Rare nuggets of gold swimming in an ocean of shit.

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 hardly ever play on my mobile, the market of games I enjoy is saturated with ‘free games’ that you can buy to get rid of the ads. Which however are completely designed around the ads. ‘Watch this ad for 30 more gold’ , or shit like that. In other words completely and utterly pay to win, because instead of ads you can just pay for the gold with ingame currency that is ridiculously overpriced in relation to what the ad money would have been. And in order to compensate: more ads.

Guess what, I lost joy. We live in a capitalist hellscape. Nowhere is that more clear than in Google play store.

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.

I stopped playing games on mobile as I have more than enough to play on pc and ps.

Also I hate the free to play skinner box model that took over the mobile industry.

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.

Don’t you have phones -Blizzard Rip never forget.

I only play arcade type games, the kind that you only play for 20 minutes while you’re in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.

They stopped being fun 10-15 years ago. Back then people started figuring out the new touch input for games which lead to many simple, but creative games.

Nowadays, it feels like there exists nothing noteworthy in this space. Most are just boring clones of clones of clones riddled with ads and other garbage. I was unable to find even one game worth installing on my phone the past few years.

I don’t know what I am looking for at this point. I love casual games and play a lot on PC or my Steam Deck and it is so much easier to find something there which isn’t just a cheap money grab.

“Real” games I pay for with no ads I think are ok. My most played mobile game is Slay the Spire, which works well since it’s just a card game.

Action games would be a hard pass.

The only mobile game that I ever really enjoyed was Game Dev Story by Kairosoft, and that was a long time ago.

I’m sure good ones exist, but most mobile games seem overly simple or boring, and they often have annoying or borderline predatory business models.

They are cool. 👍

And i don’t mind making a one time pay to get rid of ads and supporting the developers. 😃💵

But i really hate pay-to-win games with a passion. 🔥

As a teen I used to game a lot on mobile, until I got a gaming pc

I’m addicted to NIKKE Goddess of Victory and Blue Archive

They keep me sane during work I guess…

But they also make me want to spend money on cute moving PNGs

…

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.