
Why I don't play mobile games on my smartphone - void_nill
https://voidnill.gitlab.io/cosmic_voidspace/mobile_gaming.html
======
jaabe
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
gaems
The last game I "played" was _2048_ , which is a pretty dry game when you get
down to it.

Actually, _Universal Paperclips_ is the most recent "game" I've tried,
although in some respects I wouldn't call it a game as much as, perhaps, a
technology demonstration.

The last true "video game" I played, ever, in the clasic sense of the word,
would be _GTA: Vice City_. That's the last time I had a console, bought a
title, and immersed myself in the game play, to beat the game, as intended by
the producers of the game. I also revisited it, when they re-released it as a
mobile app, and played it on a tablet.

After that experience, the deep dive of investing maybe 80 hours of zombie-
like effort into beating a richly developed video game, while being mildly
entertained by the story arc of the game, I washed my hands of video games. It
had eaten up about a month of my life, and had amounted to pretty much nothing
in return. I gained a new variant of button mashing skills, while vegetating
at home on the couch.

Mobile or not, games are time wasters, for when you have time to spare. As
I've gotten older, I resist getting sucked into media that tries to engulf me
and swallow up weeks of time, to unravel a yarn of riddles attached to a
gaming environment. (or whatever)

I've seen all the newer games, and they're interesting for sure, but to sit
inside and play a video game like it's a job feels like erasing whole sections
of your life, when you come up for air. You ask yourself: What the fuck am I
doing with my life?

I don't really care about all of the new, emerging technology and
advancements. It's kind of a sad joke at this point. Graphics cards, consoles,
downloadable content, live streaming speed runs, e-sports celebrities and
fame? I just... I just don't care anymore.

~~~
avgDev
I enjoy gaming though. Some people play sports, some people watch shows, some
people build stuff and others read books, because it makes them happy.

If something makes you happy, you should do it. It is not a waste of time if
you enjoy it. Also, I find listening to people a waste of time. Work is a
waste of time. To be honest everything in a sense is a waste of time.

------
mosselman
I have bought some games on my iPhone and some are good, but most aren't. They
usually are at the level of a nice proof of concept, but lack depth and have
very little replay value.

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.

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.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
> 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.

The version of Settlers I played on the iPad a few years ago is absolutely
nothing like that. It was almost a straight port, and the touch screen
actually made for a great experience.

~~~
k__
Interesting, I'd expected games like Settlers to be bad to play on a tablet
because RTS with your hand constantly in the way of the screen would seem bad
for me.

X4 games, on the other hand, are pre-destined for tablet.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
There’s an element of that, of course - and, bear in mind, I _am_ talking
about several years ago - but I found the easy scrolling and pinch-to-zoom
counteracted any problems caused by obstruction.

------
cletus
I went through a phase of playing pay-to-win games to see how far I could get
without paying but really they're not games at all. They'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't played one in years
and don't expect to play one ever again. They are a scourge.

So I'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'll typically pay $5-10 for them but it's totally worth it
if this is your thing. Honestly I want more of this so I'll basically buy any
quality implementation of a board game just to encourage more of this.

Here are some of the better ones:

\- Through the Ages (totally playable on a phone)

\- Agricola (this one probably needs a tablet)

\- Race for the Galaxy

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.

The only IAPs with these are expansions, which I'm totally fine with.

Non-PTW games seem to be largely dead, which is sad. Think Waking Mars. But
the market has spoken as there's way more money in PTW. But I actually really
enjoyed playing the earlier Asphalt games (like 6/7 whereas later they went
free and heavily upsell you on buying in-game stuff). I've put more hours than
I'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.

I'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'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.

~~~
dunnevens
> Non-PTW games seem to be largely dead

Strongly disagree. The microtransaction games are flooding the market, but
there's still a substantial number of quality games which have a purchase once
model. More have been released this year alone than I'll ever have time for.

pockettactics.com is a good place to start for seeing what quality games are
out there and what the new releases are.

------
saagarjha
> On the smartphone, people don't know it any differently and maybe it's
> because of the mentality of the Android users, because as far as I could
> read from other experiences it's different on Apple products. Even there
> good games cost money and you get a regular product.

The situation is pretty much the same on the App Store for most games. There's
a few high-quality games with an upfront price, but the majority are free-to-
play with ads or in app purchases.

~~~
jarcane
Indeed. There’s a few proper games that trickle out now and then, and the App
Store editors do try to highlight them, but they’re still few and far between
and buried under crap. And now days even paid games aren’t immune to gambling
and pay to win scams either.

It is sort of surreal how little the needle has moved since the F2P boom. I
bought the first gen iPad, and back then there was a ton of excitement about
gaming possibilities on the platform, and some good stuff came out.

I left with the 2nd gen and hadn’t touched one since but a couple years ago I
got a new current gen iPad on sale, and was surprised to find that basically,
a lot of the best games were still just the same ones that were out back then
for the iPad 2. And then the switch to 64-bit happened and we lost a ton of
those older games entirely that never got updated.

It’s really depressing. I don’t really even try to find mobile games anymore
either.

~~~
arkades
> and the App Store editors do try to highlight them,

That’s funny, because I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the App
Store.

The one function I’ve been waiting for, both directly as a customer and as a
parental control, is to be able to have the app store search filter out
results with in-app purchases.

Right now there is no way to effectively -find- real premium games, let alone
purchase them. Of course they’re going to die under the flood of freemium
garbage.

~~~
beatgammit
They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out.
People seem to pay more with in-app purchases than up front purchases, so it
makes little sense for them to offer such a feature.

And in-app purchases can be done well (e.g. pay to remove ads functions
basically like a free trial for me), but they've become predatory since
they've started influencing game design.

~~~
arkades
> They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out.

Oh, I agree - which is why I don’t buy the idea that the App Store editors try
to highlight “premium” games. Making them easily discoverable would be trivial
- but cuts against their profit motive.

------
orbital-decay
_> What a game developer would never try with a PC player would be to display
an ad for another game._

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.

~~~
Kuraj
I've seen that happen lately, for example in the main menu. But it's an
effective ad that I don't mind at all, if it's just another game from the same
developer/publisher.

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

~~~
mosselman
Most browsers have 'reader view' or something like it. I use it on most
websites, even ones that have put some effort into being mobile-friendly.

~~~
beatgammit
I use HN through an app, and articles use the embedded browser, which strips
the chrome so reader mode isn't available. I can open the link in my regular
browser (Firefox), and from that I can use reader mode, but that's a couple of
extra steps.

I'm, if you're writing an article about mobile games, the website should be
usable on mobile without reader mode. That shouldn't even require saying...

------
eswat
Maybe I’m extreme in my view. But I look at most companies that produce games
skewed towards IAP/DLC/P2W as ethically corrupt.

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).

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.

~~~
ianai
I wish I had the resources to do this. Nintendo should make a smartphone
Switch - with the smartphone price, hardware, and their games. (There’d be
some serious technical hurdles for them to be comfortable with it.) They’re
the perfect actor to revamp mobile gaming. They’ve got history making popular
handheld gaming systems and IP millions love.

~~~
robrtsql
I wish Nintendo treated mobile like a first-class platform. Unfortunately, I
only know of one good game that they made (Super Mario Run), and they've
allowed their other IPs to be poisoned by pay-to-win garbage (Animal Crossing:
Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem, Pokemon Go).

~~~
zapzupnz
I mean, I know why Nintendo doesn't treat mobile as a first-class platform: it
isn't their hardware.

More than that, though, I think Nintendo doesn't like to make sacrifices to
realise their ideas, both in terms of having to support multiple hardware
profiles (as opposed to three for the 3DS line [normal, large, no 2D] or the
single supported home console), multiple operating systems, loss of control in
terms of what content is considered appropriate, loss of control over
distribution, etc.

The sacrifices you have to make on mobile is subscribe to the pay-to-win
model, garbage though it is, because people just won't pay a reasonable amount
for a good game — Nintendo knows this all too well because of how poorly Super
Mario Run did after the first month, and how few players actually paid for the
game relative to the download base.

Mobile is between a rock and a hard place for Nintendo whose innovation is
somewhat contingent on a level of control of which most mobile developers
could only dream.

~~~
ianai
Do you have references on their Super MARIO run revenue? It was definitely my
favorite game of theirs in a while. Still play it because it’s so simple.

~~~
zapzupnz
Here's an article on it: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/31/16580976/super-
mario-run...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/31/16580976/super-mario-run-
nintendo-downloads-profit)

I love it, too, and I think it's well worth the money. But I'm sure Nintendo
became aware all too quickly that their traditional fan base is happy to pay
any amount for Mario; most mobile users, particularly children, are either
unwilling or unable.

------
slowhadoken
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.

~~~
beatgammit
Yeah, I really enjoyed that game, and I really wish the 4x genre was more
represented on mobile.

I think Polytopia's profit model was completely reasonable and it feels very
similar to DLC. I like that it's completely optional, but still expands the
player experience. I don't play it anymore because there wasn't all that much
depth to it, but I feel it was really well designed and recommend it to
everyone.

~~~
slowhadoken
I enjoy the lack of depth. The medium of mobile is designed for casual play.
You can pickup and drop a turn based game too. The profit model is smart like
most Norwegian and Swedish projects. No ads makes the game inviting. You play
it because it’s fun. DLC is optional. There’s a kind of dignity to it.

------
nottorp
I remember buying an iPad 1 and then buying a couple games. Back then you paid
upfront and they were enjoyable.

Then everything became a free to play borefest so now I have almost no games
on my mobile devices.

What's worse, I don'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.

~~~
simonh
It’s a real shame. There are some great pay-once games out there. XCOM,
Monument Valley, Crashlands, Ittle Dew, but then you get some like Kingdom
Rush that concert to P2W and get ruined. There’s no way to revert to an
earlier better version either. So frustrating.

~~~
nottorp
I remember when EA bought PopCap and converted my Bejeweled to free to play...
support did give me some kind of code to convert my version back to the paid
one but it only worked on one device. RIP PopCap.

------
p2detar
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've been
playing for a couple of hours every night for the past few weeks. There'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's the cancerous ads plus
ridiculous IAP business model.

[0] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app-bundle/dark-futures-
bundle/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app-bundle/dark-futures-
bundle/id1353419188)

------
ducttape12
I'm an avid gamer on PC and console (both retro and modern), but not mobile.
Mobile games aren't games, they're thiny veiled clones of addicting progress
bars designed to annoy you into buying in app purchases.

------
zapzupnz
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'être seems to be making fun, positive, memorable experiences
wrapped up in games — not just idle distractions (or at least not primarily).

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).

Not that there aren't gems on Steam and the App Store/Play Store, but hardly
enough to call me a fanboy of any such platform.

------
II2II
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.

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'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.

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't see it as manipulative.

~~~
beatgammit
Stuff like resource gathering stretch gameplay, and things like in app
purchases are designed to give you immediate pleasure, so spending money feels
good. Do you want to wait a day for X to finish building, or finish it now for
$1 and start your war today!

Yes, it's absolutely manipulative, but it's also pleasurable, so people accept
it. However, I reject it because I don't want to feel like Pavlov's dog.

The DLC model isn't that much different. Instead of getting an immediate
pleasure reaction at the time of purchase, they extend the pleasure over a bit
longer period. Instead of, "I'm glad I sped up that building", it's "I'm glad
I bought this DLC, mechanic X is so nice". Both try to get you to spend more,
and both try to reward you for doing so. Instead of being Pavlov's simple dog,
I'm Pavlov's sophisticated dog.

Unfortunately, microtransactions are getting more popular in the form of loot
boxes and cosmetics. Fortunately, they seem to separate purchases from
gameplay, and hopefully that doesn't change anytime soon.

But I'm definitely with you. $40 is usually my upper bound for a quality
title, and I'm willing to pay $10 or so per quality DLC if I'm enjoying the
base game.

I recently got EU4 for $40 (bundled with a few DLC), and I'm likely to buy
some DLC when the next sale comes around so they end up in my preferred
spending range. Waiting for a sale for a reasonable price is stupid and EU4
walks the line between a reasonable DLC policy and a predatory one, but it's a
good game so I give it some slack.

~~~
II2II
> I'm willing to pay $10 or so per quality DLC if I'm enjoying the base game.

On the whole, I believe that the ability to buy DLC based upon a player's
enjoyment of the game is good for the consumer and developer. Yes, it can be
manipulative. On the other hand, game development is risky and businesses that
need to turn a profit. Creating a good base game seems like a solid way to
assess the market. Expanding it with DLC seems like a good way to entice
players to pay for the development of additional content or a more
sophisticated game. That being said, there are games that are pretty much
guaranteed to succeed in the market. In those cases DLC feels like a way to
extract money from consumers for an incomplete title.

EU4, and other titles published through Paradox, are special cases. To
outsiders the cost of the game and all DLC is absurd, yet a subset of people
will play the games for hundreds or thousands of hours.

------
mosselman
Can anyone recommend a good mobile strategy game that doesn't rely on in-app
purchases?

~~~
ralphstodomingo
Was gonna say the Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun ports are pretty good
(Dragonfall and Returns) but can't seem to find them on the Play Store now.
Weird.

There's also the XCOM: Enemy Within port for Android. I loved these.

~~~
yoz-y
Shadow run was never recompiled to 64bit sadly.

------
Yhippa
In addition of what the author said, the ergonomics of playing console or
computer desktop games on a smartphone are usually bad. I'll get my Bluetooth
controller and then complain that the screen size is too small. Then I'll
project the display to my TV somehow and...I might as well be playing on a
console.

As for the majority smartphone games, I haven't many that don't have sketchy
F2P/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.

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.

------
kalado
That's why I'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't know who all these
people are that play "pay to upgrade building to level 4" games but there are
a lot of people looking for just fun games instead of horrible p2w games.

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.

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

~~~
Fnoord
What about the fact that Blizzard is releasing a mobile Diablo game? What kind
of strong indicator is that?

~~~
skilled
What, you don't have a phone?

------
Arbalest
I've been searching for a decent 4X game on mobile that can be played in
portrait mode. Just can't find one. I feel like on mobile, going landscape is
a failure of the interface. It's tricky though, as I'm comparing it to more
desktop oriented 4X games like Stellaris (which I've been playing recently)
and Master of Orion (II III and the more recent remaster)

------
makecheck
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.

------
Causality1
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's not worth wading through the
garbage to find them.

~~~
frosted-flakes
I did the same, but found the touch screen controls to be lacking. I even
tried mapping the buttons to keys on my BlackBerry KeyOne, and it was just not
a great experience.

Instead, I installed custom firmware[0] on my Nintendo 3DS, which was just
collecting dust. This lets you install _any_ GB, GBA, or DSi game onto the SD
card, in addition to the vast 3DS library. (Regular DS games can only be
played from cartridges). Notably, this is often used for piracy, but I've
mostly been re-playing old GBA games from my youth that I own the cartridges
for (I don't condone piracy).

The 3DS is a dedicated player, so it has proper buttons, joy sticks, and a
directional pad. It's also pocket-able, unlike the comparatively massive
Nintendo Switch.

The Legend of Zelda is my all-time favourite game series, and I can play 10 of
the main games natively on my 3DS, which is actually quite amazing. Many of
the other I can play on my WiiU.

[0] [https://3ds.guide](https://3ds.guide)

~~~
Causality1
Oh, touchscreen controls are junk. I always use a Bluetooth gamepad.

------
jdofaz
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.

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.

------
thrower123
I won'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's still terrible to not have a real d-pad and
buttons.

~~~
Simon_says
I've found that the touch screen is a near perfect input device for chess. I
prefer it to over-the-board play.

~~~
RugnirViking
I know its silly to say, but I feel like I have much less patience when
playing on a touchscreen. It feels much harder to think about the geometry of
moves in that way.

That said, I don't think this is the same for everyone, just my observation.

------
lostphilosopher
Personal recommendation: Stardew Valley

Paid app, no microtransactions or ads.

Similar to the original Harvest Moon games.

------
DonHopkins
What's with the text in those screen shots? Yikes! I'd pay just to have a nice
anti-aliased font!

Reminds me of the 3x5 font from Mike Koss's "The Terminal" emulator on the
Apple ][ from 1981.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com/jscript/tinyalice.htm)

~~~
Narishma
The low resolution font itself seems fine to me. The problem is that it was
scaled up horribly in those screenshots.

------
karmakaze
Universal Paperclips

