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TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

toucharcade.com

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Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#61

Post by benoau »

pnw wrote: post #59

I remember when Apple killed the Touch Arcade app because apparently apps that include reviews of other apps are verboten. I am sure that sucked for them but in retrospect was probably good for me because it weaned me off finding and playing games on my phone.

They went to war with everyone that could make apps popular before that too.

https://www.pocketgamer.com/features/opinion-apples-move-to-...

> Of course, the fact that revenue generated by the per install business isn't funneled through the App Store so Apple can take its 30 percent cut will be another factor in the company's decision.

By coincidence, Apple ended up getting a premium cut of customer acquisition costs on iPhone.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#62

Post by xerox13ster »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #50
jhbadger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? If by that you are referring to Stardew Valley , while it is indeed inspired by Harvest Moon , it is so much richer and deeper and after playing it I guarantee you won't want to go back . It is like saying why play a modern Roguelike when you can just play Rogue .

I’ve played a fair bit of Stardew Valley, and that complexity can be fun, but sometimes I prefer to return to Friends of Mineral Town for the simplicity, and can do so on mobile (iOS lacks a mobile port of SD to my knowledge).

I thought I was the only one. I played so much FOMT on GBA that when I found Stardew Valley I was ecstatic because the dev added a bunch of QOL features I always wanted to add to FOMT.

The longer I played the less I enjoyed it and it’s hard to put my finger on. Music is great, gameplay is great, relationships are alright. Something always feels off though.

I blame the hard coded cooking aspect of the game tbh. And your animals can’t die. And you can’t save in the mines…

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#63

Post by johnnyanmac »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #35
rightlane wrote: post #27

One of the last bastions of good games journalism, and the only good mobile gaming site. Another casualty of the garbage listicles and AI generated garbage that fills up search results. I would do anything to have the old, fun, internet back. This monstrosity we have now just isn't doing it for me.

Can you explain to me what you mean by this? What about the internet today isn’t fun? There are plenty of websites that don’t have garbage listicles and AI slop, they just aren’t as popular.

Well if you wanted a whole deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZCzhoeQMg&t=828s

But I can distill it down to

1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend).

2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper.

3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it)

4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1).

5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter?

The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant).

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#64

Post by johnnyanmac »

bmalicoat wrote: post #47

As a mobile game dev, this is a bummer. I have been fortunate to get review and preview coverage on a few of my games from TA. There aren't many sites doing what that do. I get that the market has moved and now discovery happens in the App Store and via advertisement dollars, but growing up reading EGM or IGN.com and seeing people excited about a game just from a few screenshots colored me for life. I'm sad mobile ga…

unfortunate but inevitable. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how the mobile scene became in these past 15 years or so. When you have companies pouring tens of millions of dollars to advertise to a more casual audience who probably isn't looking for a professional review, where does a mobile journalist like TA come in? Meanwhile, the more console-esque audience left because less and less games out on mobile bothered appealing to them.

Not TA's fault, but they were pincered on both ends and couldn't do much as the medium they reviewed changed in real time.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#65

Post by benoau »

fidotron wrote: post #28
chasing wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobile gaming market is overwhelmed with cheap trash. It's what you see when you open a mobile game store. (I just opened the iOS App Store games section and, apart from Minecraft and Roblox -- which I'm not interested in -- everything on the main screen pretty much looks terrible.) It's a marked contrast to the major consoles and other game store platforms which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not…

> And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. There is a good reason for this. “Premium” mobile games never reliably made that much money, even during the early iOS boom. If you were a publisher it took having quite a few hits to compensate, and Android was more trouble than it was worth for a long time. A successful MTX game made several orders of magnitude m…

> Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated.

And finally, there's an initiative to outlaw many of the tactics that make it work so well!

https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer...

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#66

Post by johnnyanmac »

MBCook wrote: post #51

Really too bad, but I’m not surprised. I know losing affiliate money many years ago hurt bad. But the truth is I don’t care much anymore. I loved TA because they helped me find fun games. And while I’ve found a few from them in the last few years like Peglin most of their coverage is unsurprisingly what most of the industry makes: pay to win with smurfberries advertising laden crap. I strongly believe the iOS gaming…

in some ways, this is on consumer choice as well. I'm sure people like you were more console oriented, but the MTX era meant they could appeal to a casual audience who would slowly drop money here and there, for games that are simpler to iterate on compared to something like Infinity Blade or Chaos Rings. Or watch ads in-between their 30-60 second level-based games.

Or in the opposite way, the ruthless Korean MMO model matched very well in mobile and you have that same hyper-hardcore audience dropping thousands for a new character in a gacha. You don't need 99% of that console audience paying $10 when that whale is spending $100k/month, consistently.

So it makes sense that the console players, no longer appealed to, left while the newer models found other audiences.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#67

Post by johnnyanmac »

minimaxir wrote: post #6
n3xus_ wrote: post #2

I'm wondering how many sites are being affected due to AI, I've noticed myself using Google less

TouchArcade dying is completely unrelated to the AI slop boom: as the post notes they've been on the deathbed for many many years due to shifts both in web revenue and mobile game interests. They were good when premium mobile games sold well (TouchArcade was the best place to learn about deals) but that time is long gone. Notably, websites specialized around gacha mobile games have been doing very well.

sites specialized around gacha are probably not just western. I imagine sustaining a few korean or japanese site managers is cheaper than in the US.

There's a few english-first sites talking about gacha, but they are much smaller endeavors. Not much different from a blog managed by 1-2 people that just need a few hundred dollars (if that) to pay for servers.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#68

Post by johnnyanmac »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #42
minimaxir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also correct. > Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What We Are Going to Do. (2018) https://toucharcade.com/2018/08/01/apple-kills-the-app-store...

Are there any good backend/IAP-integrated ways to do affiliate referrals now ? I guess the only way is to use in app code entry to unlock access to a promo code or a special IAP

That's the only way I know of. You tell some code for a game, and if you enter it you get some small rewards. That's how some streamers get a bit of pay.

Of course, the issue is that communities (and AI slop) will just coalesce the codes into one place, often without credit. I'm guessing this still helps affiliates, but it loses the advantage of more traffic.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#69

Post by johnnyanmac »

fidotron wrote: post #5

This is a highly visible manifestation of something that has been going on for years. I have been around mobile games for 20 years (going back to J2ME) and have never seen interest in the field so low. Essentially the noise is that people are locked into habits in the app stores. It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publish…

I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor. Seemed like such an obvious slam dunk (really just a matter of talking to like, 10-20 indie devs with games on mobile already like Stardew. Then the audience and other devs will follow), but I suppose Steam isn't exactly strap for cash to try.

I suppose in all fairness it was well deserved of Epic. Valve had no interest and Epic's 7+ year war with Apple and Google is probably a part of why no other player has tried this method. Hopefully these changes open the door for other vendors to break that monopoly.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#70

Post by [deleted] »

chasing wrote: post #19
fidotron wrote: post #5

This is a highly visible manifestation of something that has been going on for years. I have been around mobile games for 20 years (going back to J2ME) and have never seen interest in the field so low. Essentially the noise is that people are locked into habits in the app stores. It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publish…

The mobile gaming market is overwhelmed with cheap trash. It's what you see when you open a mobile game store. (I just opened the iOS App Store games section and, apart from Minecraft and Roblox -- which I'm not interested in -- everything on the main screen pretty much looks terrible.) It's a marked contrast to the major consoles and other game store platforms which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not…

[deleted]
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