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.
I played a new gacha game 2 nights ago that was so overloaded with crap to do I found myself not even playing the game but just clicking the stupid rewards buttons for everything i “accomplished” and I hated it. I continued to play for another 4 hours… thankfully, once I closed the game, I removed it. I also didn’t pay a dime outside my wasted time.
Idk. I got extraordinarily drunk in Vegas, put a twenty in a dollar slot machine, thought I would get 20 pulls, pulled once, lost all my money, them never touched a slot machine again.
I think it’s just because it was the dominant monetization scheme when they were introduced, people got used to spending nothing up front on their mobile games. Then there are other barriers. Like why would I pay $15 for Stardew Valley when it probably won’t work with a controller or output comfortably to a TV. You can do some of that stuff sometimes in mobile, but there’s no enforcement of it, so that means you’re getting a lesser version of the game, which drives the price down. I wanted to revisit Planescape: Torment on mobile, but they ported it to Android too long ago, and now it just doesn’t work with modern Android OSes. They’re really teaching me to not treat mobile as a place where people like me should expect to find stuff to play.
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.
When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.
If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.
I think that there’s more to it than that.
My own guesses are:
I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.
Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.
This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]
They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.
So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.
Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.
Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.
I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.
Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.
Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.
I assume its not possible, otherwise anyone would have done that already. From what I read through online research, it looks like Xbox Cloud is using an API for Cloud streaming by Google. And only Chromium based browser have this implemented and Firefox does not support it. If this is correct, then there is nothing you can do about it. People try to make Xbox Cloud work with Firefox for a long time now, without success.
Not this streaming is not just showing video files like YouTube. Game streaming involves gamepad (or other input) in realtime to coordinate with the server. Therefore the browser has to support these functionalities.
(But seriously, what are you asking here? Is it for the same audience? Is it similar enough that if you like one you’ll like the other? Are the gameplay mechanics similar? Your question is not specific enough.)
Depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a game exactly like BotW than no, Elden Ring is harder and has a lot more complex mechanics.
If you’re asking because you can only play one then Elden Ring is better and it’s not even close. With that said it is not meant for casual play, if you don’t like losing do not play it. Dying is a core mechanic of the game.
Idk if I’d call it a replacement per se but elden ring is an excellent large open world game with some really good variety of weapons / spells to play with. It also rewards exploration really well with secret loot and even entire secret areas
That’s a wild recommendation.
I never bothered to get past the first real mission, so I don’t know how true it is. It’s a goddamn slog playing the game.
Director’s Cut eases some of that, but it’s definitely a game that could use better guidance. The first map is a slog, but if you charge through it (past the point where you take a barge to a new map) things open up pretty quickly with vehicles, new obstacles, and other tools to keep things more interesting.
The worst part is that the game doesn’t really direct you towards unlocking the tools and upgrades that make things better. A lot is unlocked through the main plot path, but there’s more that’s just not signposted at all. Is grinding out the full 5 star approval of this guy going to unlock a level 3 exoskeleton, or is it just unlocking a new decorative patch for my backpack? How am I supposed to naturally find out what places give you the best boots in the game as delivery rewards?
It’s a game where you just kind of have to accept the slog as part of the narrative. You’re one singular delivery man tasked with reconnecting the remaining people and settlements in a ruined america. It’s going to be tough. Moments of power fantasy will be few and far between. As you reconnect more, you gain the ability to build infrastructure (and use infrastructure built by others through the network you’re making) to make things easier.
Like, if you can find enjoyment in the slow moments, then you earn the more enjoyable stuff over time. Definitely not for everyone. I like it, but I play on and off in bursts. Think I have like 100 hours over four years. Biggest advice is to speed through the first map, just do the main quests. On the second map you can start taking your time if you want to.
Everything you’ve described is so far past where my point of giving up is, none of that matters. “Charging through it” is watching 3 hours of cutscenes and only God knows how little gameplay.
I’m not gonna downvote Death Stranding, but it’s not much like Zelda BOTW at all. DS is the best “strand type” video game around. Breath of the Wild is an awesome Zelda RPG-lite with a vast open world and tons of stuff to do. Elden Ring is the best RPG like and Souls-like game of all time to present day.
For me at least, BotW was more about the movement and traversal problem solving than anything else. Of course it has action elements and it’s super different to DS in many ways, but the pathfinding part tickles the same part of my brain in both games, idk.
I think Elden Ring is way different because it’s an action game, where the fights take center stage, and not so much the movement mechanics (although the exploration is great in its own way).
Not likely. Game Pass and other similar services stopped offering many deals like they used to for indie studios. I started using it again recently but it feels like so many games have been taken off, likely due to Game Pass not performing as well as they expected it to
An excellent philosophical question, that we all ask ourselves at some point - why do we play?
I’ll answer your question with one of my own: what is productive labour for after all? To allow for more productive labour?
I could cite some evolutionary hypotheses about how we came to enjoy play and beauty for their own sake, but that doesn’t tell you what we ought to value.
For my own part I think thoughtfully maximising life’s pleasures is a good goal (though I would rank diminishing pain as higher priority).
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