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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.

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.

i don't know if they were ever profitable. But certainly i think there's been a paradigm shift to commercializing everything (mostly through advertising) the last decade or two and if you fall behind, whatever growth you were aiming for goes away and revenues shrink.

And also almost all advertising revenues have probably become centralized with google search, social media by facebook, and youtube, etc. That combined with rising costs, and higher opportunity cost to instead do something else means these sites are biting the dust.

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.

literally what?

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).

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.

Can you name some? I know they exist, but in my experience 99% of them are small personal blogs maintained as a hobby. In 2024, it is practically impossible to focus on solid journalism and turn a profit, and every site I've seen try has either gone under or been forced to sell out to bottom-feeders and adopt listicles, etc.

Some of it might still be here:

https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

Did you ever do anything to support that website?

Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time. I almost struggle to remember where I heard them from, but I distinctly remember reading this site trying to find the next great game for my first-gen iPod Touch. I can't say I've ever followed it closely, but there's a certain sadness bound to happen when a childhood site goes down.

I'll poor one out for TouchArcade (and Joystiq. and Rooster Teeth. Just checked, and gonintendo is still kicking!)

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).

It’s a shame for sure, as I’ve occasionally used sites like TA as a consumer. But it’s also not anything I’d ever actually pay for. If these kinds of sites go away then I’ll just go on living without them. They’re nice to have, but they’re not necessary by any stretch. Life will go on, with or without video game journalism.

Out of curiosity, what kind of sites you pay for?

As a consumer, I struggle to find a voice with strong opinion (strong as in ' this game sucks ' and as in ' we found this little gem on itchi.io and it's great' )

I’ve subscribed to news sites in the past, but these days I would probably only pay for local news.

Currently there isn’t any site I pay for.

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 game players don't have that opportunity.

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.

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 scene died the day IAPs came out.

There is the incredibly rare indie game that you can pay for now, and Apple Arcade. While I enjoy that most of the good games I’ve played before (a plus on the name = existed before). Those that I haven’t played or are new often were obviously designed for IAPs and aren’t that fun when they’re removed.

And I know devs seem to hate it, and I’m not surprised. But it’s the only option I’ve got left.

I’ll miss you, Touch Arcade. You long outlasted the era of greatness for the platform you covered. Thanks for making it as long as you did. One more sign we can’t have nice things because ruthless unnecessarily exploitive capitalism.

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.

I understand having other business models. I personally hate ads, but I’m also happy to buy a game and then pay to remove the ads. And I’m willing to pay a lot more than the $1 that most people seem to think is overpriced.

I also understand having some in app purchases.

My gripe is a few games took a really exploitive route with in app purchases. Having extremely aggressive timers and tons of currencies. And they CLEANED UP. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it’s mostly people who pay nothing, children being tricked into paying, and a small number of people who spend an insane amount of money. The whales.

But whatever the mix it made money so every game publisher started racing to turn out identical skinner boxes.

This had two effects. First, that’s what the publishers were interested in so it’s probably a lot harder to get anything else through. Second, because those games are “free“ it changed pricing expectations that games and other apps should be “free“.

So if you wanted to make a good game and sell it at even a really low price, people screamed at you. How DARE you charge $1.99.

By driving down the expected price we ended up at a point where the only things that can make any money at all or either crammed with ads that get shown to you constantly or designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.

Games only have to be good enough to keep people looking at the ads or paying for another set of Smurfberries.

Worst of all even games that were already made and were absolute classics have been ruined. Because they either get updates to add those features (Flight Control) or sequels to change the game to be more like one of those that makes a lot of money (Plants be Zombies 2, Trism 2).

Yeah, I think we are in full agreement. I usually prefer to try and offset downer news like this with some attempt at a solution. But I know those solutions won't come from anything currently in the scene; not from Apple/Google, not from whales, not from the devs. We basically need a storefront focused on premium games so we at least forge a new audience. A "Steam" of mobile. We can't drill through the diamonds but we can drill an alternative path, in theory.

I'm very slowly working on a PC game but I always fancied the idea of also doing a mobile port. It'd be a fun challenge and I know a phone can be more accessible for many. Due to the factors you highlighted I know that's a fool errand in the current state of mobile. Even if I made it a truly free game I wouldn't get many views (let alone downloads), especially compared to all the dopamine inducing hyoercausla games or high budget services. The native stores are just hyper black holes for people like me. So this "mobile Steam" would really help motivate people like me.

Them featuring my game in a front page article was a big moment for me(and helped it become a viral hit). Best of luck guys.

Why haven’t AAA games on mobile devices been a huge success? Millions of people love their Nintendo Switches, but they’re toasters compared to modern Android and especially iOS devices. With a cheap controller attachment you could provide a much better experience with these devices most people already own. I expected basically every AAA Switch port to come to iOS as well, but they haven’t.

Assassins Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4, suggest gamers don't think of these devices and casuals don't play these games:

https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/28/aaa-games-iphone-ipad-arent-a...

Meanwhile, before IAP destroyed retail pricing of games, there were some, but now the devices can run great games, it's all IAP dross.

Braid, Civ VI, Disco Elysium, various others show the devices are fine. Genshin Impact shows a casual fan audience is there, most likely in my mind is: phone other than "Max" screens seems too small, and few people realize you can pair your favorite controller to an iPad. (Xbox Cloud Gaming works so well, it's confusing dedicated cloud players exist.)

Price anchoring, I suspect. Apparently, people simply won't accept mobile games at "game prices" ($20-60) instead of "mobile prices" ($0-3). I am the opposite, refusing to engage with anything freemium, but I am also in the clear minority.

Darn, I remember checking this website everyday for new games when I had the 1st generation iPod Touch.

End of an era. TouchArcade was one of the better review sites and it was great to get featured there. Going for 16 years was a really good run. I hope the people involved land in good places. Game marketing has changed so much during that time. I do wish affiliate programs for games never went away as it was an entire economy and another way others would help get sales.

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.

Shame!

Fwiw nowadays MiniReview is a very good source of games: https://minireview.io

This is sad, TouchArcade reviewed my very first game on iOS back in the iPhone 4 days. A lot of places ignored my game but TouchArcade gave my game a fair chance and I will forever appreciate them for that.

Thanks to the TA team and here’s hoping the best for them.

Too bad. I wish STEAM would open up listings to mobile games, even if unsold by steam just so mobile gets STEAM curators treatment. Hell they should break into the mobile emulator game, but I guess driving people mobile would hurt their bottomline.

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.

I recall reading several years ago that Apple dropping affiliate links (? Not sure if that’s the correct name) was a major financial blow. I had no interest in the podcast or the reviews of games on other platforms, or the increased coverage of anime games, but I continued to support them financially in a modest way just so that I could read the roundup of new games released every week. A few years ago, there would be several games I would check out each week, but more recently I would just scroll through the list and find nothing of interest.

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.

But are there any platforms that help with managing the payouts and tracking these events? That's the daunting part that I don't want to do manual accounting on every month...

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.

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 publishers. The big breakout hit last year was a Monopoly spin off, admittedly well executed, but with absolutely massive marketing pushes.

Steam is squeezing on one side and web games on the other. When the mobile herd simply moves where the marketing dollars lead them who needs reviews?

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 innovative gameplay just doesn't convert that well.

Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose. Marketing can only drive an install, but after that, it's the game quality and a person's preferences that decide the LTV.

>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.

> Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose.

Marketing is also the process of surveying the market and deciding what to make in the first place.

Good point, I should have phrased it differently.

> the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay

Yeah although what percentage of mobile users actually play on their phones regularly these days?

It's anecdotal but I haven't played a mobile game in almost a decade now. I played a lot on my iPad 1 and 3.

The app fever of 2010 has passed. Again anecdotal, but I avoid installing apps on my phone as much as I can.

My wife still plays candy crush on her iPad almost every night but has zero interest in any other game.

Anecdotally, when I was in Asia I saw people playing mobile games all over the place. Mobile is the biggest gaming platform by a large margin.

Yes, but it's all anime gacha games like Genshin, Honkai, Arknights etc.

Is that a bad thing when you see what the western mobile scene looks like?

I used to be a huge mobile gaming person, but then a few years ago, I found out several of my mobile games were available on PC so I just stopped gaming on my phone all together. I have several co-workers who also did the same thing. We used to talk all the time about whatever new game was coming out on mobile, but now its all about PC and console titles.

You're 100% right that it takes massive amounts of money to move the needle for gamers now. It seems like the group I run in, whatever your game is and you're good at, you stay in that lane. Any new additions or versions, you're on right away and excited about.

It takes a lot for the people I know to try a new game and actually spend the time and money to see if they like it. Nobody I know is willing to do that now since the economy is not great and money is really tight all over. The people I know are only going to buy what they know they'll like.

I feel like a lot of this is people sticking with what they know since the market is so saturated like you point out.

I haven’t bought a new game for myself for years. Most of what I play is retro emulation, and what PC titles I do play are ones I already own and have a lot of replay value. Indie titles are far cooler than AAA, but even they don’t speak out to me as often. Why spend $60 on a flop like Hyenas, or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? Especially on mobile, where most games are idle timewasters looking to lock me into a microtransaction loop. I‘d rather boot up a GBA game and spend my time on that.

>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…

My biggest gripes are definitely within the mines and relationships, but there’s also a general feeling of, I guess best described as urgency, I feel in SD but not in FOMT.

The mines are an easy target to pick on, and I understand why it is like this. The game is first and foremost an indie farming sim, and as someone who really enjoys action JRPGs (having grown up on Summon Night: Swordcraft Story) I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mines. It’s essentially pre-1.12 Minecraft combat (aka spam clicking) against the same 5 enemies, breaking rocks to either get to the nth floor or collect enough of whatever resource to get out and do something more productive. I understand that making it more in-depth would pull the lone dev’s resources from other things and may not even be an interest for them, let alone the mostly casual players, but still a critique I will field.

Probably bigger to me is the relationships. I adore most of the characters, and especially Penny and Sam. It makes romance delightfully difficult when your preferred partner gets with your favorite guy, but that brings me to the problem with the base game. I can’t have a best friend. I want to get full hearts on people without it being strictly romantic, and I am thankful there are so many mods that do touch on this.

Finally, as for urgency, it’s really hard to describe and I’m not sure if it’s the right term. I just feel pressured in SD in ways I don’t in FOMT. Pressured to focus on the game, to plan my time around the game rather than picking it up, playing for the time allotted during a break, and then quicksaving for later. I feel pressured to be profitable, to be efficient, and to be social on top of that. It’s been a good few months since I’ve played FOMT, I admit, while SD was only a few weeks ago, so it may be revealing to play it again and see if I can deduce where these feelings originate.

To you and the previous commenter, is it possible you've just aged out of the market? (not sure what other word to use than "aged") but my point is, most people eventually change their habits in almost everything.

The way I game now has changed drastically over the years for various reasons. The latest for me is probably just being tired of games that seem 3% different than the last fps/shumps/twin-stick-shooter/metroidvania/...

Most likely. My gaming habits have also drastically changed, I would say mostly in part because I find it harder to justify them as a form of entertainment when I could be reading non-fiction books or browsing my RSS feeds. The fact that AAA games have gone to shit and indie games aren’t quite catching me has only further soured my feelings on the matter.

If you're already pirating games with game emulators, what's stopping you from pirating AAA titles as well? I'm not making any value judgement here, it just feels like you compare apples to oranges.

Buying a retro game no longer gives money to the developers. It doesn’t support the development of further games, it mostly just puts money in the pockets of collectors and scalpers.

> Buying a tomato in a grocery store no longer gives money to the farmer, because he's already been paid for it.

Same logic, same fallacy.

Except you don't have to hunt down the descendants of the grocery store or who acquired the company that acquired them that sold it for parts, decades later. With old games the rights holders are scattered and even unknown until they assert a claim they believe they have.

It's not, though. I'm not buying a 30 year old tomato, like I would a 30 year old game. I'm going to keep buying a tomato every week to make my BLT, enabling the grocery store to continually give money to the farmer for more tomatoes. I'm not going to be continually rebuy the same old game on a regular basis. Me buying tomatoes encourages the farmer to grow tomatoes next year, the same is not true for retro games.

One of these is a continual economic...pipeline of the tomatoes being exchanged for money, and being consumed. The other is speculation and collection. Please don't get hung up on the terminology, I'm not an economist.

I would if there were any AAA games I was interested in.

Then there’s also people opting to watch gaming streams or videos to experience a game, instead of playing themselves.

I do this with DCS.

Flightsims fascinate me, and I used to play the old Microprose sims, but nowadays it's too expensive and time-consuming a niche. DCS is expensive, both the hardware and the modules, and it also requires way too much time.

So I watch a couple of YouTube channels dedicated to DCS, and get to "live" the experience through them.

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 just promoting stuff that will be profitable -- but of promoting stuff that's not trash so when you think of a Nintendo Switch you think of amazing Mario games; when you think of a Playstation you think of The Last of Us or Elden Ring or whatever. You know if you crack open Steam that you'll see interesting stuff.

The difference may be the norms set on pricing. Console games are still $30-$70. People complained about the horrible race-to-the-bottom on mobile game pricing in the early days. And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored. So the marketplace was overwhelmed by companies who could execute cheap, micro-transaction-addictive games the best. And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be. (With notable exceptions!)

> 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 more. (Instead of getting low millions you would be getting hundreds of millions). The process was perfectly satirized in South Park by the “Canadian Department of Mobile Gaming” which like all the best South Park jokes wasn’t nearly as fictional as might be assumed.

Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. Team Fortress 2 is an example of Valve indulging in exactly this on Steam, so it is far from isolated to mobile.

> 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...

funnily enough, these factors affects mobile games the least:

- Gamers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending.

mobile games do have some confusing tactics like using odd currency amounts (say, 180 in game currency instead of 200 to pull a character), but changing that won't really kill any game.

- Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong.

for premium games with MTX this makes sense. For a f2p mobile game there is no preference.

- Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies.

mobile games tends to be pretty good at dealing with this. Mobile had huge charge-back rates, be it through Google/Apple or CC companies (and probably still do), so it's financially wiser to just help out complaining customers who aren't objectively in the wrong. the digital currency is basically worthless anyway.

- Children are vulnerable to these manipulative tactics.

A classic argument. I don't know how this one will result, but I have seen more and more games launch as 16/17+ rather than 12+ (I dont know if these stores even allow 18+. But I'm sure they would if it means they keep their lootboxes). A few even retroactively increase their age rating. But those are for reasons beyond the scope of children fears.

It's a good step to make console games choose between f2p or premium, but I don't think this (in its current iteration) will clamp down much on the mobile market.

> It's a good step to make console games choose between f2p or premium, but I don't think this (in its current iteration) will clamp down much on the mobile market.

The fact that Roblox and Clash of Clans are cited as examples suggests this will absolutely impact Apple, if there is validity to the claims, because they are and have been the biggest beneficiary of such tactics for more than a decade.

A decade ago they were forced to create parental controls after it was found kids were spending money like crazy in games designed to let kids spend unlimited amounts of money, and today 10x more is spent in those kids games...

Roblox is definitely a unique case due to its marketing, yes. And it's been under fire for a while now. I do wonder how much impact that could have if it was forced to lose much of the audience assossiated with it.

For stuff like Clash of Clans, I'm less sure. The impact wouldn't be zero, but I'm expecting it more on the scale of making 100m a month to 90m a month. You'll feel it but it won't really make devs change course.

> which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not just promoting stuff that will be profitable

it's simply the law of large numbers. The early Switch was a goldmine for indies. If you could get a game on in the first 12-18 months, you were nearly guaranteed decent sales. That mine ended about 2 years in, though. Still a big market, but you will probably be buried more often.

Now Go to Steam. Decent storefront based on recommendations, but due to user tagging and the sheer volume of releases you're bound to get some random $2 hentai game everynow and then, no matter how fine tuned your filters on. This is partially because again, steam leaves it to the community to tag, but those weid recommendations are a peek into the surface of how much slop there truly is on Steam. And we don't even talk about how 99% of indies fare on Steam.

Google/Apple's stores are just Steam x 1000. There's millions of apps released per year, nearly impossible to curate manually. And due to the f2p nature, it'd take a lot longer to build a proper recommendation engine. because games optimized towards playtime, not getting $5 out of you ASAP.

But on top of all that: mobile games aren't on that power curve where they peak sales for the firs month then trickle along. Roblox was a highest earner for years and probably makes more revenue over time, not less. So the top selling board doesn't change. And google/apple have negative incentive to change that, because they will keep selling and they will get their cut. Who cares about new titles when the old ones are making hundreds of millions years later?

>And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be.

well, money talks, and Whales can disproportionately talk louder than some complaints online about mobile games. That's all that matters to the company. The best compromise would seem to be to support those games offering console experiences (more and more these days also on console/PC as well) but using a f2p monetization system if that's desirable. it won't change the candy crushes and robloxes, but it does show you can still grab console-oriented players on mobile.

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.

>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.

>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.

>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...

> 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).

Seems a natural result of monopolist app stores treating software developers as a complement to be commoditized. That relationship was what held me back the most when I was tempted to write for iPod Touch.

> It takes huge amounts of money to get people to try something new, and this invariably leads to amazing conservatism on the part of publishers.

This is purely the fault of enshittifying the mobile gaming experience.

I moved through various genres like Puzzle and Dragons, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc.

Each one of those games was a lot of fun because initially they left a path to play them with skill instead of money. Putting together a set of characters to beat the tough bosses in Puzzle and Dragons required a lot of skill to get the big combos you would need since you were underpowered. Clash of Clans was neat because you couldn't make a castle to protect against everything and someone with some skill could probably get an extra star off you with some work (I was really good at timing the placement of dragons against the algorithms to exploit seams and make higher leveled players cry). I had a Clash Royale deck based on Golems and Lightning that would win about 30% of the time even against players who had super powerful decks (I was casting things before stuff even hit the field in anticipation of what players would do and timing the delay from the system--sure it was high risk but also high reward).

Alas, the siren call of the microtransaction is strong. People who spend money expect to win and complain when they don't. Those games eventually all nerfed any skill-only paths. And then they expanded to make massive purchasing the only real path toward higher levels.

And that led me to stop playing mobile games altogether. There is no point. If a game is money or gacha, it's completely not interesting. If a game has a skill path, it will get nuked post haste as soon as the publisher figures out that it exists.

The only winning move is not to play.

Feels like the race to the bottom is nearing the finish line

Case in point, I just saw one of these bizarre advertisements for a game where they show some simplistic gameplay that is supposed to hook you, which is not at all the point of the actual game. It was about a pregnant women and her other child, freezing outside in the winter. I had to watch it to the end and it turns out the game was... Gardenscapes.

The one thing I like about new Twitter is how those deceptive ads can get community notes that say "gameplay depicted is not in the game".

Ugh, if they make an ad that has non-game game-play that gets a lot of clicks... why not make that game instead/too?

I've heard that they do metrics on the ads to pick particular pseudo-games to implement.

But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.

> But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.

This video did a very good job of explaining it, to me, someone who never plays mobile games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhajAqI66nU (https://archive.org/details/youtube-NhajAqI66nU).

tl;dr: it's all about getting whales into the game. The type of games people will download based on ad game-play are not the most monetizable (b/c whales). So the main game is a highly monetizable city-builder (which whales spend on), with the ad's minigame somewhere (which at most only has a few minutes of playtime). The ad's mini-game is often developed as a concept for the ad first, then only actually implemented later after A/B testing the ads. It doesn't matter that most people will get frustrated and delete the game when it's not as advertised, because the people who do that aren't whales.

Does anybody know how much money someone has to spend to be considered a mobile gaming whale?

Yeah they've run shitty ads for years now.

And it seems like the one time they did face consequences for their fake ads four years ago clearly wasn't enough [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761349

It is a common trick. There are many culprits using same tricks: Gardenscape, Whiteout Survival, Frozen City, Township, Fishdom, Hero Wars and to some extent Royal Match.

All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.

> All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.

That's because "# of downloads" is a crap metric that's easily gamed (be it by fake ads or bot campaigns or whatnot). A more useful metric would be "# of installs still active after 1/2/4 weeks", that would disincentivize a lot of these scams, but at the cost of Google being able to claim download numbers for the vitality of their app store ("# of app installs a day!!!"), which is why Google doesn't do much against this shit despite the "quality" dragging down the image of the entire Play Store. Unfortunately there is no competition worth the name as the Apple Store is similarly plagued by copycats and fakes, so neither party has an incentive to de-enshittify.

a/b testing to the (local) max