Why do people hate on mobile games, call them "not real games" and mock them, when some mobile-exclusive games are the best games I've played?
The Infinity Blade or Minigore series, for example, or anything made by Illusion Labs. These games are genius and most consoles don’t even have a touch screen or utilise it well like some smartphone games do.
Also why do people look at me weirdly 👀 when I play games on my phone in public while waiting for something?
For a long while mobile games were either beyond simple (like snake on the old indesctructible Nokia) or we’re pay to win money extractor gachas. It’s relatively new territory for games on phones to be anything other than those. There have almost always been exceptions of course, but finding them has not been simple. This is the first I’m hearing of the two you mentioned.
The only reason I can imagine people actually caring enough to look is if you’re playing with sound enabled in a public place, put your headphones on if so. No one wants to hear the sound from someone else’s phone.
I guess the only other thing I can imagine is if you get too into it, maybe? If you’re frantically tapping your screen, that’s gonna draw attention too.
I assure you no one cares you're playing on your phone in public. Unless you have your game sound on speaker. Then they're staring at you because you're annoying them.
The vast majority of mobile games are not designed to be good games. They are designed to be addictive vehicles for advertising and micro transactions.
It doesn't help that the games you constantly see ads for are the dumbest, most brain-dead crap imaginable. I'm sure there are decent games for phones, but they don't seem to invest in advertising.
Play whatever you want, I doubt you’re getting weird looks for playing anything in public.
I personally despise the mobile gaming industry as a whole for its propensity for going live service or shovelware in the vast majority of instances. Of course I can think of gems in the rough but in many cases it went for a business model I ended being disappointed in.
At the end of the day, the switch and steam deck are far preferable on the go gaming platforms that suit me much better.
personally, i still do it out of stubbornness. the old cell phone games weren't real games. they were less than old Atari games. as cell phones evolved, so did the games. eventually we get into the more modern era, and some cell phone games are more 'real' than older console games were.
i acknowledge that modern cell phone games, are often more of a real game than games we had back in the console days.
that said, i'll still consider them not real games for many years to come. don't worry what other people think. if you enjoy them, play them.
I wouldn’t call one “not a real game”. If you like them, great, play them. I have not been very happy with mobile games, myself, however.
A couple of reasons:
While they don’t have to do so, many mobile games appear to me to be designed to cater to people playing in short spurts. That is, you don’t have to build up a lot of metal state about the game; you can play a bit while waiting in a line or something, put the thing on hold, do something else, come back. A lot of my favorite games don’t work like that.
For a number of genres, using a touchscreen is a serious limitation, because part of the screen is obstructed by fingers. Phones can use external input devices, usually via Bluetooth, and so you can make a game that requires an external input device, but it’s an inconvenience to lug one around with a phone, so smartphone games generally need to be designed to be at least reasonably-able to be played on the touchscreen alone. That places some constraints on the way the game can work.
Touchscreen accuracy is limited compared to a mouse pointer, which again limits a number of genres of games.
Not everyone using a smartphone game can be playing sound while doing so; carrying headphones/earbuds around isn’t something that all players will do. That means that smartphone games generally need to be playable without sound, which is a constraint that PC games generally don’t have.
The major benefit smartphones have is that they’re mobile. A smartphone can generally run for a while, as long as most of that is idling. Playing games in most genres burns through their battery quickly. You can carry USB powerstations, but kind of a pain.
Even in genres – like turn-based ones – that really don’t need much battery consumption, for some reason, game developers – unlike developers of many other application types – often seem to feel the need to have stuff going on while nothing’s happening in the game, burning battery life. I’d like to have the option to minimize battery usage.
I would say that a greater proportion of smartphone games than PC games have in-app purchases and ads, neither of which I like.
Many game genres tend to benefit from a wider field of view. Smartphone screens held normally take up a very small portion of one’s visual field.
I am not particularly enthusiastic about having Google track and profile me. A large portion of the commercial games on Android require that one use Google Play Services and this requires a Google account. I’m not willing to get a Google account. This limits availability of many commercial games. I have no problem with getting a GOG account on the PC, and am at least less concerned about Valve, with Steam, than Google.
I have no idea why, but a higher percentage of mobile games seem to go for a cutesy, simplified vector aesthetic. Maybe it’s because they need to run on screens that may vary a great deal in size; I don’t know, but it’s there. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that style, but I’m not especially enthusiastic about it. The Game Boy had the same “cutesy” tendency back when, relative to larger, fixed consoles, so maybe it’s to deal with small screens.
Most mobile games I’ve played that I’ve liked (e.g. Shattered Pixel Dungeon) are also available on the PC, and I find that it’s more-comfortable to play there.
So for me, at least, the mobile gaming experience hasn’t really been one that I’ve been all that happy with.
I could certainly see games that I think would work well with a smartphone. Choice of Games-type multiple-choice interactive fiction, or gamebooks. Those are (or at least can be) light on a battery, are fine on a touchscreen. I’ve generally played those on a tablet rather than a phone – I think that even with those, more screen space is desirable, given the option – but I have done those, and I think that they’re all right. Annoyingly-enough, Twine games – which I would think could be a good match for mobile – aren’t, because Android browsers don’t have an ability to view file:// URLs and Twine builds pages that don’t always work well on small mobile screens. There hasn’t been the kind of explosion of freely-available games in this genre that there have been for the keyboard-oriented Z-Machine and TADS interactive fiction VMs on the PC, though.
Deckbuilding games – though I’d rather have ones without animation or 3D stuff going on, to reduce battery consumption – would be another possibility that I’d like. If cards are designed for a small screen, I think that it’d be reasonable.
I see mobile games as the natural evolution of flash games from the old days. I used to spend my time playing those games and I had fun, but I would never insist on them being the best experience I’ve ever had in gaming. They were just cute games to spend some time on. To use your examples, Minigore is just like Boxhead. It may be fun but there’s nothing “genius” or ground-breaking about it.
In the end, gaming is just an experience, and our emotional attachment to it decides our rating. I hardly care about Call of Duty, but the people who spent their childhood playing online with friends rate it as one of their best/most formative gaming experiences. Surprise, people’s opinions on things are subjective.
By the way, as you’re the same guy who dunked on Uncharted, The last of us, God of war and Witcher for being games that rely too much on story exposition and have too little gameplay, you seem to have a preference for games with zero/near zero story and offer immediate gratification via gameplay. That’s also a characteristic that lots of mobile games share, so that may shape your preference as well.
Personally, I rate mobile games very low because I hate their monetization and I despise touch controls.
Add comment