I don’t think we need an article to figure out the answer: Slay the Spire was a megahit and it’s a copycat industry.
I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way either; there’re always plenty of devs finding interesting new angles on the current hot genre and creating genuinely interesting new games in the process, but also a huge number of devs that end up just chasing the trend and releasing something uninspired/derivative.
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
If these deals didn’t exist, lots of games simply wouldn’t get made. You can hate on the platforms all you like but the deals are one of the only sources of funding for small & solo developers.
The stores have a serious problem with discovery which makes it unreasonably difficult to find the good original games in the sea of shovelware, but the good stuff IS out there.
People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise. Almost no one pays for premium mobile games, and that’s why no one bothers making them.
People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.
If you don’t finish Y6 (or at least watch the cutscenes on YouTube or read a story summary) then the setup for MWEHN won’t make sense. Judgment and Ishin are standalone spin-offs so they can be played at any point.
Achievement % stats are so comically skewed by various factors that they mean basically nothing. There’s an achievement in Minecraft for literally just opening your inventory for the first time but only 60% of Xbox players have it.
Or neither. Platform cert doesn’t directly correlate to how many bugs a game has, it’s a set of very specific test cases that software has to pass to be approved for release: show the correct button prompts for the platform, have correctly-implemented achievements/trophies, show correct error messages, etc.
Some of the tests do include things like ‘don’t crash during normal operation’, but the failures could be almost anything. (Source: am a developer)