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Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

theguardian.com

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Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#61

Post by pavel_lishin »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #50
roymurdock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>How do you discover quality games? 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 de…

> You can't

jwcooper did

> Mobile gaming doesn't have the tech press, steam-like reviews, etc other gaming has.

I was going to say [citation needed], but then I just literally googled "mobile game reviews" and hit two matches at the very top: http://www.polygon.com/games/mobile/reviewed and http://toucharcade.com/

> This is like asking where the chess table at a casino is.

Ballrooms A through C: http://www.vegaschessfestival.com/schedule/

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#62

Post by badloginagain »

coldtea wrote: post #44
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas. 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.

The biggest challenge with mobile game design is not so much the precision of controls, it's the premium on screen real estate.

You have to put all the information of your game on the same layer as the controls- meaning your number one concern will be optimizing your interface and controlling the flow of information. It also means that the games you'll be making should be unique to touchscreen- games ported from other platforms are almost always inferior, in part because their design is optimized for a different platform.

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#63

Post by tdkl »

stegosaurus wrote: post #3
askyourmother wrote: post #2

If they can get games to be fun again, where you want to play, rather than just kill time, that would be awesome. I still play games on the old 8 and 16 bit consoles, where gameplay always shone. No matter how many times you complete R-Type, you still come back for more.

>> rather than just kill time Yeah, that's something I find really odd about most mobile games. They seem designed as a way to basically put the brain into a low energy state or something, rather than actually being interesting. My personal experience of games like Candy Crush is that people play them on the subway or whatever when there's nothing else to do. If they had a book with them they'd read that, if someone…

They are engineered to be a placeholder for ads and environment for micro transactions while feeding the brain novelty. Everything else is secondary or non existing.

But hey the governments love the mindless entertained drones and if someone desires to be one, it has the human right. But let's call it like it is.

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#64

Post by rasz_pl »

Declanomous wrote: post #47
Goronmon wrote: post #19

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.

For you and I maybe. Touchscreens are very natural for people who have grown up using them. My 3 year old cousin (once removed) can destroy most people I know at touchscreen games because she has grown up using touchscreens. My cousin's mother gave her a glossy magazine to read a while back, and she tried swiping the pages to turn them.

its like saying your cousin is great at special Olympics, same goes for console FPS/RTS.

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#65

Post by [deleted] »

jwcooper wrote: post #14

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…

[deleted]

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#66

Post by badloginagain »

blue_dinner wrote: post #53
jwcooper wrote: post #14

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…

"These games were all priced probably too low for what they offered in time played." The marketplace has pushed prices down so low (sub $5), in-game purchases or advertisements are the only way they can make a living. If Google/Apple cared about their developers, they would force a minimum price. This way, it wasn't a race to the bottom. The end result is either large companies using the games as a loss leader, hobby…

The race bottomed out before Google/Apple were even in the game. Zynga's burn n' churn strategy set precedents for both the gaming audience and game developers alike- pull users into turbo-charged Skinner boxes.

Now these platforms monetize from selling users to developers. Acquisition rates are as shady as they are exacting- you compete for the same users as the top 10 games, who have advertising budgets the size of small countries GDP.

Besides, if they put a minimum price in, they would have to start real curation of the platform. That goes against profiting off developers spending for users, and their percentage for users paying for the game.

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#67

Post by TuringTest »

protonfish wrote: post #36
grandalf wrote: post #33

Atari 2600 games are more playable, fun, immersive, and inspirational than any games for IOS and most modern console games. If you have a few pixels to animate and want to build something fun, you think about what makes a game fun.. When you have HD video, textures, etc., you think about implementation details.

Tell that to E.T.

Actually E.T. was all right, after you read the manual and fixed the few release bugs [http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/]

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#68

Post by Arjuna »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #48
jwcooper wrote: post #14

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…

If anybody's looking for a side project, I think there's a curation opportunity here. I'd subscribe to a newsletter focused on great, non-IAP-driven iOS games. 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 thi…

"The key thing for me is quality."

I wanted to say that I developed Rocket Renegade [1] for iOS. It's an 80s-inspired arcade shooter, with elements reminiscent of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga... and, of course, it contains bosses.

I wrote all of the code, and I composed the soundtrack as well. The bitmap graphics were done by game designer Daniel Cook, who released them under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

I believe that it fits all of your requirements: the quality is high, the gameplay is fun, it runs rock-solid at 60 frames per second, the music is awesome, and it's a POP game (Pay Once to Play); no IAP, no ads.

It's essentially a straight-up, gun-for-your-highest-score-classic-arcade-shooter.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#69

Post by enumBoss »

The state of mobile games is pretty sad, to be honest. There are obviously some great gems out there that focus on touch interface. But so many try to shoehorn classic-style games onto the platform with virtual joysticks on the screen and the like. That sucks so much. And that's not even considering microtransations and all that crap.

Re: Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

#70

Post by pasquinelli »

coldtea wrote: post #41
Goronmon wrote: post #19

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.

> Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. Isn't gaming precisely a time diversion?

there are people that watch movies because it's an entertaining way to pass the time, and then there're film buffs for whom moviegoing is an important part of their identity. and so on.
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