41–50 of 221 posts
Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't something that's comfortable to use for extended lengths of time, in my opinion at least.
Isn't gaming precisely a time diversion?
If you can get past maybe the top 50 or 100 grossing games there are a lot of really good games out there that aren't looking to leech money from you. I have plenty of games that have been worth every penny I spent with a lot of depth and strategy required in order to master them. Letterpress, Spelltower, Hearthstone, Tiny Wings, Ticket to Ride, Strategery, GD Swarm, Ridiculous Fishing, Monument Valley...I could go o…
You Must Build a Boat and it's predecessor 10000000 are games I still play forever and a day later even though I've maxed out 10000000 forever and a day ago.
I played Clash Royale for several days and the insistence on payments to progress was really off putting. The gameplay itself was quite addicting so I presume they're trying to avoid players burning out from binging. But the fact you either had to pay money or wait three hours to do anything of value was just too much to bear. The entire game design is genius in how it funneled you toward purchases.
Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't something that's comfortable to use for extended lengths of time, in my opinion at least.
Yes, I'm intrigued how one is going to bring "old-school arcade sensibilities" to a system where the inputs really need to be interpreted as "a user pressed sort of hereish, sort of nowish" and when the user does that, they also have to cover some percentage of the screen to do it. Precision is not available. Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with,…
Not sure what the issue is. I've used tons of old-school arcade games in the 80s. They had horrible precision joysticks, guns ("operation wolf"), etc.
TL;DR: person preparing a product to sell finds existing competing products lacking.
He's had his own streak of noncompelling products over the last 4 decades. Sente. Catalyst. Aristo. uWink. I wouldn't expect anything different.
But that's just my opinion.
Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't something that's comfortable to use for extended lengths of time, in my opinion at least.
My cousin's mother gave her a glossy magazine to read a while back, and she tried swiping the pages to turn them.
If you can get past maybe the top 50 or 100 grossing games there are a lot of really good games out there that aren't looking to leech money from you. I have plenty of games that have been worth every penny I spent with a lot of depth and strategy required in order to master them. Letterpress, Spelltower, Hearthstone, Tiny Wings, Ticket to Ride, Strategery, GD Swarm, Ridiculous Fishing, Monument Valley...I could go o…
It could be weekly or monthly, with a mix of new games and classic gems that maybe aren't so well known. I'd tolerate a fair amount of advertising or sponsored content in the newsletter as long as it was clearly labeled.
The key thing for me is quality. I think that's true for many (extremely) casual phone gamers. I'd much rather get 1 outstanding recommendation per week/month than 10 of varying quality. And I know game enjoyment can be somewhat subjective, but there are still some games that are generally well-done and broadly appealing to fans of a genre. If the top recommendation is a racing game, I might skip it. That's okay. I don't need a new game every week or even every month. I just don't want to waste my time sifting through bad games or games that start fun but quickly ramp up the IAP pressure.
HumbleBundle kind of fits this niche, but I found their volume to be too high. And frankly, I don't want to buy a bunch of games at once. I think I'm less of a gamer than their target audience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they can get games to be fun again They are still fun! But the bar for creating games has been lowered. On net, that's a good thing -- we get more games to choose from overall. But one bad consequence has been that people have created lots of games that aren't fun, and especially lots of pay-for-play games that exploit people's weaknesses.
It is incredibly hard to dig through the mountains of garbage to find the occasional good game. I'm not so sure it is a net good thing, I think fewer good games are succeeding now because they are being buried in crap.
If you can get past maybe the top 50 or 100 grossing games there are a lot of really good games out there that aren't looking to leech money from you. I have plenty of games that have been worth every penny I spent with a lot of depth and strategy required in order to master them. Letterpress, Spelltower, Hearthstone, Tiny Wings, Ticket to Ride, Strategery, GD Swarm, Ridiculous Fishing, Monument Valley...I could go o…
How do you discover quality games? I've found the ability to discover apps outside the top 100 to be virtually non-existent with the current app store configuration.
You can't because the discoverability is terrible and the various app stores just care about raw sales, not quality. So that means that devs who want to make quality games never get noticed and that's a major disincentive to produce such games. Mobile gaming doesn't have the tech press, steam-like reviews, etc other gaming has. Its a lot of impulsive buyers feeding a market that delivers crap because crap is good enough for them.
This is like asking where the chess table at a casino is. The casino and the people who go there have no interest in chess. They just want you to toss your money into a skinner box, which is what freemium games are.
Google and Apple could fix this, but prefer to lean towards the 'popular' discoverability than the 'quality' discoverability. I think they're wrong and have turned mobile into a ghetto in so many ways - its not just games, but obviously they prefer this method, which I imagine is more profitable. See the recent reports on how freemium games are powered by 'unicorns' who pay vast sums of money for in-game purchasing, all of which Google and Apple get 20-30% of.