f13.net

Saw this link on Scott (Lum's) facebook page and felt like sharing. It's my general attitude about mobile games written much better than I ever could.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.fi/2014/05/please-stop-complaining-about-free.html

In short: Stop whining about mobile games not being "real" games or "tainting" future players.  They're games, they're fun, stop being an uptight cunt, indy developers.  This isn't a zero-sum game and you're starting to sound a lot like the whiny douches at the losing end of every other tech shift. (Riaa, Cable companies, Movie Theaters, Radio)

I don't like mobile games because they're implemented in such a way that eventually you either have to spend ridiculous amounts of time grinding, or spend a lot of real money to advance.  Sometimes both!

Hell, I wish mobile gaming was more fun.  It's currently not.  There's no sign it's going to become any more fun.  There is every sign that the monetization will increase.

Cough. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

No one is saying they can't make a shitload of money. By nature of the platform and what it attracts, 99.9999% of them are, were, and always will be total dogshit and they're worth complaining about.

Total. Dog. Shit.

I won't comment on Vogel but to say its in his interest to take this stance .

Edit: also. Those asshat arteest indie devs? That attitude appeals to a crowd and makes the casual crowd stay away from their shit. I dont think those people like money anyway, so it works for them. As for Notch, whatever, guy got lucky and bottled lego.... lightning. Wont happen again. Not like Minecraft.

Total. Dog. Shit. I'm with schild on this one, so that basically makes it the truth.

I'll tell you what. I'd ease up on the utter shithole that is free/low cost mobile gaming if some studios would make some decent fucking games even if it cost a few more bucks and didn't build it around panhandling me like some grubby homeless hipster. Really, I just skimmed that stupid article that sets up more straw men than Dorothy's wet dreams. I don't mind people making cartoony games that make money. I care that they're shitty games.

The only good thing I have to say about looking into mobile gaming on my tablet was an article on how to set up dosbox for gog games, and even that isn't worth the hassle, really.

Also. Let me play Minecraft:PE with a mouse and keyboard.

Mobile games are great for giving you a break from your young child or getting them to sit still at a restaurant.   Otherwise, I can't think of a single mobile game that I've reinstalled once I've uninstalled it. They're all ports or forgettable drek.

I have yet to download a free game I would describe as total dog shit.  In fact, I have to say that have enjoyed them all for various amounts of time.  My experience might be due to the fact that I have not downloaded that many (maybe 20?) and I don't download games on a whim, but usually wait for a sold recommendation from someone I know  or play it on someone else's device first.

I tried out 2048 the other day because it's the hot, new game, and had a good time through two playthroughs.  Half an hour later I had a message on my lock screen inviting me to "come back and play 2048".  Immediately uninstalled.

Can I also hate on indie douchenozzles who think that "pixel art" is somehow a fucking artistic choice? It's not, it's because you don't have the budget for "real artists" and thus decided that going back 15 years for art style that engineers could emulate is somehow artistic as opposed to budgetary. Fuck that.

Mobile games? Don't fucking care. I've tried playing many of them, and they all too often remind me of the douchey pixel art games I just complained about. I also don't spend money on them most of the time because if you don't commute by train, or spend lots of time away from some form of PC or TV-attached device, why are you bothering playing these inferior gaming experiences? Also, why do you care if people who wouldn't be playing video games anyway pay money to mobile game developers for games you don't give a shit about anyway?

In short, why is anyone talking about mobile games?

My wife has a game on her iPad, something "Camelot".  Pretty much as soon as she exits the game, it starts yelling for her attention again.  I'm not sure why she hasn't uninstalled it yet.

Generally I agree.  Sword and Sworcery has an exception, imo.

Wait, what?

NO you may not.  I forbid it!

Actually, the one that really gets me is "minimalist."  Minimalism is an artistic style, not an excuse to make your entire game out of untextured cubes.

Re: the article, it seemed to miss the point to me.  The rebuttal to just about every point was "yes, but a lot of people are doing it / it's making a lot of money" which seemed a bit misdirected.  Like asking indie filmmakers to stop criticizing Michael Bay movies because they're profitable.  And even then, as far as I've seen (feel free to correct me), most mobile games don't make money.  Yes, the ones that do make insane amounts of cash, but the vast majority make basically nothing.  That's not a domain in which most garage studios can compete, so getting on your soapbox to defend the multi-million dollar corporations from them seems awfully petty.  Thank God Zynga has people like you to stand up for them against a guy cobbling together an MMO in his free time from his mom's basement because he really loves the genre.  Hey, be sure to point out that he's not making millions of dollars while Zynga is, I'm sure that will change his mind.

And the bullet points where that's not his argument are worse.  "People think mobile games aren't hardcore, but they require even more time investment to beat than a hardcore PC / Console game!" is such a colossal case of derp I have difficulty believing he even wrote it.

No, the point was, "Stop getting your panties in a bunch about what other people are enjoying."

Which, was missed by everyone. Good job.

They're games which are ultimately a pointless frivolity. Nobody's doing them wrong, you're just not the market for these particular products.  The majority of the bitching all seems based on the fear that, "Oh shit this might become mainstream and I'll only be a sliver of the market." 

That ship sailed a long, long time ago, boys and any developer of what you enjoy who chases that dragon will also fail, because they don't understand the consumer either.  These people were never going to buy a AAA title. They're not Xbox gold purchasers or hacking away in MMOs or even pouring over replays of LoL matches on youtube to refine their game. They bought a Wii for Wii Sports, they mess around on mobile games while waiting in lines or at a lull in a social activity. 

At worst you'll get more kids who want a richer experience looking in to deeper games as they get older. Oh no, expanding the 'traditional' player base, which has trended way too old as time's worn on. Millenials outnumber genX by a lot, the average PC & console gaming age should be getting younger, not trending into its mid 30s.  Which it did as soon as they included mobile platforms.
http://kotaku.com/5931077/the-average-age-of-a-gamer-just-dropped-by-seven-years-um-what

So, yeah, stop being such a bitch about them.

Feh. You guys are late for the party. This all started with Facebook games.

I'm going to start with personal bias:

I'm not going to sit at my fucking iPad screen for three hours of exclusive gaming like I do on my PC or console (and really, I just threw console in there because I assume how that goes for console fans... not for me, I hate those too). And shit, I am certainly not doing any more than looking at my iPhone screen a few times per minute, each for about 10 seconds at a time. I'm on the bus/in a meeting/walking between them/in traffic.

Every game that does well on those platforms acknowledges the kind of play occasion that user has. Smartphones and tablets have all the same genres that PCs have. But the only ones that get the traffic and dollars are those that acknowledge how a user wants to play on the device.

ACIV companion app vs ACIV whatever-tie-in-app. The former basically gave you a second screen experience (map, missions) without needing a second monitor, nor fighting the modal UI in the PC/Console version just to assign ships to battle and use the map. The latter was something about some girl assassin at some point in time I'd much rather experience on the PC/Console than on some tiny ass screen between meetings.

Hearthstone proves me wrong. Maybe. Let's see in three months. Some argue Clash of Clans does too. But then the most popular PC game in the western markets right now (by number of players, revenue and followers) is an eSport that coulda launched on mobile first for just how much it's like the other PC games we usually play.

There's a lot of shit out there of course. But there's a lot of shit at GameStop and on Steam too. And I don't mean empircal shit, just that I'd bet most of us will never experience 50% of the total games out there in any environment simply because they don't pass the first test (judging by recognition), the second test (judging by pedigree) nor third (judging by screenshot). Of course not everyone does it like that. And of course someone's already writing an angry retort about me having the gall to imply this all. Blame how metacritic and key reviews can still be used as a bellwether for sales. I don't make the rules.

It's just so easy to slap together the next Candy Crush iteration over a weekend that we get 50x the number of knockoffs per proven mechanic on mobile that we do on PC, much less console.

tl;dr mobile gets a bad rap, but there's nothing so different from historical Steam and Wii games outside raw quantity.

Ok, but why?  We're not allowed to critique something we don't like now?  Because something's mainstream it is not OK to discuss it?  

There are people that take games seriously.  There are people who think games are art, or that games are important in some way. There are people whose livelihood depends on games, who are really passionate about them.  You might disagree with them, but you're not going to convince them that they're wrong by pointing to big stacks of cash and going "neener neener, I bet you wish you had this, but you don't, because you keep insisting on designing games with actual mechanics instead of copying Farmville like a smart person would!"

Mobile games make money, we know that, that's not the issue.  If you want to defend mobile games, pointing to their massive install base is not telling anyone anything they don't already know.

edit: added last bit

It's one thing to say "I don't like this" and another to say "the existence of this detracts from my enjoyment of other things".

If you're complaining that mobile gaming will be the death of gaming then you're doing the latter, and you're being dumb.  I don't see the point in wasting breath saying that "casual" RMT-based mobile/FB/whatever games aren't good games, you might as well complain that SyFy movies lack artistic vision or that Arizona is too dry.

Right, no argument from me there, but there's different perspectives here.  The perspective of the average gamer on this board (for example), who's just a consumer, versus the perspective of a developer, who's personally invested in the success of their product.  I don't think the existence of mobile gaming negatively impacts my day at all, but a developer who's got to compete with Candy Crush might have legitimate reasons to feel differently about it.

Which gets us back to the original point of it's not a zero-sum game, this crap is expanding the market rather than taking away your slice of it, put on your big boy pants, etc.

I still play Bejeweled and have since 2002 when I got my first smart phone.  Mostly it's related to me sitting around waiting for something and wanting mindless entertainment - there hasn't been a AAA game I've liked or wanted to play in years.  I think I have all of 3 or 4 games installed on the phone and have never paid a dime for any of them.  I consider most of the games to be vapid and money grabs, but that's not my problem as I'm not giving them my money and I have no problem making fun of people I know who do give them money ;-)

I play Clash o Clans, Dungeon Keeper, and Plants v Zombies. I spent an initial 5 bucks for an extra worker once I figured out I was going to play for a bit. I enjoy both defense games, and for the platform,  think they're perfect. Play when you want, no money sink, fun stuff. Every generalization is false, etc.

The fact that there is a new "in defense of free to play dogshit" piece every 2 days is more damning than anyone actually damning them. These games only need constant defense because they are as a whole so self-evidently awful.

If they're all so awful as to be self-evident, why the constant need to also publish articles every 2 days bashing them?

Oh, because they're successful in ways indy devs aren't because that market segment doesn't want to play the indy shit and it burns their britches. Big boy pants time, not all customers want your product.

I work with a lot of lower-class co-workers whose jobs involve menial, low education tasks. Playing Candy Crush for the nth time on their breaks is enjoyable and provides needed relief from their day-to-day. It's like television watching, giving their brain a break, and I don't see anything wrong with games designed with that in mind.

It seems like trashing mobile games would be like looking down on Sudoku or Crossword Puzzles for not being sophisticated or "quality" products on the level of entertainment that I think most of this board has grown accustomed to expect.

A developer who's got to compete with Candy Crush is already developing for mobile. The target demographic for Candy Crush doesn't have a gaming PC or a console. They might have an iPad but they for sure have a phone and maybe a laptop that can run Facebook games.

I make mobile games these days and I've been making f2p for a while. A lot of f2p games are shit and should be scourged from the earth but that's an artifact of the low barrier to production and not something endemic to the model. Sturgeon's Law applies just as much to mobile games as it does to PC games aimed at core gamers.

Core gaming is growing for mobile. There's stuff out there that isn't aimed at bored soccer moms or ADD kids. I'm playing Panzer Corps on my iPad at the moment, it's as diametrically opposite to Candy Crush as it's possible to be while still being in the set of video games. The Collectibles has a shit monetisation design but the game is aimed squarely at gamers like us. X-Com, Hunters 2, Tactical Heroes (obligatory self-l=plug) are all core games for core gamers and there are hundreds more.

Not missed. I don't care people love these things, I think it's great. I support them at the public library, after all - facebook games put asses in seats.

But as I have an android tablet, I'd like a decent game or three on it, ffs. I'm not bitching so much about the current offerings as the lack of anything good as a 'refined' gamer :p

(Iain, your game is competitive, I don't like competitive games.)

Anyway, I think it's disingenuous to say we're saying it's hurting gaming overall. We're saying they suck (yay opinions) and as long-time gamers we wish there were some good options amongst the bajillion clones of crap and payware. I have my big boy pants on and want to play a good goddamned mobile game that isn't tower defense or puzzle or rts - I want an experience similar to what I have been playing for years. If you can't code a game with the depth and intelligence of something written on a motherfucking 486DX - I turn it around and say put on YOUR big boy pants.

Or just admit that you're shoveling out LCD stuff in hopes of a big payday and fuck integrity.

How about this as a challenge. Integration between platforms so I can play Civ V or whatever at home with a full graphical interface and then when I'm sitting in the dentist's office I can load up my steam cloud save and play a few turns on a tactical map? Or something? Give me fucking something to be positive about mobile gaming that isn't "suck it up and learn to love this shitball new paradigm and forget the decades of gaming experiences you've previously had."

Frozen Synapse does this. You can pick up your games on any supported device from where they left off.

Of the games I mentioned, Hunters 2 is TBS. Panzer Corps is grognardy TBS strategy straight out of the Avalon Hill model of cardboard counters and hex maps. The Collectibles is TBS with a TCG monetisation model tacked on top and Crytek production values, X-Com is.. well it's X-Com. They all offer the same experience that you get on your current PC. Check out Pocket Tactics or Touch Arcade to help you separate the wheat from the chaff, if you're just browsing the store then you'll see all the chaff and clones that you are complaining about but I bet you don't look for PC games that way.

No, I come to f13 and when I posted asking for suggestions I didn't get much.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24115.0

I don't really care about mobile games - to me they're just a different industry. It's like Hollywood movies vs porn - they are both movies, but they aren't the same industry. I do find it annoying how GDC is now half "how to market your mobile game" shit - to me that has nothing to do with game development.

I think "mobile games are killing games" is more "f2p mobile games are killing the market for premium mobile games" - which is true. I don't care, but I guess it sucks if you are trying to make good, premium mobile games, like the people who made The Room or Room Escape or whatever the fuck it's called.


The vast majority of both indie and mobile games fail spectacularly. They're actually very similar in that regard. Mobile games have a higher upside, but both markets are extremely volatile and the average experience is complete failure.

I also don't really understand the point of pitting indie devs and mobile devs against each other, considering that the majority of indie devs probably work on mobile games.

How many of those are on Android as opposed to just iOS? That's where the industry is lagging from my perspective.

It's true that Android gaming suffers from a particular paucity of choice compared to iOS. I talk to a lot of mobile devs and the overwhelming consensus seems to be (anecdotally at least) that if you want to make money you develop for iOS first and then consider an Android port ony if your game does well in the App Store. Unfortunately it's not possible to force people to develop for a platform they find unappealing. If you can think of a way, then the people at Blackberry would love to talk to you.

It's why I switched over to an iPad and gave my Android tablet to a friend with a young kid.  The app support was pretty disappointing, even with some stuff that wasn't gaming.  There's a good variety of mobile gaming out there for iOS, and my tablet sees a ton of use thanks to it. 

A game like Candy crush is competing with Danielle Steel or the NY Post / Sports Illustrated for someone's  break time, bus ride leisure, it's not competing with Elder Scrolls, Eve Online, etc. I might load up bejeweled and try to beat my high score when I am on the can, not when Im sitting around at home deciding whether to watch something, read, or play Europa Universalis.

You also have a super narrow range of games that you find personally appealing as well, at least going on what you gave us in that thread. Your likes just don't line up with the market as it is and probably will be for awhile.

Except it has ALL to do with game development. I found this out when I published my first novel. Marketing my novel has fuckall to do with writing novels, but without it, I don't make any fucking money from all that hard work. "Write it and they will come" doesn't work in a media-saturated environment like the App Store or Amazon.com. Same goes for game development. If a game company doesn't figure out how to get eyeballs on their game, they won't be making any money.

It's important, but it's a bit cynical when you have something called the "Game Developer's Conference" and it's really a Game Marketer's Conference.  Shouldn't they talk about the development of games at some point?

They talk about what developers need to talk about. If that is 50% marketing, the GDC is going to be 50% marketing.

There was a time when GDC was almost solely about development. Now it's about marketing, social issues, monetization and a bunch of other shit. That stuff might be of interest to developers but it's not about development.

I don't really care if there is a mobile game marketing conference (and in fact there are a few of them) but it's kind of lame when GDC is barely about making games any more. The original idea was sharing insights regarding the art of making games. It's not just a conference for game developers, the idea was it was a conference about game development.

It doesn't help that most of the "how to market your iPhone game" talks are pretty useless. I don't really know anyone who goes to GDC to learn or share about game development any more - people go to meet up with vendors or friends or to have side-meetings. The main content of the conference is now almost totally irrelevant.

To swing this back around to being more on-topic, I think it's telling that when the show became more mobile focused it largely stopped being about game design in favor of being about marketing, monetization methods, etc. The actual content of mobile games seems irrelevant to most of their developers. Many of these games are not games with monetizations models, they are monetization models with games bolted on.

Flappy Bird - sums up the mobile game market. How the market ate up that furore over said dev taking the app down because it was too hot to handle really fucking irritated me.

I like many mobile conversions of board games--Carcassone, Small World 2, Waterdeep. I play Ascension a fair amount.

I do wish someone would make a decent Western-style RPG for mobile.

Wish I can make fun of the mobile games more.
I like School Idol Festival.
Every hour I look forward to spending life points and just tapping away at the circles.
It's a pretty big deal because I always boasted to my friends that I see no point in mobile gaming since I spent most of my time at home and when I head out, the last thing on my mind is to play a game on an inferior platform.

Yet, there's nothing on desktop at the moment that made me want to sit down and play.
Instead, I kept my Samsung Galaxy on standby so I can just get spend those Lifepoints in the most efficient manner.
And those precious Life Gems are too nice to be spent on game time. I should keep them to roll rare cards.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/47/Screenshot_2014-05-16-21-39-14.jpg)

 :pedobear: Precioussss. I don't wanna spend money on it. But I'm having fun on it at least.

Conferences have marketing.  Conferences also are informal job fairs.

You guys are all cute.

Acquisition cost if you do marketing/ads/etc for a single mobile player is now $4. This is why F2P is winning.

A 99c game moves 1/10th the copies a free game does. A game over $4 moves... nothing. A few hundred units.

Unless it happens to be one of the damn few that go viral or get featured by Apple. Keep in mind it's some insane number like 100 games released a DAY now. (http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/) so if you don't spend marketing money, you are basically playing roulette.

Meanwhile, dev costs continue to rise. So 400 units of something at $4 doesn't pay for anything.

GDC very much does the talks that developers need to hear. Mostly, younger developers, with few exceptions (as I often say "GDC is a teaching institution, not a research institution." It didn't use to be, but that is what it is now.) This is shit that devs need to hear before they can't afford their rent. Marketing and biz skills equals devs getting to actually make the games you want.

If people were actually willing to pay for premium mobile games, then maybe you might get titles that you want, stuff that is more core. But as a group, core gamers just aren't paying for those games. I know so many great devs who have tried, and gotten back piles of 1 star reviews saying "this isn't worth more than 99 cents" -- for a game that on PC downloadable would be worth $20.

F2P is the only thing letting a lot of these devs eat. And yes, it distorts the game designs. Yes, it lets in shitty douchebag marketing approaches. All that stuff was always there behind the scenes, it's just now you can see it better.

If you ask me, we're heading for a crash.

Go read: http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/05/07/the-financial-future-of-game-developers/

I guess I need to start a mobile gaming review site for the sake of balance.

And this is why we get to be bitches about them. Market is flooded with bullshit. Apple controls the fate of basically any game in their app store. The vast majority of games are total butt.

But are we heading for a crash? Far as I can tell, the crash already happened. Gaming has turned into shit.

I cannot stress enough how much this type of education needs to be given to anyone considering getting into the games industry. My father didn't teach me anything about business, and I ran off to the west coast with nothing but a passion for video games and no *fucking* clue about the industry or what it takes to make it. And this was 1999!

Did he teach you anything about nepotism? Because that'll get you further than business in the money pit that is gaming.

The polite term is "networking."  :grin:

That was the polite term in 1996. Now it's inbreeding, incest, and Why The Gaming Industry Doesn't Get or Deserve Nice Things.

I had to learn that "Fit" was the most important hiring quality the hard way.

I'm really curious what mobile games Raph thinks would be $20 PC games. I can't think of a single one except for maybe X-Com.

Trying to make "core" mobile games seems like barking up the wrong tree to me. At most you want to make games core gamers would play when they needed a break from core gaming. A core game on mobile just isn't going to compare favorably to one on other platforms, even if it's cheaper.

Alternately, there are some $20 pieces of shit on Steam.

X-Com is incompatible with my Samsung Note Pro that came out this year.  :oh_i_see:

It's shit on my iPad 3 as well, it takes up so much space that I have to uninstall and reinstall it every time there's an update which means I lose my campaign progress as it's not Gamecentre enabled.

There are a fair number of $20-ish titles on Steam which are way cheaper on iOS, maybe that's what he's referring to?

WH40K Storm of Vengeance, for example, is $10 on Steam, but $5 on iOS.  Rover Rescue is $5 on PC, and $1 at the iStore.  Plague inc. is $15 on Steam, $1 on iOS.  That kind of thing.  What they're "worth" is a whole other discussion, though.

Do people not remember when casual games cost $20?

I remember when gas was under a dollar.

25 years later, I can still hear my mom saying "I don't know David, $20 is a lot for a game." The game in question, Legend of Zelda.

Dev houses who try to make core games for core gamers on mobile platforms that are NOT purely game machines (phones and tablets and Glass and whatever the fuck else anyone comes up with) are doing it wrong and likely will die a well-deserved business death. Core gamers are whiny, entitled bitches who hate everything including and especially everything they love (or claim to love). You will never please them especially on mobile platforms and mobile doesn't really lend itself to core experiences anyway no matter how many pixels you can push out or how many "this is a joystick peripheral" attachments you strap on to a goddamn phone.

Stop trying to please core gamers. They will only eat your limbs off while they fuck your rotting corpse.

Exactly.

Mobile game development has allowed a lot of developers the chance to try something without quadruple mortgaging their souls, and if it succeeds grow it, and if it doesn't, stop and move on. It's like iterative development as applied to business. Try something, get it up and out there, and if it sucks, learn that early before you invest further.

You can do that with Flappy Bird.

You can't do that with The Division.

And there are far fewer companies that can handle the latter than there are people who want to try their hand at the former.

Have you actually been to GDC? Most of these talks are sponsored sessions (AKA advertising masquerading as advice) and most of the rest are still completely useless.

The reality in mobile is that you either need to get lucky, have an established brand or spend a lot of money on marketing. That's it. There's no fucking strategy for success beyond that. For small developers the mobile success strategy is "don't make a mobile game." If you insist on making a mobile game your best shot at success is to make a good game, which ironically GDC basically isn't about at all any more.

It's basically a con - there is demand for the advice so people offer it, even though they advice they have to offer is not at all worthwhile. It's like those seminars you can pay to go to that teach you how to get rich.

I go to GDC Europe every year. There are always more talks that I want to go to than I have time to see. Even the sponsored sessions can be valuable.

Edit, here is the schedule for GDC San Francisco (http://www.gdconf.com/conference/index.html) this year. There is one track for business, management and marketing and one for monetisation, the rest are design, art, sound, programming and production. Clicking on any of those will give you a list of more talks than you can take in over the conference timeline. The quality will be variable of course but it's my experience that the GDC submissions panel are pretty pro-active about trying to filter out the poor value sessions.

The strategy for mobile is that you have to pump out as many games as you can as fast as you can that involve a free to play model.  There isn't much strategy beyond that.  Most successful mobile games so far have shown that, and that's pretty indicative on why most of us have such a low opinion of mobile games.

GDC is three or four interesting, insightful talks a year and the rest is either awkward marketing or dinosaurs clinging to the last thing that remotely resembles relevance. Parties used to be good though.

The ENTIRE monetization track is sponsored!

It's a scam. The mobile market is completely flooded due to the gold rush, nobody is making money, so there are a bunch of sponsored sessions that purport to tell people how to make money - and oh, by amazing coincidence, the way to make money is to integrate the sponsored products or use the sponsored services.


There definitely is an element of "whether or not you succeed or fail is largely chance so just blast as much shit as possible and hope to get lucky", which of course makes success even more fickle.

The entire monetisation track is also all of 7 talks as compared to 99 talks in the Design track alone and comparable numbers in the other development tracks.

While I'm not in Margalis' camp of chasing the red herring that is sponsored talks (as they're fundamentally worthless and not worth mentioning, I did look through the design track to look for combinations of both seasoned and recent success. I wish I hadn't.

The ratio of fluff to shop talk in the design track is extremely high.

I can't remember what this thread is about anymore :-)

On Mobile: why begrudge people taking a shot? There's way more games in existence than anyone here will ever play. Shit, there are entire platforms we've never touched. Think back to all the shit third party crap on Wii, or all the shlock on greenlight, or all the crap they'd peddle in GameSpot when they still mattered to game discovery. Every generation of hardware and gamer gets it's own set of 80% junk/20% worth checking out. It's just mobile's turn. Soon it'll be Occulus Rift and then Glass and then whatever we're jacked into.

On GDC: It's been good each time I've gone. Some of the offshoot events like GDC mobile, eh, not so much. I generally won't bother unless I have meetings though, because unto themselves, the events aren't worth the $thou+ in travel to me. And I haven't rated an event by its in parties since my 20-somethings :oh_i_see:

I think the contention (at least for me) is that the current state of affairs have come up with a massive race to the bottom that rewards trying to make the simplist gameplay out for free and hide extra content behind a paywall, which means it's much harder to make a deeper game that cannot be financed by incessant F2P extras.  Everyone has proven that episodic games are extremely difficult to pull off successfully (even Telltale doesn't imo, as they take way too long between episodes and the episodes are too short). 

I just want to sit down and play a deep and interesting game that can entertain me for an hour  or so in a given session and I don't mind paying for it, but all the shovelware gets in the way and makes it hard to find the good games.  I also don't want to be always nagged to pay extra while I'm in the middle of trying to immerse myself in a game.   It's rare to find a mobile game that entertains me for more than 20 minutes at a time and after a while I just stopped trying because it's too hard to find.  I don't doubt that it's there but the current marketplace does nothing to make it possible for those games to succeed.

Ok, with that, and as a gamer, I totally agree. I better, because I think I've ranted about it myself :-) I can understand why development, business, and marketing have all needed to overlap. But I don't like the results myself. It has the feel of design-by-analytics, which makes mobile games feel much more like gambling games, where the math and brain centers triggered are so well optimized they're really not games in the sense of how gamers think of games.

What I don't agree with is the idea that the slate of what I'd consider schlock on mobile is any kind of new and unique occurence in gaming. I remember bitching to my buddies about how many crappy Atari 2600 games there were for chrissake. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if those guys who worked up Spacewar in the early 60s had 49 other attempts that sucked  :grin:

Different business models encourage different types of design. (And vice-versa)

Mobile / F2P models strongly encourage extremely shitty game design in a way that other models do not. (Not nearly to the same extent) The single biggest question for the vast majority of mobile game devs is how much worse are we willing to make the game to make it monetize better? The process of making a mobile game is basically making a game that is ok, then turning the dial towards "shitty" as far as it will go without the whole thing blowing up.

While there has always been a sea of crap available for every platform since the dawn of time, there used to be at least a few gems available at any given time, something for almost every preference. Now it seems all you can find are just lumps of shit floating in the sea of crap.  Are there ANY actually good complete games (ie not F2P/ad driven/game snippets etc) out there you can buy now for Android?  Deeper than Angry Birds?  Right now, honestly, the only game I play on my phone is Solitaire, which I did pay for thankyouverymuch so no ads. I WILL NOT allow a game to install on my device that accesses my address book, location, or whatnot. Period.  If that is the only way to get a game these days, game developers can all f**k themselves while they starve to death for all I care, I'm out. bye.

Maybe the platform is just too constrained. Not only does it pretty much only suit short play sessions, but it has so little real estate to show you what's going on/happened last session making it far harder to pick up and put down repeatedly.  Swiping is more annoying than useful in most cases and the lack of physical controls or the ability to precisely point further limit the amount of useful interaction space the game can present at a time. And it also needs to survive far more distractions than while seated at a desktop/couch, as you move in line, chat with someone, check if you are at your station, try not to fall down the manhole, recover from colliding with others, switch to another app when the boss walks in, answer the phone when it rings, etc.

It seems like it would be a great platform for turn based stuff that doesn't require reflexes or tight controls or large viewing space, stuff like 4X games or Adventure games or weird stuff like Sims Medieval or something.  But the few games of those types out there all seem to be crippled by poor controls, display constraints, f2p stupidity or are just plain incomplete and barely worth calling a sales prototype. But you can find thousands of pieces of crap like Flappy Bird and Cookie Clicker (or whatever the hell that incredibly thinly camouflaged Skinner box my grandson was playing is called).

I've heard a lot of people recently say that they've stopped playing mobile games for similar reasons. Overall dissatisfaction with the games, the realization that time is as important as money and that playing a cheap bad game is worse than playing a more expensive good one, store so crowded that it's impossible to wade through.

Facebook went through the same thing. There was a period of time where a lot of people dabbled in FB games, now the people who play FB games seem to be mostly FB gamers - the dabblers have stopped dabbling. A few years ago "core gamers" might at least try something like Sims Social or Facebook Civ, but not any more.

Personally, I'm still grumpy about consoles fucking with my Rainbow 6, or Thief, or Deus Ex. I don't have the energy left to be a bitch about mobile games.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85841906/Naamloos-2_bewerkt-1.png)