One of my beefs with mobile gaming in general is how difficult it is to find games that don't feel like gambling. A large portion of even the "non-gambling" games are still gambling under the hood.
I worry that typical mobile games are going to serve a funnel towards gambling for the kids who are growing up playing them. Like flavored vapes function for the tobacco industry.
Of course, that makes me wonder what the games I grew up on funneled me towards, but it seems like just maybe Mario games didn't have any ulterior motives beyond making you want to play more Mario.
There are close to zero genuinely great mobile-exclusive games that aren't simple action or puzzle games. It makes me want to dig up some of the breathless hype about mobile/social gaming from 10-15 years ago, because basically none of the predictions have come true.
It's pretty depressing how the F2P formula has taken over.
The real example for Nintendo going full lootbox was Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s a pure gacha game.
Actually viable at the highest end of competition (top tier all modes) as free to play, but has earned more revenue than not only every other Nintendo mobile game combined, but also possibly the entire 30+ year old Fire Emblem franchise.
To summon a hero at maximum competitive scoring capacity (11 copies) with cash on a focus banner was usually $650-750, bit more over $1000 for a Mythic or Legendary - but bad variance could easily double those numbers, if not triple them. But playing the game for free you earned about $175 of that currency per month. Moreover, the game now averages 11 new heroes a month. It launched with 90-something, but now has nearly 850 different heroes.
So if you ignored paying, saved your currency, understood the numbers and sat on your hands… you could be right at the top, spending your currency on exactly what you needed for score (and nothing else), and making meta-viable, sufficient scoring units out of the piles of 3 and 4 stars you’d be buried in. After that, play well and you’d be ranked in the same tiers as the biggest whales.
But the core monetization model (outside of newer reasonable cost subscription stuff) was basically evil.
I still have a hard time understanding how mobile gaming diverged so hard from traditional computer gaming to be the lootbox cesspool that it is. The majority of the market is filled "free" exploitative ad-filled knockoffs with less effort put into their actual gameplay than 2005 flash games. The actual paid market is barren in comparison, with most of the top rated games just being ports of decent PC games. Even coin-based arcades weren't this bad; it's like the mere presence of a FAANG is enough to suck all the genuine creativity and passion out of a market and replace it with growth-optimized exploitation
It’s not hard to understand. The mobile app stores trained people to expect sub $1 prices for everything. Games that were priced fairly did not sell well. They still don’t. The five (or fifty) people on HN who insist they’d pay full price for a game with no loot box mechanics do not a sustainable market make.
Unfortunately the loot box mechanic is so lucrative that all you have left in the market is unscrupulous companies.
It’s a natural consequence of gamers insisting that the content they love to consume cannot possibly cost what it does and the industry must be full of exploitative sharks.
Funnily enough, 15 years of this has not resulted in good games getting cheaper but rather good developers leaving the industry. Who could have seen that coming?
The interface just sucks. I really think that's more or less enough to explain it. You can only do so much when your only mode of interaction is pawing at a tiny screen, so people who want to design good games mostly don't bother. In the absence of real games, the void is filled by cynically engineered malware for your brain.
The iPad was slightly more promising as a games platform, but it just isn't popular enough.
Maybe because mobile games are played in very short bursts of time, like sometimes 5 minutes max? People just want something fairly mindless to distract between errands or what have you.
Why are states legalizing some gambling in the first place?
Like I can understand that not all states ever made gambling more or less completely banned, but most states only really had the lottery, possibly horse/dog racing, and tribal casinos (mostly because they can't prevent tribal casinos in the first place).
Now I know pre 2018, states could not generally legalize sports betting due to PASPA, but many states seemed to have no interest in legalizing say pure online casinos, which is something they certainly could have done if they wanted despite PASPA. Yet they don't.
It should all be banned by Visa and Mastercard like they do with porn platorms and forced to use cryptocurrencies. Then eveyone and thei neighbour is going to associate online gambling with crypto ponzi schemes and North Korean ransomware.
I've no love for mobile gaming, but the idea of payment platforms being encouraged to ban legal activities willy-nilly is a trend that scares me a lot more.
States now have to compete with foreign (and to a more limited extent, domestic) Internet companies as future tax dollars are now going overseas to gacha games, cryptocurrency, and microtransactions.
I worry that typical mobile games are going to serve a funnel towards gambling for the kids who are growing up playing them. Like flavored vapes function for the tobacco industry.
Of course, that makes me wonder what the games I grew up on funneled me towards, but it seems like just maybe Mario games didn't have any ulterior motives beyond making you want to play more Mario.