Ask Lemmy

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.

No one in their right mind would do proper gaming on a phone. Touch interfaces are shit.

I've yet to meet a game with a touch screen interface that doesn't annoy the hell out of me

It's rare I find a mobile game that is truly a game and not merely a slot machine with a different appearance. And of those that are decent games, there are far better equivalent games on literally any other platform. For example, Galaxy on Fire 2 is a great little mobile game space sim like Freelancer. But Freelancer is still a better game and could work just as well on a mobile device.

Many mobile games are just thinly veiled attempts at monetization. Get people hooked, then start adding time-bound gates you can unlock, add PvP with loot boxes and multiple types of premium currency that's hard to keep track of. Doesn't matter what the game is about - you can do this to racing games, fighting games, gardening games, whatever.

That said there are still mobile games that are fun and genuinely good gameplay - I used to love Minigore too, after it was available on Android. But these are few and far between.

because 99.9% of them are cheap cash grabs and little more than a clicker game which just changes some arbitrary numbers to simulate progression.

The rapacious micro transactions we see in games today started on mobile. People associate mobile games with that model. I have some mobile games, but these days they're all premium. The gacha system just starts to feel like work to me after a while.

As to the stares, non gamers always sneer at gamers. You're playing games in public. They'd probably give you the same looks if you had a handheld console.

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.

No offense but how old are you

Multiple things:

• A lot of mobile games include ridiculous micro transactions
• a lot are copy paste concepts or are missing game depth and complexity (comparable with Minesweeper or Solitaire)
• the standard input device (touch) is not great for traditional games developed for physical button games

There are definitely exceptions to the problems, but I haven't found a mobile game yet that catches me for 100h.

Because the big majority of mobile games are filled with ads, pay to win, made for ipad kids, have a very simple concept and are generally just copy pastes of the thousands of shitty games on the store.

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.

People just like to dunk on things to make themselves feel better. And this can be especially a thing in gaming because lots of gamers are badly-adjusted and desperately need to feel better. It's nothing really to do with mobile games specifically at all, you see the same thing with anything outside of the very narrow window of "real" games ie the games these people happen to be into.

It's one thing to have a preference, it's quite another to look down on other people for having a different one. We're all just choosing to spend our time staring at pixels on a screen.

gatekeepers gotta gatekeep

Infinity blade had a story. When people think mobile they think endless grind like clash of clans. Where the grind and wait is the game.

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.

Problem for me is phones are uncomfortable to use for gaming in so many ways. My hands aren't even that big, and my thumbs cover a lot of the screen. Then phones get hot when using them a lot. Not to mention staring that long at a mobile screen makes my eyes feel like raisins. Plus it's really shit posture to sit with your neck bent at a 90° angle looking straight down into your lap. None of these are very enjoyable for a gaming experience.

I won't even talk about the crazy predatory nature of most phone games being aggressive dopamine hijackers, cause that's covered in the thread already, but that 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.

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.

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.

Play the games you enjoy on the platform you want and ignore anyone that gives you shit for it.

I use a gameboy emulator on my phone cause nearly all mobile games are marginally better than casino games and designed around the same idea.

The kind of game I like to play usually have keys to move the characters, keys for actions, keys for selecting items or weapons, them the mouse to move the viewpoint, fire or block.

These controls map poorly to a slate of glass.

Even the games I used to play, like Tetris or platformers, work badly if you only have virtual buttons to press.

It may be fun for you, but I just can't get the hang of it.

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.

Personally I won't judge people for playing mobile games, there are some good ones out there, but most of the ones I've seen seem very streamlined towards player monetisation, or are slot-machines by a different name - it's the same reason I often won't play "Free to Play" games on PC either.

I'm curious as to what genre of games you play, because some absolutely would benefit from touchscreens (i.e. visual novels, point-and-click games), but I can imagine most others would fare better with traditional controls (even at the expense of portability)

Edit: Having actually seen these games you refer to, I can see they're very much part of that former category, and are very reminiscent of flash minigames I played as a kid. I would personally consider minigames as a different thing to games proper, as they're much more shallow experiences, so maybe that is what you're running into with people saying they're "not real games"

Question to you: Why do you care if others mock the games you like to play?
Does it make you feel like less of a "gamer"?

On some level, all games are just pushing buttons (or a screen) to make our brain produce the happy chemicals.

Honestly it’s the monetization systems. I’m sure there are some fine mobile games out there, but they are drops in an ocean of low effort microtransaction factories.

The status quo right now seems to be gacha style games, which tend to be a thin veneer of probably anime fan-service girls over a deceptively addictive slot machine. The point isn’t to make a fun game, it’s to get whales addicted to the loot boxes so they pour fortunes into the game a few bucks at a time.

I doubt that most people actually care that a game is played on a phone, they’re just tired of watching the mobile game industry race to the bottom of the integrity barrel; and they’re afraid that the undeniably successful profiteering is going to continue leaking into every other medium.

Who cares what other people think of you're having fun?

Personally, I've never really had a good experience with mobile games. I keep trying, but the games I get recommended seem shallow, and I have a serious aversion to ads so that ruins most mobile experiences for me. The games I have enjoyed on mobile are mostly puzzle games, or clones and ports of games from other systems. But who cares what I think if you have fun. My partner spends way more time playing games on their phone than on PC or PS5. Different strokes, and all that.

How do you know they’re looking at you weirdly?

People have been calling Nintendo games “not real games” since the PlayStation 1. Who cares what other people say.

Cuz people like to play games with each other without ever needing any object, place, or particular reason. Its how we learn