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.

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.

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

No offense but how old are you

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

gatekeepers gotta gatekeep

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.

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.

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"

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.

Because people are elitist shits about everything

I like how everyones complaining aboit micro xactions and monetization like console and pc games aren't also doing that. Compare apples to apples, if you're only going to talk about the free to play mobile games, you cant compare them to the $70 dollar titles on console and PC. Give it enough time and your PC free to plays and mobile ones will be monetized almost the same, weather thats due to new laws or the industries playing the long slow game of adding more and more monetization without spooking off the customers.

What are some of your favourite pc games?

A lot of the older ones are pretty good

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

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

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.