like Monument Valley, Kensho, Pirate Outlaws, Rusty Lake, Pocket City, Mini Metro, etc. and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s also a great platform for indie games with low spec requirements.
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