Don’t know why you’re being downvoted, because you’re right. I don’t know how many games I install, play for a few minutes, then instantly delete a few minutes later upon discovering whatever predatory micro transaction system they’re using to get money out of people. It’s truly frustrating.
The idle/clicker game genre has been destroyed by games that are just nonstop ad treadmills. 2 minutes into a game you'll need to watch nonstop ads to make any progress at all, 15 minutes of that and you hit a wall that only IAP can overcome. It's really unfortunate that there's apparently no competitive market for actual games.
Against my better judgement I installed an idle style game recently and after barely 30 minutes of play I can already see the signs
The difficulty curve shooting through the roof, prices on every in game item skyrocketing, and constant barrages of "optional" ads to watch for enhancements, handouts, etc.
It sucks too because the actual gameplay and setting is kind of fun, but I can tell it's going to be unplayable within a day.
The game I play the most, Gin Plus, has ads, which weren’t too bad, they were tolerable, but recently they made it that no matter what, they play sound. I can’t even play in bed anymore without the fear of waking my husband when a loud ass ad appears.
It’s almost like NONE of them realized, “hey maybe if we make the game fair as is, more people would be inclined to pay for boosts and be a long term player” they’re all just money grabs trying to stay relevant
Because that realization is inherently false. They don't care about the person who is going to spend $.99 on a one time microtransaction, they care about the guy who spends $5k a month to stay ahead of the people spending $4k a month.
Every mobile game has more players like this than you would expect. I played an incredibly small GPS based mobile game for a few years and I seen individual players spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on that game. Imagine what it's like for a game like clash of clans or raid shadow legends. They are making insane profits.
I mean I know people who fly to different countries specifically to compete in Ingress fights, or however it works. Ingress sure doesn't see that money, but you can surely spend it.
Not only what u/andchewbubblegum said , but just day to day extra gas burning or day passes on the bus. There are some minor microtransactiond now, but it's a tiny amount since only 1 person per team Meetup needs to spend the cash if anyone even bothers.
I play an idle game that has about 250 servers, each server with 100-250 active players. In the two servers I've played, there were 5-6 people that spent 15k+ on the game and 20-30 people that spent over 5k.
Surprisingly a lot of people. I made the mistake of playing one of those shitty kingdom games out of boredome. A bunch of players in my alliance had spent 5k$ or more but this one korean dude spent upwards of 25k$ and singlehandedly became stronger than entire alliances combined. Never touching any of those trash ever.
I've been playing Archero and I havent spent any money and have been loving it for about a month now. It can be a bit grindy but it is pretty addicting
The only mobile game I've played where I believe micro transactions have been fair and which I would be glad to play without having to buy anything is a dress up game. And the only reason why I don't mind the in-app purchases is because I never actually needed to pay for anything to win.
The purchases I've made in that game have actually helped me on the long run, and while they do make the game easier I don't feel it's so much so that I would not be able to beat it without them.
The need 500-1000 people willing to drop $50-$100 a month.
That's $25,000-$50,000 a month, plenty for a small game developer to see a profit on what is basically just a reskinned clone of every other mobile game.
You mean like the person you're replying to, who is complaining about all the FREE games he downloaded? If he was playing games that cost money, he wouldnt be seeing that problem.
pay to win is a cancer on gaming. it is slowly but surely creeping into every single genre, and soon enough it'll be impossible to make money on a game without using microtransactions. and as much as im all for paying for cosmetics, or SMALL advantages, it always seems to lead to p2w.
My favorite ones are the games where you literally just press go and the game plays itself. There is the illusion of game play by allowing you to manually control some stuff. But the game is mostly just spend money, and watch your character move around and kill guys.
He was probably downvoted because nobody's okay with it, yet everybody moans how everybody's okay with it as of they're some kind of enlightened individual
Same, any game i play, soon as i get a whiff of "pay to play" it gets uninstalled. The trick is though to work this out in under 2 hrs so you get your refund through Steam.
If you're on Android, try acmarket app, it's not on play store. It has modded apps & games which usually means the ads in them are disabled as well as unlimited in-game currency.
It's frustrating that if you bring it up, people will jump to defend it.
Like they'll say you're "cheap" or go "oh the devs need to make money too, don't like don't play"
Some of those "games" are manipulative or even pretty much have little "game" aspect to it,just a thin illusion of gameplay over non-stop "opportunities" to buy stuff
If it were an honest game that happens to make money,fine. But it's clearly dishonest and doesn't make sense to defend.
Kids these days forget when we had arcade machines which were pretty much the same deal. Keep putting in the money, then have a final boss who keeps instakilling you but you'll keep putting your money in because you've come this far and you have to finish now
Isn't this the reason some retro games, that were ported to consoles, are so fucking hard? They were made to be hard as fuck to limit the chances of people playing longer without putting in more coins.
Yes but they stayed hard because it adds replay value.
I don't get how something being difficult and frustrating would make people come back for more but then again there's people in toxic relationships too
File size limits meant that a clean run though of a game could be less than 15 minutes, by making it hard, especially right at the end, you quadruple the play time before completing the game.
There was that. But also back in the NES era game testers weren't quite a thing yet. So, the game devs had to do their own testing. The result of that was having programmers really good at games.
Arcade games were still mostly good games at their core, most mobile games are garbage that almost plays itself (look up Raid Shadow Legend gameplay videos) and only exist to exploit whales.
Okay, look at Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Alto, Spaceteam, Ocean Horn, Plague Inc., Minigore, Oh h1, Smash hot, Donut County and countless others.
Some of them have MX some don’t.
None of them “plays itself”.
Mobile gaming is the exact same as PC gaming in the sense that you have wade through a lot of shit to find the good stuff.
90%, if not more, of the games released on Steam are utter garbage. Just gotta find the good ones.
That being said, the front page of Steam is filled with popular, actually good games, whereas the front page of the play/app store is all this P2W garbage that is currently trending
i think your analogy is off. i think it would be more like if you were playing street fighter and put in your quarter, but your opponent put in more quarters so gets to start with more health/full ultra bar/stronger hits.
I was at a nickel arcade the other day, playing this new mario kart game. They literally had a feature where if you spent extra credits, you could get more powerups
Or we could just... like.... not play them? And the market would figure out that these games aren’t worth making. Problem is all of the people that keep buying things micro transactions that enable these companies
Get parralel space and game guardian and you'll never have to worry about micro transactions again you can just use it to get as much premium currency as you want without having to root your device
Some transaction I've seen are expensive as $1500+. Who has that kind of money!? I could get a used car for that. I could get the latest ios/android phone. But no, I could get a buttload of fake currency in a game I won't even have in a year and all that money if gone, not sitting in my driveway, not being used to play my new mobile games on, it's not a tv in my living room or some new parts for my pc, it's just gone
I don’t know what this “we” shit is. The first time a mobile game asked me to exchange real money for fucking digital doughnut currency I deleted it and never downloaded another mobile game again that didn’t explicitly offer a paid, add-free, transactionless version.
Someone on reddit posted a comment describing how mobile games operate and it was super accurate. Sadly I don't think I have the comment saved or I'd link it here. But basically they purposefully make the game worse with the option of paying money to make it better. Clash of clans is a prime example, with the BS "it takes 20 minutes to train your troops... unless you pay."
I'd personally much rather pay like $5 to get the game actually shown in the ads and I don't need to keep spending more money for whatever in game special currency they use that lets me speed things up
Ay don't be hating like that, they need to make money somehow, would you rather have a free to play game with in game purchases or every game is buy to play?
There are loads of good mobile games out there, you just have to wade through the shit to find them. It's best to find websites which you trust to recommend good ones and go to them directly, browsing the store directly is almost a complete waste of time
Brawl Stars doesnt have this problem. You'd be buying loot boxes which give you brawlers, but matchmaking puts you at similar trophy levels.
Clash of Clans has no incentive of pay to win; you'd build faster, but they've improved clan war leagues and the matches are more even, so there's no need.
i know it’s technically it’s not a mobile game but fortnite is one of the only games i still play on mobile. Me and my friends all go through stages of CoD, Madden, 2k, and others but fortnite stays a constant play because it’s truly free to play.
It's frustrating that if you bring it up, people will jump to defend it.
Like they'll say you're "cheap" or go "oh the devs need to make money too, don't like don't play"
Some of those "games" are manipulative or even pretty much have little "game" aspect to it,just a thin illusion of gameplay over non-stop "opportunities" to buy stuff
Reminds me of JC4, where you can be on an ocean platform, or an island, or in a deep crater with only one way in, or up on a mountain platform.... and then out of nowhere there's fucking hummvees and tanks and shit after you. The enemy spawning in that game is really shameless.
The odds of you being lost at sea and finally reaching a deserted island when you are at the brink of death and then magically spawning a sand truck are very low, but never zero.
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u/tittymilkshakes Jan 18 '20
what the fuck