Phone games suck

How can we make them not suck?

Let me just preface this by saying that I am not a game developer. I have never been involved in the making of games. I’m just some guy who likes games and has a few ideas as to why some are more enjoyable than others.

One look on the App Store, and topping the sales and grossing lists are boring freemium cashgrabs, rip-offs, bad ports of successful titles, and a tiny minority of actually good games that work in the mobile format.

Now, I’m not saying that these are the only categories that mobile games fall under, but there is a clear divide between games created with a vision in mind for the finished product and those created with profits in mind. How many games have you seen that are basically FarmVille in different settings? Mobile Strike (featuring the most audacious dissonance between advertisements and gameplay I’ve seen in a long time), Game of War, Township, Dream City… I could go on. So many games designed and engineered to maximise money gained from microtransactions as real progress is agonisingly slow without it and the few players who do spend this money are light years ahead of everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong, free-to-play can be done right; there are countless analyses of microtransactions being used to facilitate the experience for players whilst not being essential – see Hearthstone. However, it is incredibly difficult to balance free-to-play with the potential for exploitative mechanics and signals in-game. This is the difference between free-to-play and pay-to-win, and on the App Store, pay-to-win reigns supreme.

Nintendo, on its maiden first-party title for mobile platforms, released Super Mario Run. It was an endless runner, a genre very conducive to mobile gaming, but with that coveted ‘Nintendo Polish’ – the controls being simple yet purposeful, the levels varied, and the replay value core to the whole experience. I saw it as a brilliant example of what mobile games should be like.

Mobile gaming is still seen by many as ‘casual’ gaming, so a lot of potential paying customers for games will be put off initially by the platform. Still though, I do feel like with the concentration of bad ports unsuitable for the small touch screen (FIFA, Grand Theft Auto etc) and pay-to-win Skinner Box driftwood clogging up our feeds, real quality doesn’t see the light of day. Creators of purposeful, mobile-centred gaming experiences simply don’t get the attention they need for it to be worth it, so instead we come to expect free games even if they’re all the same shit. Either that or we settle for paying the big bucks (£6.99 in App Store terms) for San Andreas, dealing with theclumsy controls and managing our precious, elusive gigabytes on our devices.

I believe the onus is on both us as players to try our best to separate the wheat from the bollocks, and also the curators of marketplaces like the App Store, to make it easier for us to do so. Apple have already made a start with their ‘indie games’ section, and I hope this does not turn out to be in isolation.

Game makers will be able to make better experiences on mobile platforms if we make it worth it for them. I’ll be keeping my eye out for the next Mario Run, or even the next Monument Valley, New Star Soccer, and Crossy Road. Games on mobile can be real games. They just have to focus on the limitations of the platform, and make them into strengths.

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