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TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

toucharcade.com

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Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#91

Post by nolist_policy »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #82
thierrydamiba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is still fun, but some services are severely degraded. A lot of sites require accounts, Google search quality is extremely bad, chatting and communities are behind shitty corporate platforms and I include GitHub and Discord here. Open social networks are often full of crazies, so that more people remain in private groups...

> A lot of sites require accounts

This is mostly for fighting spam.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#92

Post by mrkramer »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #69
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 Stea…

>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.

I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes better games(Counter-Strike, Dota 2, TF2, new MOBA game - Deadlock)), Epic only has Fortnite and Epic can't beat Valve at revenue, Valve overall makes more money than Epic.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#93

Post by thierrydamiba »

mercacona wrote: post #37
thierrydamiba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they don’t get attention-public-funding enough to be profitable because of the garbage. The garbage is burying them in search results but also literally.

You’re just complaining that the average person doesn’t like what you like, which seems silly. I’m sure the average person thinks what you like is garbage. Who gets to be the judge?

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#94

Post by johnnyanmac »

mrkramer wrote: post #92
johnnyanmac wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Stea…

>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. I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes bette…

>I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose.

Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple.

And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media for IM, built in phone features for recording/straming playback.

>Epic won't beat Steam at anything

I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space.

Even their steam client app is probably the worst part about Valve from a technical level. I'd be very shocked if Valve did anything with the mobile platform this decade.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#95

Post by mercacona »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #93
mercacona wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t get attention-public-funding enough to be profitable because of the garbage. The garbage is burying them in search results but also literally.

You’re just complaining that the average person doesn’t like what you like, which seems silly. I’m sure the average person thinks what you like is garbage. Who gets to be the judge?

My only complain is on the low value of the search results the average person gets, which is easy to judge: passive advertising, SEOsites, etc.

I don’t care what they search, read or watch.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#96

Post by mrkramer »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #94
mrkramer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes bette…

>I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media…

>Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps.

I thought somebody would try to make something like mobile Xfire at least for the Android where you could for example; connect with your gamer friends, see what they are playing, invite them to games, share screenshots and short gameplay clips etc. Google Play has some tidbits of that but clearly social gaming is not their focus.

Xfire was powerful beast at the time and I also liked Facebook social gaming features as well. Discord and Steam are good enough for PC but nothing like that exists for mobile social gaming. I still to this day fantasize about having something like Xfire on mobile but like I said somebody should've made it 10 years ago but now it is probably too late or it's not idk, it seems like Apple is relaxing their rules on their iOS walled garden.

>I mean, Epic wins the mobile store by default if Steam isn't even showing a modicrum of interest in the platform to begin with. And I don't see any other competitor rising up in that space.

Steam's focus is PC, they earn billions from PC gaming so they don't need to worry about mobile.

Also Microsoft wanted to open their mobile games store[1][2] but idk what's with that....they are probably preoccupied with their Xbox and cloud gaming strategy so they can't think about mobile gaming.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/10/microsoft-is-launching-its...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/9/24153245/microsoft-xbox-mo...

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#97

Post by johnnyanmac »

mrkramer wrote: post #96
johnnyanmac wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. Discord for know what friends are playing and chatting with them, twitch to stream games, any given social media…

>Pretty sure the idea wholesale was dead on arrival. Much less invasive apps on IOS were taken down by Apple. And the appification of mobile more or less split that idea into 4-5 different apps. I thought somebody would try to make something like mobile Xfire at least for the Android where you could for example; connect with your gamer friends, see what they are playing, invite them to games, share screenshots and sh…

> they don't need to worry about mobile.

They don't really need to worry about anything but being a middleman. But they always seem to know when to tap into untapped markets. That's why I'm surprised. But maybe they are simply complacent as of now.

>Microsoft wanted to open their mobile games store[0] but idk what's with that..

Part of that was definitely from legal battles with Apple over Xcloud so I'm sadly not too surprised it was put on the back burner.cloud was clearly their biggest priority before the economy tanked so they won't worry about native mobile games until they feel secure in cloud.

But yea, Microsoft is seemingly giving up control on consoles and is more or less the de facto desktop (honestly, it's still baffling they didn't make a steam deck first), so I think eventually they will go to mobile. It'll be quite ironic if they end up being late to the party a second time, though (the first being their attempt with the mobile Windows OS).

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#98

Post by mrkramer »

golergka wrote: post #18
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 worked in mobile gamedev a long time, and I remember the excitement around 2010, where it really seemed like we got a new, innovative platform which will allow for completely new types of gameplay and turn a lot of casuals into real gamers at the same time. But turned out, the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovativ…

>innovative gameplay just doesn't convert that well

Mobile gaming might be casual but the touch UI is huge innovation by itself. Touch gaming controls is the real thing that makes the difference in mobile gaming compared to other types of gaming.

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#99

Post by amadeuspagel »

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.

Did you ever do anything to support that website?

Re: TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

#100

Post by algaeselect »

It's amazing to me that a website that publishes articles (real articles, not AI slop) about games can't even support the livelihood of 3 people, and yet mobile game companies shovel out godawful games and continue to exist. It blew my mind when I saw how there were several games which were some combination of match-3 + PvP (so that you can whale your way to victory).
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