I remember when Yahtzee once unironically said something along the lines of "The mobile gaming market is the only place you see variety anymore" back when he reviewed Angry Birds and Cut the Rope
@@jamesbevan9939 So does horse armor. The problems for monetization run deep and the industries behind mobile games and modern IP owners & publishers see everything as "any way to extract wealth is justifiable."
Ah yes, the defining mobile games that definitely weren't rip-offs or convenient copies of games that Newgrounds artists had been pumping out for fucking 10 years previously. I have never seen an original mobile game (not that i've really looked) beyond the likes of Donut County (which is absolutely fucking brilliant, btw).
I'll never forget what made me buy The Banner Saga on my iPhone - at the time, the game was selling for the astronomical price of $10. The creator of the game said in an interview "People ask me why the app costs so much when other games on the App Store are $5, $1, or even free. I tell them that it's because our game is a $10 game". I bought that game for $10. It was worth way more than that. But we'll probably never see that level of audacity again.
I’m old enough to remember when gameloft did this too. Sell a game for six bucks straight up and no in game purchase (the model wasn’t there yet, not that they probably weren’t trying). One of the sci-fi shooter that was a bit a of a halo clone, a Medal of Honor licensed game, etc I remember 2014/2015 is when this endless ripoff trend really calcified. When what was once 6-10$ became free with in app purchase or endless ads
I'm surprised this video went the entire time without talking about Gacha, the trend of tricking people into playing a normal game (especially one based on a popular/lucrative IP like say, Simpsons or Fate/stay Night) and then creating constant progression roadblocks and multiple different currencies to convince people to spend hundreds on a single phone game. Once companies realized that could be the profit model it prevented most traditional games from ever rising to greatness again.
While they are certainly pulling in a lot of money, I would argue Gacha games can be some of the most immersive and mechanically complicated games on mobile right now. Quite a few of them require actual thought, some skill and dozens of spreadsheets to play, not to mention the much deeper storylines that the best of them offer.
@@hamham_6411 True, but it did start on mobile with games like Clash of Clans, bled its way into SOME console games like EA and 2K sports stuff, but is a larger chunk of the mobile space.
Mobile games have other monetization models too. There are games on the store where the entire gameplay loop consists of watching an ad every few minutes. The rest of the game just plays itself while the player watches
I really appreciate the focus on the "clone games" side of the mobile market. People tend to rage at the gachas and other kinds of heavily monetized games, and everyone and their mums have already talked about it ad-nauseum (honestly for good reason) but this side mostly gets overlooked, maybe because these ripoffs are not the ones making headlines that they are raking millions.
There is a presentation called _Turning players into payers_ that describes what happened to the mobile games industry. Manipulative, FOMO , hurry-up-and-wait gaming, pay to progress turned it into a greedy cesspool where chasing metrics of how to extract as much money as possible from players became more important then designing a fun game that respected player’s time.
The irony (to my mind) is how phone and tablet makers celebrate how the latest mobile chips can offer 'console level performance' - yet the games themselves are... well not console level games. It amuses and frustrates me in equal measure.
Game devs have to market to the $100 Wal⭐Mart smartphone audience in the same breath, completely invalidating the relevance of an excellent piece of silicon within a $600-$2000 housing. Basically devs aim for the absolute bottom line as always. Expect disappointment, never be disappointed 😎7
If we had more games like CoD:Mobile, Genshin Impact, Alien Isolation, Xcom 2, Sky" Children of the Light, Fornite, Pokemon Unite, Apex Legends, Pascal's Wager, Battlechaser's Nightwar, Shadow Fight Arena, and other ports, that would make upgrading to better chips more wothwhile. The clones need to die out. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I am kind of glad some AAA devs are making games for mobile now. CoD" Mobile, Apex Legends, Pokemon Unite, Diablo, Valorant, Fornite, and Final Fantasy Ever Crisis tells me there is potential for games with bigger production value.
"Our phones can deliver console level experiences." "Our consoles can deliver PC level experiences." Why can't we just focus on what makes each platform unique? PC will always be at the top, so design games that maximize the use of console or phone advantages!
I remember when people thought mobile gaming was going to erase handheld gaming and I would state that the core audience between the two designs are, while occasionally overlapping, vastly different. Mobile games are designed primarily to be little distractions to be played in short intervals because normally you're doing something else at the same time. While handheld games we're not a distraction but the actual thing you were focusing on at the moment.
I remember reading a call for smart watch game devs, to make games that can be played in a few seconds, like while you're standing there waiting for the cashier to ring up your groceries. Because you can't just look at the gums and mints for ten seconds.
Well it's not that they're wrong, it absolutely has the capability to make handhelds obsolete now, it just doesn't have the market/games available to allow it to do so, I mean take Stardew Valley for instance, if you already have a phone would you buy a handheld or whatever to play it when you could just buy it on a phone? I don't know if it has changed as of lately, but of course the other problem is developers have or had to manually add support for controllers, putting the burden on them makes compatibility with other input devices kinda spotty and even harder to get more traditional games on there.
In a way, they did. The 3DS and Vita released when mobile was taking off and they sold a lot worse than their predecessors, then Nintendo announced the Switch as a console you can take with you instead of a handheld you can play on TV.
Thing with handheld gaming is that, for the most part, you don't really see dedicated handheld consoles anymore. You don't see Sony hyping up a Vita 2, or Microsoft pushing their own portable on-the-move console. The only real handheld console you see nowadays is the Nintendo Switch, which reigns unchallenged in the niche while still having a foot in the home console space by virtue of its docking mode. So while mobile technically didn't erase handheld gaming, handheld gaming doesn't seem nearly as prominent anymore. Though who knows, maybe the Steam Deck will change all that somehow. I don't know if it's gonna do much, but if it does somehow revitalize the handheld gaming space by some wild miracle, maybe that'll help renew interest in the niche outside of Nintendo and Valve.
@@GmodPlusWoW | The Evercade is the closest to a dedicated handheld I've seen outside of the Deck and Switch and it's basically a emulator device that went through the trouble of actually licensing out its library.
Doesn’t apple arcade have a ton of original games though? Like sneaky Sasquatch or exit the gungeon? After all, paid games generally rise from the rubble due to having an actual price tag and needing to convince people to pay for it.
That's pretty much true of all mainstream games tbh. There have definitely been original stories since 2010 but there really hasn't been that much innovation in gameplay. It's all third or first person shooters OR first or third person stealth action games as far as the eye can see, optionally open world... or stuff that's even older in concept like 2D platformers.
@@jaklawrence4301 But these are the same stories these are literally the same exact games Subway surfers has been in the top games since literally 2012
It's like instead of making us have fun, they figure out how to hack our brains. Sadly it's fairly easy to make a game that people want to play even when they're not having fun playing it.
@@Shinku_no_sanbun I think we've all instinctively known this since kindergarten. The first time we got crafting glue on our fingers and had to peel it off. 'Satisfying' is more powerful than 'fun'. Alternately, the discovery of bubble rap.
Yeah, I see those all the time and figure it'd be a nice mindless distraction, exactly what I want to do on my phone (if I wanted anything of actual substance, I'd use a bigger screen). The deluge of ads is enough to keep me away from actually trying - I leave my mobile gaming to something I can throw $3 at to permanently turn off ads.
If you look at the number of phone games that have made more money than the highest grossing movie of all time, there are EIGHTEEN of them. The top one has made 4.5x more than Avatar. And yet these eighteen games have failed to really create recognizable intellectual properties. Edit: It's 4.5x. I can't do mental math.
That might be like saying Reese's has made more money than one of those real exclusive restaurants where a single chocolate torte is 4 grand. Yeah the profit margins for charging rich people a normal person's monthly wage to artfully smear raspberry sauce on a supply store plate are amazing, but have you tried selling ten trillion things for $1.09 apiece?
And that's just the eighteen games that made MORE money than any movie in history, what about all the mobile games that made equal money? Or were just very profitable comparably to the development budget (that probably consisted of coffee and strong mints)? There's still a great platform to be found in mobile gaming, but I believe the big issue is that the audience actually willing to pay for a game is very small, thus we get games with predatory monetisation practices, and all the cheap knock-offs a bottom of the barrel market creates.
“The smart miners have already cashed in and pissed off”. I did my own dive through the App Store and took a look at what happened to the mobile games I used to play 5-6 years ago. One company had completely gone, it’s Gacha games gone from the App Store. Either they went bust or cashed out. Another studio, Kairosoft, used to make brilliant £2.50 - £3 tycoon games. About 6 years ago, they dipped their toe into the f2p with ads and IAPs. Ever since then, their catalogue has been devouring itself, with sequels to their own games with less features and more ads. They even went back to their own existing games which you had to pay to purchase and locked content behind “share” walls. My final stop was the “cookie clicker” clones. These have stayed the same in terms of monetisation. The only thing I noticed on the one I checked was that they added on a system of relics and relic crafting using their slow to acquire premium currency. So, you know, it looks like the compost heap is Steaming nicely.
Fruit Ninja... Wow, now that takes me back. This video, is the reason I quit playing mobile games altogether. In the past I was able to get away with games dominated with ads, by just turning off my mobile data, but even that stopped working after a while. Of course there's still games out there that don't contain ads, but obviously there's other methods of these developers to earn cash, and I don't even have to explain how, I hope.
I'm a backend developer working on a mobile game and I'm happy to say that we aren't making a no-effort ripoff of another game. Creating original content is really expensive... it takes a team of dozens to pull off, and quite a long time. Meanwhile if you're just going to decompile someone else's work and reskin assets, the work can be done on the scale of weeks by a very small group of people - sometimes even by an individual. I wish the app marketplaces actually policed these heartless clones more than they do - particularly Google. 😢
This makes me very much miss the early to mid 2000s, who doesn't remember playing those free flash games from time to time, occasionally even in your free time during class? Not all of them were great, but many of them were reasonably compelling for short 10-90 minute bites to pass the time, now we have 500,000 clones of literal time-wasting games that offer little to no compelling gameplay and next to zero progression unless you pay money or spend 3 years of your life grinding away at it, hurray for mobile gaming in 2022! I would however like to give a shoutout to Starlost by hoodwinked studios though, one of the best mobile games I've played in the past year or two if you like space shooter type games.
You heard of Flashpoint emulator? IDK if your still intetested in playing old Flash/Java/Shockwave games, but that program will let you run them on a modern PC.
@@scottthewaterwarrior Yeah I know of it, but I would like those kind of experiences on my phone, you know because it's nice having a good handful of simple games to take anywhere.
I think a big difference is that a lot of those Flash games were made by people, not by companies. There were outliers, like Nitrome, but usually those games were developed by some guy on a bedroom with an idea and a computer.
Agree, i have been well have to play mobile i dont have mi pc for over a year, and yes, i haate that, no matter how much you play, oyu dont make visible progress, they block you to play, i have install and uninstall so many games, fro gatcha, to the worst strategic builders, hardly any one of the ones i install like a year ago remains only one, and that is because it is fun, and fun beleive me fun, even when some can gave you is harldy ever or not endure. I only manage to win two games, one a visual novel, and the other warhammer 40 freeblade, and i have install tons of them.
I think some of my favorite mobile games were the Infinity Blade series. The mechanics of combat were simple but fun, and the games had a story and world that they built up, with lots of cool character and environment designs. I wish those games were still available in the app store
It would be wonderful if Escapist employed someone to specifically play mobile games with a price tag in the app stores. I bet there are some good games that aren't free to play but I'll never know.
A 'game' I'd wholeheartedly recommend is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. It's a collection of games like mastermind, sudoku and minesweeper. Great for a short occasional game, with great variety. Some require deep thought, others are mindless relaxing puzzles. And best of all, it's totally free, no adds or any monetization. Of course, mobile gaming being what it is, people copied the files and are selling it as an original product.
This is truly a gem for anyone into puzzle games or puzzle game design. There's lots of interesting ideas, some better than others, and exploring their depth is part of what makes it interesting (at least for me). The customization options for each one are especially nice to have.
I remember Yahtzee's review of mobile games and how he pointed out that the mobile app store seemed to be a place for genuine innovation. It's sad how we've evolved as an industry
No amount of potential innovation can penetrate dense skills hellbent on earning most profit. Companies might not necessarily need that much money, but if they don't get it, others will. And that is not something desirable within the system. Hence the infinite race for greater profit that never ends and throws out every ounce of humanity.
@@garr_inc That really is the worst thing about it. The knowledge that if you don't try to hoard all the money, someone else will do it. Why is the human race capable of being so shit?
@@e.y.d.6079 Capitalism might not be perfect but it's self correcting; Because ultimately, what sells: is what is desired. Companies and corporations can trick people for a while, but eventually people will get tired of it, and eventually they'll be forced to innovate or be upstaged by young promising companies. Probably why capitalism has been so successful, because it taps into human greed to drive innovation and contribute to society.
There was a time really long ago when some of my favorite flash game creators moved stuff to mobile and I got happy nostalgic pings, but it was pretty short lived when a billion clones of the same game made them all dissapear
I still proudly evangelize my favorites from the mobile boom. Shattered Pixel Dungeon, A Dark Room, and Monument Valley are all fantastic in their own way.
Shattered pixel dungeon and monument valley are both fantastic. I haven't played the other one, but seeing it lumped with these two is a good indication that I should check it out.
@@DonkoXI A Dark Room is one of those experimental games that not everyone enjoys, but if you're one of the people who can enjoy it, it hits you hard. It's also one of those games that's really hard to talk about without spoiling anything.
Pull away barriers to redirect lava and water. Pick which tool should be used on which problem. Work out which number is bigger than the other number. These games could easily be made! ...but, of course, the actual games are all match-3s with microtransactions.
It is interesting that there was some inside info from an employee in Mihoyo on how a lot of Mobile "developers" hated Genshin Impact just because they decided to make something that requires effort to do and cannot be intantly copy pasted for a quick buck. Say whatever you want about the faults that the game has but if it in the future its seen as the game that finally forced mobile gaming to stop being lazy fucks and start doing actual games, i will take it as a win... not happy if they all become gacha tho.
What I find funny about this is the sort of "journey" Mihoyo has gone through, basically until after Genshin impact, every subsequent release from Mihoyo has been bigger and bigger. Starting with flyme2themoon you got some generic mobile game, then there was GGZ a pretty decent mobile game, then Honkai impact a pretty damn good mobile game but a sorta eh pc game, and then we arrive at Genshin impact and we all know the story from there.
@@insertcoolnamelater9334 It was called a Breath of the Wild clone because it blatantly is one. That doesn't mean it's not a good game. But I'll stick to BotW and other games that allow me to pay one price and receive a full game with zero microtransactions pushed on you by progress-gates.
Well this was incredibly cathartic, thanks! I made a couple mobile games in college, because as you mentioned, the design has to be simple and elegant and it’s just a fun medium to create for. I wish there was a way to focus on that without needing to join the rat race of mobile development. I interviewed at a mobile studio right after graduating and not only were the hours horrifying, but there was no artistry to the design. It was pure numbers and data crunching to continually figure out the newest, most optimal hit to succeed in an extremely over saturated market.
Whenever I see my mom on her tablet, she's always playing that ball sort puzzle game. I remember looking at the screen and seeing her on level 252 or something. No way could that many levels be handcrafted in interesting ways. And seeing the number of similar games in that genre, I would readily believe they've got algorithms to just generate games now. Ironically, a gacha game, the cash-grabbiest of all kinds of games, still gives me hope for mobile. Arknights constantly innovates with their tower defense gameplay. Not only adding new mechanics with events, but then reusing those mechanics in meticulously designed and challenging CC events and annihilation missions. The rogue-lite mode is also interesting. They also have artistic non-gameplay elements like the character-themed music, and the lore complete with infection-racism, bara furries, and depresso espresso bear girls contemplating committing un-alive.
I've recently been playing Hunter Assassin. The notion of being a stealthy killer wiping out entire warehouses full of enemies intrigued me, but now that I'm at level 170 (with no end in sight, I might add), it's starting to feel like this was a wrong choice.
Nice to see a fellow Doktah in this comment section, lmao. You hit the nail on the head with that last paragraph, there's still hope for mobile games yet.
Becoming a Dokutah is what got me out of the lockdown rut way back when. Even if it is a bit formulaic and tropey, you can tell that the game was made by people that want to build a world that one can escape into. Among many other things, there's an interesting worldwide zeitgeist with the divide between the Infected and the Healthy, the world itself is very interesting to learn about and explore, and most importantly, you can't help but think about how you might insert yourself into the game as your own character, which is to my mind a sign of worldbuilding done well.
Goddamn, reviving Extra Punctuation in video format was a 24-carat solid gold move on the Escapist's/Yahtzee's part. I'm loving it; long may it continue!
The only game I really still play on my phone is "Flow" because the devs aren't jackasses with their monetization being shoved in your face and the game (and all it's different forms) is relaxing to me
Thank you, I used to play that game all the time but I could't remember what it was called. Yeah I actually brought a couple of the micro transactions for that game because it had earned my respect as a real game not an ad revenue generator.
@@Clara_Page I don't pay for hints ever, I did pay for the extra levels and just watch ads to get hints since they're easy to grind, but eventually I just stopped using hints altogether haha
@@Clara_Page oh I gotcha, I just always relate the term microtransaction to "consumable items that cost money that can be replenished" so that's why I thought you meant hints
I remember us all looking forward to the day video games became mainstream. They finally are, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. Major AAA studios are overworking their employee to death to create visually overly polished games that sell well but are decades behind in gameplay innovation. Not to mention the near unplayable state most major games come out these days that we now accept as normal. Meanwhile, the mobile games have become pocket casinos, suckering people to spend hundreds of dollars or watch the same amount in ads. The worst is when the two collides and mobile game-y design worms it's way into AAA games. So it is under-the-radar games that we find solace in, novel indy games or retro games we grew up with. I have never been so disillusioned with gaming, but the past decade was a sad eye opener. Valve, Blizzard, Rockstar, Ubisoft... It's impossible to look up to these names anymore like I once did.
@@Jay_Johnson I used to be a big Valve fan, so part of the problem is that I held them to a higher standard. In a nut shell; They went from being innovators to trend chasers, and their odd company structure is leading them to create very polished games on launch, that gradually turn into a mess (or get completely abandoned) down the line. TF2's aggressively priced store is still raking them a good amount of money, yet they can't even be bothered to bring their game to a playable state. There is a "bot apocalypse" going on, where the majority of public servers are dominated by hackers. This is so underregulated, that these hackers actually advertise their presence as much as possible (with spamming sound items etc). They halfheartedly implemented some changes that didn't help the issue at all and only made it worse by taking away features from free to play players. This was just the nail in the coffin, as around the time Overwatch launched, it was becoming evident that Valve was being lazy with the game, as every update the game got was a bug riddled, unfinished mess. Cactus Canyon, Asteroids, Mann-Power mode are just a few examples of this. What truly killed the game (to the extent that most major players migrated to other games) was the completely dysfunctional "competitive" mode they released after allegedly working on it for 5 years. TF2's art style is a masterpiece, yet they continually added community cosmetics that butchered it to oblivion. So when they announced that Dota 2 would have cosmetics, the community expressed their concern that the game would turn into a visually uncoherent mess as well. At the time, Valve promised this wouldn't be the case, going as far as removing some of the cosmetics from the game upon hearing complaints. Fast forward to today, and I legitimately cannot enjoy playing the game, nor even watching streams of it because the annoyingly goofy cosmetics, taunts and voice clips completely ruin the game for me. This is obviously a "me" problem, but I lost a lot of respect for them when they started prioritizing attention grabbing cosmetics (many of which cost hundreds of dollars to get via battlepasses) over a visually (and audibly) coherent and pleasing experience. Speaking of cosmetics, most of them (practically all of them) are made by the community. Yet Valve's lack of communication really puts community creators in a difficult position. Dota2 Workshop artists in particular where hit hard when Valve implemented unannounced monetization changes that cut their profits to such a level, that a lot of them had to leave the workshop scene all together. I attribute a lot of these issues to Valve's unorthodox company structure; The games turn into a hodgepodge of ideas (none of which given enough time to go anywhere) instead of keeping their distinct identity they had at launch. I used to respect them a lot more for being innovative, but their games and updates have been very trend-chasing in recent history. LoL was popular, so they made Dota2. Heartstone was popular, so they made Artifact. The best thing that happened to Valve recently, was the complete failure of Artifact. Turns out, you can't just hire someone (even if they're a pioneer of the field) to make you a different version of something that's popular today, and release it years after the trend you are chasing dies out, while launching it with aggressive monetization. I truly believe Half Life Alyx wouldn't have been made, if this failure didn't serve as a wake-up call. They lost so many of their talented artists and writers over the years, no doubt because they took ages to get any project done and likely half-finished a hundred along the way, and all the real development efforts were focused on the in-game stores of their multiplayer games. As you can tell from my long rant, this is mostly from the perspective of a bitter fan. The other game companies mentioned show much clearer signs of problems (botched annual games and mistreated employees). This might be partially due to Valve's secrecy, but I will at least give them that; They are no Blizzard or Ubisoft.
@@Mick0Mania Yeah I don't play TF2 or Dota and they essentially haven't made another game except for Alyx which according to reviews was definitely innovative (shame no-one can play it tho)
Indeed, is sa to think the best moment for games, were when they were niche stuff, for me the moment i realize just how bad things are where with MK11 and street figther 5, in MK11, all womans are cover, Kitana with a burka, and the final boss, i see a guy that play like a god, and the final boss was so hard and so full of BS, it was not fun, the only reason he buy t was because the terminator character, but outside that said that the characters and mecanics are lifless the womans are so ugly that it didint bring atention and these is a guy that love MK. For me was with streetfigther 5, i love street figther, i win the second one like a million times , i play four a lot, i remember going to arcades to watch 3. But 5, what a bunch of crap, the only good thing was Mika, and they censor her, they censor her but slapp, half the rooster, half the rooster lock, stages, stages locks, music, the music suck, and loading times are unberable, and it looks worst, the story is bs that put the main characters nearly as secondary, Chun li, CHun li is a side character. And six, street figther six, logo loocks like bs, Ruy, Ryu, looks like the hulk, and instead of ken a guy that looks like MMA ninja appear. And five, mi, the only character i cared was Mika, Cammy was mi fave, but now they get rid of her leg tatoos, and instead one of the most powerful characters in canoon she is second to Yuri, a boring character that is evil because evil and lesbian, censor also, i mean when i see that i really see what games are, nothing. Also when i find good games in obile better than triple AAA is sad, mi last seen of how bad are games, come in mi last visit to one of the last game palces in mi hometow, the guy there, siad, that games are a disaster now, the last GTA, loocks more or less the same, games come broken, and something these triple AAA companies is taht they focus only in rich regions, for latino america, the console, or computer, plus the game and all of that combine when the game doesnt work or is buggy or is a grind fest to push loot boxes, at least mobile games are free, you can play a bit, for free. Yes games in the moment are a shadow of theyre former self, as both enterteinment and art, i mean come on, very few games generse ike strategy and 4 try to do soemthing else and yet they barely prosper
On the other hand, the premium market on mobile games has evolved very well. There are actual mobile ports now of really good games. Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells. They all have mobile ports. Heck even League of Legends has a mostly one to one mobile port now. There are a few gems that do actually put quality on the market. It's just unfortunate that they're drowning in a pile of shit.
There are definitely some good ported games. Should probably check Stardew Valley. But as Yahtzee said, touch screen requires a different mindset and design. I spent impressive amount of time playing Xcom, Supergiant or HBS games on mobile. But only because they are had some what sensible controls. For shooter ports you better to just take a laptop and be done with it. I remember really complex and innovative games around n-gage era: Ancient Empires, Revival, Deep 3D/GoF, Doom RPG/OaE series. Most of them are actually being ported to iOS/Android. But now you just google "top mobile games of 20XX", see "Raid Shadow whatever" top 1, and delete the rest of the list after testing it for 2 hours. Sometimes you actually better installing a GBA emulator with the same game, but better and without ads.
This has only gotten more true now that RUclips shorts are bombarded with these ads of shooty side scrollers that flat-out lie about what the game is truly like, because at best they're just mini games that only occur five times throughout the whole thing. I swear to god, I'm seeing like 7 of these things pass by on a daily basis.
The thing I love about mobile gaming is that there are still diamonds in the rough, like Battleheart and ~Sdorica: Sunset - which pretty much describe where mobile gaming could have gone based off Yahtzee’s optimistic early thoughts.
This gave me intense nostalgia for a time I had completely forgotten. Showing freinds games on an ipod-touch and being so totally captivated by the new input mechanics. I think it'll come back around like traditional video games did. if not I'll still have the memories.
I miss mobile games from 2011-2013. Even games like Angry Birds were solid with neat physics gameplay. I remember feeling like N.O.V.A. 3 and Chaos Rings would bring about more console quality games to mobile but then people bitched about them being expensive (they weren't) and the rest is history. Only till recently have I seen somewhat of a surge in more quality titles, but they are still drowned out by a bunch of shameless filth.
probably my favourite mobile game is infinity blade. Having an rpg as a mobile game seems odd at first but it being a sort of looping boss run game was amazing. You could just pick it up, fight boss, check area, close game, rinse & repeat. It had everything, simple progression, fun gameplay and a rewarding story.
About a month ago I published my first mobile game with ads, Super Sky Knights. At it’s peak I had up to 80 downloads in one day with a retention that plummeted after the ads kicked in after the first couple levels. This earned me about $0.60. Looking back I would have rather earned nothing and kept my players engaged longer. I think I made a relatively fun game for my first attempt, but I ruined it by choosing monetization over player experience
I would say that there is nothing inherently wrong with choosing monetization. After all, after putting in all of that effort to create something that, hopefully, many will get to experience and actually enjoy, getting a little money out of it is a tangible reward and would certainly feel nice. It is just that monetization is so overwhelming stacked over everything else that choosing it only leads to what you experienced. Given your experience, you could probably tell us how much control over monetization you were given, though I am betting that it was a binary choice: monetize or not. I'm sure if you had any choice of level of monetization, you would've scaled it down as much as you could have gotten away with. It just sucks @$$ that, like internships, the people in charge expect you to net them massive profits while giving you very little, if anything at all.
Completely agree. In my experience, the three add types I could chose from were banner, video, and rewarded ads. I chose the video ones to play after each player death thinking they would be the least annoying, unfortunately these are the most common ones that force the player to watch 5-10 seconds of the types of games Yahtzee described in this video. In retrospect, mobile developers may be better off just charging a flat rate for their games
I guess now you know more about the ads. As for what you do with them, whether you monetize or not, well, that will be up to you should you continue to develop and publish games. Still, you had put in the effort, so it is a bit of a shame that this happened. Hopefully, should you publish another, it will not go as badly.
@@spd9190 Well, I'm not sure of the specifics behind each option, but if the "rewarded ads" are the ones I'm thinking of, then perhaps you should try those? Those might get a better "reception" than the other options. (Assuming those work the way I think they do anyway...)
So my understanding of the rewarded ads is that when the player clicks on them and watches the entire ad it takes a survey they are rewarded with something to use in game. Out of the three I agree that would be the ideal option, but unfortunately my game doesn’t have any sort of in game currency or items to give. It would probably work best for something like Clash of Clans
Honestly surprised that Yahtzee would call Angry Birds “creative” or “innovative” in the same video his chastises mobile games for being mostly knockoffs, considering Angry Birds is just a knockoff of a popular flash game.
@@alexanderfreeman3406 The name you're looking for is Crush the Castle. Castle Crushers is most likely a misremembering of that name and that of Castle Crashers, which is the comedy beat 'em up flash game where you and up to 3 friends play as knights trying to save kidnapped princesses.
Angry Birds is part of the problem, IMO. The concept existed as those Storm The Castle flash games for years before the smart phone. They just added cuter graphics, and then started licensing other properties, like frigging Star Wars. Flappy Bird was another one, I played Flappy Bird on New Grounds in like 2002 or so. It was a helicopter in a cave rather than a bird flying through inexplicable Mario pipes, but it was there. App'd up to make a buck on mobile.
Some games that I keep in my mobile menagerie that actually have soul: Downwell, Baba is You, Song of Bloom, Samsara Room, The White Door, Minit, Ordia, Thunderdogs, Burrito Bison, Bloons TD 5/6, Hidden Folks, Dont Starve, Bad North, Black Box, Miracle Mixtures, Mini Metro, and Huper Life Drifter So yeah the games you can get on steam that have been ported mostly lmao
I've been playing games on mobile a lot more recently due to my change of employer and it's weird that the developers that we used to slight for their scumminess are actually turning into the good guys like Supercell. And I'm being serious as much as we like to make fun of clash of clans and clash Royale for kick starting the flood of games in their genre, they really aren't that bad. They are well-designed with a team that actively develops their games, and they aren't stuffed with ads
These two games have some genuine strategic depth and good mechanics, it's too bad that to play these games on any decent level you either need to fork out thousands of dollars or grind it out for actual years. Don't understate their extremely shitty practices just because their games aren't some mindless ball-sorting puzzle.
I was surprised on how much I got into Brawl Stars. I turned my nose up to it as a game for little children, but it has offered me so many hours of fun and I have yet to find the need to spend a bunch of money like some other games. The progression (at least where I'm at) is still steady. I'm sure later on I would have to spend some, but there is enough modes and a solid gameplay loop to keep the game engaging. Clash Royale was also fun. Their games are super polished as well.
Remember Infinity Blade and its sequels? That was around 2010 and micro-transactions were not yet a thing, or just barely in their infancy. We all had a glimmer of hope. Now look at mobile gaming.
I heard a story once (don't know if it's true) that when he and Jim Sterling were going to be on a panel together, they'd never met before and Jim had to tell him back stage to feel free and cut loose on stage with his ascerbic public persona, since that's what people were there for. I don't think you could do this job and be angry all the time. You'd die of aneurism in your early 30s.
This video hits on a really sad point I have been noticing recently too. I remember years ago I could go in the play store and find at least 1 or 2 games that look interesting and unique, especially in my recommended. Now in the past year or so I have completely given up, I dont even check the play stores recommended anymore, after the 100th time of seeing the same cloned gamed and nothing new or unique ever popping up. Now I just go back and play old games I downloaded when I am bored on my phone, but its just sad knowing that realistically nothing new will come of mobile gaming
Some of my favorite games ever were mobile games from back in the day. Infinity Blade, Nova, Galaxy on Fire 2, Plague, the Lifeline series. And those are just the ones off the top of my head. I miss those days before we were over saturated.
I've tried to get into moble games but the log in every day thing always killed my ability to enjoy it. Without fail I went from this is alright, to why am I doing this? Normally within about a week. Anyone else got something like this.
It took me 3 years to break an addiction to a gacha puzzle RPG game. I'm sure we have all heard stories about how people spend so much money they go broke. Well that didn't happen to me, luckily I had sense to budget myself. But what no one talks about is how much time they suck out of you. Really, that's what I'm never getting back and I am still sad that I got addicted to begin with, all because the games clan / alliance system makes you feel obligated to log in and repeat the same tasks daily. I wish I would've been honest with myself and those teammates sooner, that I just didn't feel like playing anymore.
The difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Logging in every day isn't fun, but it gets you to open the game and well, at that point you've got the game open so you might as well play, and so on and so forth.
@@AccountProto5X your right. I just sort of expected that a market place this big would have a product that cattered to me instead of being more or less all built from the same flat pack. It's all so very generic, and boring...
@@Tyler-gg6xt The idea on mobile seems to generally be that you, the customer, are part of a captive market. If the only thing you're offered is crap, then you'll take it. They don't want you to have the choice between something good and something bad, they want the entire market to be flooded with homogenously bad games, all with the same depressing "flat pack" design. Maximum returns for minimum effort.
That Infinity Blade is not only discontinued, but has been removed from the App Store entirely, is a perfect and depressing example of exactly what you're talking about.
I agree, but to be fair, at 6:02 he did clarify that he was talking about "most of the guaranteed audience". Most people gaming on their phones aren't even casual gamers. Unlike portable consoles, which everybody buys specifically to game, phones, for most people, aren't purchased with gaming in mind. The kind of experience "gamers by opportunity" (accidental mobile gamers) want, might be significantly different from the kind of experience portable gamers want. "Gamers by opportunity" are people who didn't necessarily intend to game on their phone. So the kind of experience that might convince them to, is probably different than the kind of experience that convinces someone to purchase a dedicated gaming device.
@@ZipplyZane Plenty actually, I remember playing a version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on an old Palm Pilot many years ago. Had some interesting physics too: if you rolled the plane inverted and then stalled, you would fall up! Think most the phone ones these days use tilt controls, though I haven't actually played any of them.
@@scottthewaterwarrior I believe it. The GBA is surprisingly powerful. If anything controller inputs and screen real estate are what makes it hard to swallow.
Mobile gaming is like RUclips, where there's genuine good content with thought and soul poured into it, but the videos with the red cirlcles and shocked faces on the thumbnail and the *"BOLD LETTERS AS IF I'M SCREAMING"* titles are the one that get's the most exposure and shows up in the front page. You have to do some good ol digging and narrowing down your searches to get the annoying garbage out the way to get to the (usually)less popular but more meaningful games. It is certainly a shame that we even HAVE to dig in order to get to these games in the first place.
I remember when pushing the envelope on the alternative medium that was touchscreen gaming was the goal, I lived through that rise and fall when I was younger. Galaxy on Fire 2 lives in my mind forever as an excellent example of a full-scale yet concise game, that could naturally be picked up and put down rapidly with minimal sacrifice to game design.
Tbh the only mobile games i have on my phone now are the nintendo ones cause not only do they have a solid gameplay loop but they also don't force ads on ya while you are playing the game
Knowing that there's an editor who does the visual separately now adds a funny little back and forth between Yahtzee and his editor especially with the 'Everybody has a phone" comment coupled with the Diablo Immortal devs shot, lmao. Yahtzee means it literally, the editor means it ironically.
fortunently there are still some good mobile transports form certain PC games. Dead Cells is one of those few that work to use on a phone, and it is a fun game all the same from what I'v heard.
Dead Cells is an S-tier game, it's great with tons of replayability. I don't have the mobile version because I already have it on Switch and on PC, but I've heard the mobile version works pretty well.
The real depressing thing is, mobile games still DO have variety and entertainment value, but that's only because of the rare few that actively seek that out or create it! It's like if your local toy shop was some genuinely quality items buried under a million ton landfill of dollar store toys
my problem with them is, the advertisements and of course the black hole for money most of them are, there are many stories about families going bankrupt because they and or their kids did not understand that they were buying stuff to continue the game. Snake is the ultimate mobile game for me, simply, challenging, and no ads, as they had not been invented for phones at the time, I'm certain I can get a Snake Game today, but it will be contaminated with ads to an unplayable degree. I know a lot of the games cease to have ads once you buy it, often for a token amount, but still.
As a frequent user of ball sort puzzle type stuff, here's a little tip: go to your phones settings and turn of the apps acces to any form of internet. Since it can't load in any apps, you can just keep on playing, only getting disturbed every now and again to ask you if you want to purchase an add free version, which, you know... isn't neccesary anymore
So basically, a mixture of laziness and greed ruined this platform of the game industry. Makes sense. I wish it wasn't starting to infect the rest of the industry though.
I too miss the days when Jack Thompson and Uwe Boll were the biggest enemies of the game industry, not the industry itself and its obsession with greed
It was doing it before the mobile market was even a thing. Online connectivity on its own fucking DESTROYED the game industry, whilst not the only culprit.
Kingdom Rush, a tower defense game from newgrounds, is actually a pretty awesome game on mobile and one of the only mobile games I genuinely enjoyed. Played all the sequels too. Also, og pocket tanks is on mobile too. And it's great.
Preservation is another issue. You can't even play Canabalt on Android anymore, because it's incompatible with modern versions of the OS and the web version required Flash.
This is a great video. Mobile gaming is sad, that's the best way to describe it. But you're only covering 1/2 of the industry. Japanese gacha games are some of the most profitable games today, with gameplay rivaling tax forms. These are even worse because they often pull attention and resources away from the franchises they're leeching off of, not to mention their role in cultivating a national gambling addiction. I'd like to see you do a video covering those.
2:27 Angry birds ripped off the flash game Crush the Castle (which in itself was a copy of Castle Clout) and stuck ugly blobs over the lovely tapestry people in the original. It still makes me angry. Mobile games have always been copycats.
I think the opposite is happening, there was a definite gully in the quality of mobile games over time (and the developers are still pumping out trash), but there is a growing section of really good ports and games, Genshin is the best example but Apple Arcade has really helped push high quality games with no focus on money/ads.
I remember that VSauce 3 used to have a weekly or monthly video series exploring new and interesting mobile games. You can track the degradation of quality in mobile game history based on how that series petered out.
As a teen, all I had for unregulated gaming was my 5th gen iPod Touch, way back in the mid-2010s. *Every Night I Have the Same Dream, Device 6, Out There, The Room* games, and even *Hatfall* were just a few genuinely excellent experiences I found on mobile. Hell, I got my first taste of Minecraft there too, leading to what is probably a four digit total playtime on that sodding block builder. The good stuff is there if you know where to look, but it's ironically a lot like RUclips nowadays. Beneath the red circles, *(GONE WRONG GONE SEXUAL)*s and other attention grabbing nonsense, there will always be quality experiences worth having. Just wish they were a little easier to come by nowadays, especially since Idle games are apparently the new trend.
im surprised he didn't bring up wordle. not exclusively a mobile game (it can be played in browser) but it is displaying right this moment the whole phenomenon of imitators and quick cash ins following its wake. I guess wordle might be an outlier cause it's not an app and relies more on the social aspect instead of the tactile satisfaction most mobile games build around
There's an episode of South Park which is about Freemium gaming. It's pretty much a documentary about what happened to mobile gaming. Good god, remember when it was all about strange pixel art house games which you hoped would one day get an Android release and getting then all for £1 on Humble Bundle? _sigh_ Good times. Good times. _cries_
I bought Unpacking the moment I heard about it and loved every moment of it. Then, while browsing through mobile games, I found this rip off. I downloaded it, because I needed to see if it WAS a ripoff, and when I did, I gave it a low rating and deleted it. I hate this crap.
I think personally, the best example of a mobile game I've played is Armory and Machine 2 - Idle Soul. A&M is a series of incremental idle games, if you like (or liked) Crank, A Dark Room, or Cookie Clicker, you might like this, but it leans way more towards the first two. The premise is simple. You are in a room, with a machine core housing an AI. You are the machine's operator, and you must power the machine. The machine provides you with healing in exchange, as well as materials to improve it's functionality. Eventually, however, you unlock fuel. This fuel can be used to unlock portals. You can create an armory to equip yourself and go through the portals to find resources, whilst fighting enemies with unique time-based countdown mechanics. The only semblance of life is a market you can go to that requires a special, hard to manufacture fuel to access and a special craftable currency to buy from. And even though this game is an idle game, and it does have in-app purchases, I was actually hooked, intrigued even, because it was a mystery and for whatever fucking reason, the mystery combined with the "Number Go Up" thing that is idle games, made me hooked and want to keep powering and operating the machine, because I wanted answers. Just what the fuck is the machine? how am I being healed by it? why is it that whenever I go outside, it is described as a wasteland? And, when I go to the store page for it, one of the images used is this weird maze-like... thing that's never actually seen in-game. What does it mean? to this day, none of the people that have played the game, and there is actually a small community around it, have figured out the answer to the last question. I mean, yeah, it's a code, you input it and you get a storage perk and some On top of that, there are no forced ads in the game. You CAN choose to recieve "Signals" as the game calls them to gain precious resources such as Evos to evolve the machine, or DrillBots that give you even MORE resources while out in the wastelands. But you're never forced to watch an ad, you have to confirm whenever you want to recieve a signal, and you wont get an ad shoved in your face for no reason. On top of that, the only real thing you get from ads that can't be gained anywhere else is Gems, which even that is a lie, since you can get them from quests or manufacture them for a ludicrous amount of Shards, a not that rare resource often found alongside Evos.
What demoralized me most about mobile gaming was when epic decided to completely remove all traces of their infinity blade trilogy from the game store. Those were, in my opinion, one of the most groundbreaking and excellent games ever made for mobile. They were a perfect example of the heights that mobile gaming could reach. Once they were taken away, that former gold standard of what mobile games should be striving to achieve has now been almost entirely forgotten.
I've really come to like Extra Punctuation. Interesting, well-thought out and concise ruminations on the broader aspects of the medium aren't all that common. That said, I need to get on my soapbox here and scream to the rooftops that 'No, angry birds was never original; it was a blatant rip-off of Crush the Castle, reskinned for bland, broad appeal and ported from Flash to phones.' Which, in all fairness, was a winning move. But the bones at the core of it all - the bones of a good game - were just as stolen as any of today's mobile money-grubbers.
well here I disagree angry birds didn't just rip off crush the castle it did more. it added more mechanics then crush the castle ever did so I wouldn't call it a ripoff id call it inspired
The thing that really gets me about Mobile Games is that loads of them were just adaptations/ports/knockoffs of Flash Games. Candy Crush was just Diamond Mine, Angry Birds was just Crush the Castle 2, Canabalt was straight up a Flash Game, and Flash Games like When Penguins Attack 4 and Age of War straight up had ports.
One could go on a long tangent about how mobile gaming has devolved into casinos with extra steps that just drip people dopamine until they’re willing to pay actual money for their next hit, but honestly does anyone care? Reminds me of the shadow lands from Lion King. Everyone knows it’s terrible but just ignore it. No point in trying to fix it
i actually am playing a lot on mobile as my computer is broken now and those are mostly: - nds and psp emulations (other consoles too, but to a lesser extent) - pc and console ports - paid games - actually interesting free games with ad free (additionally lots of money if the monetary system is broken) mods - two gacha games that don't have ads and are not pushy in terms of monetisation (haven't spent a dime on them) - stardew valley. A LOT of stardew valley
No one else saw a positive outlook for mobile gaming. it’s a barely regulated scam shop where predatory companies meet mainstream audience. Of course it is going to turn out crap.
I used to write for a long defunct mobile game review site, I went to the East Coast Game Conference in like 2013 or 2014. There was a seminar about mobile game design. I thought it'd be about control with a touch screen or unique design philosophies or something. Nope. It was all about interrupting the game play loop with frustration points to encourage micro transactions. Basically, breaking the enjoyment of your game to squeeze a few bucks out here and there and occasionally grab a big whale, who at least at that time according to that speaker, made up most of the profits for most games. I thought the industry was in a bit of trouble then.
I remember the iOS same "Alive 4 Ever". It had local bluetooth multiple so my brother and I would play in the car. You don't see stuff like that anymore.
I remember when Yahtzee once unironically said something along the lines of "The mobile gaming market is the only place you see variety anymore" back when he reviewed Angry Birds and Cut the Rope
Things can change over a decade
@@jamesbevan9939 So does horse armor. The problems for monetization run deep and the industries behind mobile games and modern IP owners & publishers see everything as "any way to extract wealth is justifiable."
@@severdislike4222 Yeah, at least back then we didn't have to gamble for the cocking armour.
I remember Moviebob proselytising over 10 years ago that PC GAMING IS DEAD! And had gone over to mobile.
Ah yes, the defining mobile games that definitely weren't rip-offs or convenient copies of games that Newgrounds artists had been pumping out for fucking 10 years previously. I have never seen an original mobile game (not that i've really looked) beyond the likes of Donut County (which is absolutely fucking brilliant, btw).
"The line between fertile ground and compost heap only gets thinner over time." Damn, that's a good line.
I'll never forget what made me buy The Banner Saga on my iPhone - at the time, the game was selling for the astronomical price of $10. The creator of the game said in an interview "People ask me why the app costs so much when other games on the App Store are $5, $1, or even free. I tell them that it's because our game is a $10 game".
I bought that game for $10. It was worth way more than that. But we'll probably never see that level of audacity again.
Well, you can buy final fantasy for £25 on mobile currently
I’m old enough to remember when gameloft did this too. Sell a game for six bucks straight up and no in game purchase (the model wasn’t there yet, not that they probably weren’t trying). One of the sci-fi shooter that was a bit a of a halo clone, a Medal of Honor licensed game, etc
I remember 2014/2015 is when this endless ripoff trend really calcified. When what was once 6-10$ became free with in app purchase or endless ads
@@user-gk1mp1zk7n or emulate it for free
Alien Isolation decided to just be ported over to mobile for $15. A rarity but a welcome one.
@@andrewl3779 Sega have been surprisingly active on that front, they've ported a lot of Total War as premium games, too.
I'm surprised this video went the entire time without talking about Gacha, the trend of tricking people into playing a normal game (especially one based on a popular/lucrative IP like say, Simpsons or Fate/stay Night) and then creating constant progression roadblocks and multiple different currencies to convince people to spend hundreds on a single phone game. Once companies realized that could be the profit model it prevented most traditional games from ever rising to greatness again.
I agree, this is the far greater scourge.
Simpsons: Tapped Out was a nightmare.
Fairly sure that's a subject for a future EP, since Gacha-style gaming is far from just a mobile thing. It can be just as prevalent on PC.
While they are certainly pulling in a lot of money, I would argue Gacha games can be some of the most immersive and mechanically complicated games on mobile right now. Quite a few of them require actual thought, some skill and dozens of spreadsheets to play, not to mention the much deeper storylines that the best of them offer.
@@hamham_6411 True, but it did start on mobile with games like Clash of Clans, bled its way into SOME console games like EA and 2K sports stuff, but is a larger chunk of the mobile space.
The more time goes on, the less I'm joking when I say microtransactions should be outlawed.
as someone who has worked extensively helping design games built around microtransactions, I completely agree.
and create regulation on how/when you can show ads
Stop calling them microtransactions.
Call them what they are. MACROtransactions.
@@Mernom Actually, that's another thing- we really should call them micropayments. It means the same thing and it's a whole one less syllables.
Mobile games have other monetization models too. There are games on the store where the entire gameplay loop consists of watching an ad every few minutes. The rest of the game just plays itself while the player watches
I really appreciate the focus on the "clone games" side of the mobile market. People tend to rage at the gachas and other kinds of heavily monetized games, and everyone and their mums have already talked about it ad-nauseum (honestly for good reason) but this side mostly gets overlooked, maybe because these ripoffs are not the ones making headlines that they are raking millions.
There is a presentation called _Turning players into payers_ that describes what happened to the mobile games industry. Manipulative, FOMO , hurry-up-and-wait gaming, pay to progress turned it into a greedy cesspool where chasing metrics of how to extract as much money as possible from players became more important then designing a fun game that respected player’s time.
wasn't it that one presentation where the presenter actually opened with something along the lines of "let's put morals aside for a moment"?
The irony (to my mind) is how phone and tablet makers celebrate how the latest mobile chips can offer 'console level performance' - yet the games themselves are... well not console level games. It amuses and frustrates me in equal measure.
Game devs have to market to the $100 Wal⭐Mart smartphone audience in the same breath, completely invalidating the relevance of an excellent piece of silicon within a $600-$2000 housing. Basically devs aim for the absolute bottom line as always.
Expect disappointment, never be disappointed 😎7
If we had more games like CoD:Mobile, Genshin Impact, Alien Isolation, Xcom 2, Sky" Children of the Light, Fornite, Pokemon Unite, Apex Legends, Pascal's Wager, Battlechaser's Nightwar, Shadow Fight Arena, and other ports, that would make upgrading to better chips more wothwhile. The clones need to die out. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I am kind of glad some AAA devs are making games for mobile now. CoD" Mobile, Apex Legends, Pokemon Unite, Diablo, Valorant, Fornite, and Final Fantasy Ever Crisis tells me there is potential for games with bigger production value.
Mobile gaming peaked in 2012
"Our phones can deliver console level experiences."
"Our consoles can deliver PC level experiences."
Why can't we just focus on what makes each platform unique? PC will always be at the top, so design games that maximize the use of console or phone advantages!
Pc is always catching up to the latest released consoles @@NoobsDeSroobs
I remember when people thought mobile gaming was going to erase handheld gaming and I would state that the core audience between the two designs are, while occasionally overlapping, vastly different.
Mobile games are designed primarily to be little distractions to be played in short intervals because normally you're doing something else at the same time.
While handheld games we're not a distraction but the actual thing you were focusing on at the moment.
I remember reading a call for smart watch game devs, to make games that can be played in a few seconds, like while you're standing there waiting for the cashier to ring up your groceries. Because you can't just look at the gums and mints for ten seconds.
Well it's not that they're wrong, it absolutely has the capability to make handhelds obsolete now, it just doesn't have the market/games available to allow it to do so, I mean take Stardew Valley for instance, if you already have a phone would you buy a handheld or whatever to play it when you could just buy it on a phone?
I don't know if it has changed as of lately, but of course the other problem is developers have or had to manually add support for controllers, putting the burden on them makes compatibility with other input devices kinda spotty and even harder to get more traditional games on there.
In a way, they did. The 3DS and Vita released when mobile was taking off and they sold a lot worse than their predecessors, then Nintendo announced the Switch as a console you can take with you instead of a handheld you can play on TV.
Thing with handheld gaming is that, for the most part, you don't really see dedicated handheld consoles anymore. You don't see Sony hyping up a Vita 2, or Microsoft pushing their own portable on-the-move console. The only real handheld console you see nowadays is the Nintendo Switch, which reigns unchallenged in the niche while still having a foot in the home console space by virtue of its docking mode.
So while mobile technically didn't erase handheld gaming, handheld gaming doesn't seem nearly as prominent anymore. Though who knows, maybe the Steam Deck will change all that somehow. I don't know if it's gonna do much, but if it does somehow revitalize the handheld gaming space by some wild miracle, maybe that'll help renew interest in the niche outside of Nintendo and Valve.
@@GmodPlusWoW | The Evercade is the closest to a dedicated handheld I've seen outside of the Deck and Switch and it's basically a emulator device that went through the trouble of actually licensing out its library.
I loved finding apps and games 10 years ago and I recently tried Apple Arcade and many of the games are the same ones as 10 years ago
Doesn’t apple arcade have a ton of original games though?
Like sneaky Sasquatch or exit the gungeon? After all, paid games generally rise from the rubble due to having an actual price tag and needing to convince people to pay for it.
That's pretty much true of all mainstream games tbh. There have definitely been original stories since 2010 but there really hasn't been that much innovation in gameplay. It's all third or first person shooters OR first or third person stealth action games as far as the eye can see, optionally open world... or stuff that's even older in concept like 2D platformers.
Least genshin is somewhat original.
@@jaklawrence4301 But these are the same stories these are literally the same exact games Subway surfers has been in the top games since literally 2012
@@GamerKillance Bruh Zelda ?
What's really sad is that as Yahtzee was making all these valid points I was still thinking, "that color sorting looks like fun"
Mind you, he said he enjoyed those ones too.
It's like instead of making us have fun, they figure out how to hack our brains. Sadly it's fairly easy to make a game that people want to play even when they're not having fun playing it.
Of course it is, it would be fine if not for all the BS that surrounds mobile games.
@@Shinku_no_sanbun I think we've all instinctively known this since kindergarten. The first time we got crafting glue on our fingers and had to peel it off. 'Satisfying' is more powerful than 'fun'.
Alternately, the discovery of bubble rap.
Yeah, I see those all the time and figure it'd be a nice mindless distraction, exactly what I want to do on my phone (if I wanted anything of actual substance, I'd use a bigger screen).
The deluge of ads is enough to keep me away from actually trying - I leave my mobile gaming to something I can throw $3 at to permanently turn off ads.
I hate those ads that trick you into thinking that you can play the ad
One of the most annoying things ever, at least let us use the 20-30 seconds to do something
Mobile game ads are bullshit
If you look at the number of phone games that have made more money than the highest grossing movie of all time, there are EIGHTEEN of them. The top one has made 4.5x more than Avatar. And yet these eighteen games have failed to really create recognizable intellectual properties.
Edit: It's 4.5x. I can't do mental math.
That might be like saying Reese's has made more money than one of those real exclusive restaurants where a single chocolate torte is 4 grand. Yeah the profit margins for charging rich people a normal person's monthly wage to artfully smear raspberry sauce on a supply store plate are amazing, but have you tried selling ten trillion things for $1.09 apiece?
And that's just the eighteen games that made MORE money than any movie in history, what about all the mobile games that made equal money? Or were just very profitable comparably to the development budget (that probably consisted of coffee and strong mints)? There's still a great platform to be found in mobile gaming, but I believe the big issue is that the audience actually willing to pay for a game is very small, thus we get games with predatory monetisation practices, and all the cheap knock-offs a bottom of the barrel market creates.
You cant just say 18 mobile games and not list them. Could you please list them?
I don't think that a game really _needs_ to create IP, so long as it creates a fun game experience. I mean, who wants to see "Tetris, the movie?"
@@timogul and here I was thinking that that was demolition man.
“The smart miners have already cashed in and pissed off”.
I did my own dive through the App Store and took a look at what happened to the mobile games I used to play 5-6 years ago.
One company had completely gone, it’s Gacha games gone from the App Store. Either they went bust or cashed out.
Another studio, Kairosoft, used to make brilliant £2.50 - £3 tycoon games. About 6 years ago, they dipped their toe into the f2p with ads and IAPs. Ever since then, their catalogue has been devouring itself, with sequels to their own games with less features and more ads. They even went back to their own existing games which you had to pay to purchase and locked content behind “share” walls.
My final stop was the “cookie clicker” clones. These have stayed the same in terms of monetisation. The only thing I noticed on the one I checked was that they added on a system of relics and relic crafting using their slow to acquire premium currency.
So, you know, it looks like the compost heap is Steaming nicely.
Fruit Ninja... Wow, now that takes me back.
This video, is the reason I quit playing mobile games altogether.
In the past I was able to get away with games dominated with ads, by just turning off my mobile data, but even that stopped working after a while.
Of course there's still games out there that don't contain ads, but obviously there's other methods of these developers to earn cash, and I don't even have to explain how, I hope.
I'm a backend developer working on a mobile game and I'm happy to say that we aren't making a no-effort ripoff of another game. Creating original content is really expensive... it takes a team of dozens to pull off, and quite a long time.
Meanwhile if you're just going to decompile someone else's work and reskin assets, the work can be done on the scale of weeks by a very small group of people - sometimes even by an individual.
I wish the app marketplaces actually policed these heartless clones more than they do - particularly Google. 😢
This makes me very much miss the early to mid 2000s, who doesn't remember playing those free flash games from time to time, occasionally even in your free time during class? Not all of them were great, but many of them were reasonably compelling for short 10-90 minute bites to pass the time, now we have 500,000 clones of literal time-wasting games that offer little to no compelling gameplay and next to zero progression unless you pay money or spend 3 years of your life grinding away at it, hurray for mobile gaming in 2022!
I would however like to give a shoutout to Starlost by hoodwinked studios though, one of the best mobile games I've played in the past year or two if you like space shooter type games.
You heard of Flashpoint emulator? IDK if your still intetested in playing old Flash/Java/Shockwave games, but that program will let you run them on a modern PC.
@@scottthewaterwarrior Yeah I know of it, but I would like those kind of experiences on my phone, you know because it's nice having a good handful of simple games to take anywhere.
I think a big difference is that a lot of those Flash games were made by people, not by companies. There were outliers, like Nitrome, but usually those games were developed by some guy on a bedroom with an idea and a computer.
Agree, i have been well have to play mobile i dont have mi pc for over a year, and yes, i haate that, no matter how much you play, oyu dont make visible progress, they block you to play, i have install and uninstall so many games, fro gatcha, to the worst strategic builders, hardly any one of the ones i install like a year ago remains only one, and that is because it is fun, and fun beleive me fun, even when some can gave you is harldy ever or not endure.
I only manage to win two games, one a visual novel, and the other warhammer 40 freeblade, and i have install tons of them.
I think some of my favorite mobile games were the Infinity Blade series. The mechanics of combat were simple but fun, and the games had a story and world that they built up, with lots of cool character and environment designs. I wish those games were still available in the app store
that game was so good
It would be wonderful if Escapist employed someone to specifically play mobile games with a price tag in the app stores. I bet there are some good games that aren't free to play but I'll never know.
Bloons Tower Defense.
Spaceflight simulator if you are a person who would like KSP
A 'game' I'd wholeheartedly recommend is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. It's a collection of games like mastermind, sudoku and minesweeper. Great for a short occasional game, with great variety. Some require deep thought, others are mindless relaxing puzzles. And best of all, it's totally free, no adds or any monetization.
Of course, mobile gaming being what it is, people copied the files and are selling it as an original product.
Second this! It's such a great little collection, and he has .exe files on his website for PC too!
Thank you for the suggestion, I’ve downloaded this game and I love it
This is truly a gem for anyone into puzzle games or puzzle game design. There's lots of interesting ideas, some better than others, and exploring their depth is part of what makes it interesting (at least for me). The customization options for each one are especially nice to have.
I remember Yahtzee's review of mobile games and how he pointed out that the mobile app store seemed to be a place for genuine innovation. It's sad how we've evolved as an industry
thats probably what people thought of the playstation and ps2 era's of console gaming
No amount of potential innovation can penetrate dense skills hellbent on earning most profit. Companies might not necessarily need that much money, but if they don't get it, others will. And that is not something desirable within the system. Hence the infinite race for greater profit that never ends and throws out every ounce of humanity.
@@garr_inc That really is the worst thing about it. The knowledge that if you don't try to hoard all the money, someone else will do it. Why is the human race capable of being so shit?
Devolved you mean?
@@e.y.d.6079 Capitalism might not be perfect but it's self correcting; Because ultimately, what sells: is what is desired. Companies and corporations can trick people for a while, but eventually people will get tired of it, and eventually they'll be forced to innovate or be upstaged by young promising companies. Probably why capitalism has been so successful, because it taps into human greed to drive innovation and contribute to society.
There was a time really long ago when some of my favorite flash game creators moved stuff to mobile and I got happy nostalgic pings, but it was pretty short lived when a billion clones of the same game made them all dissapear
I still proudly evangelize my favorites from the mobile boom. Shattered Pixel Dungeon, A Dark Room, and Monument Valley are all fantastic in their own way.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon recently had a 1.0 release on iOS
@@adamvincent7086 And from what I hear, there's a version coming to Steam soon, too (if it's not already up there)
Shattered pixel dungeon and monument valley are both fantastic. I haven't played the other one, but seeing it lumped with these two is a good indication that I should check it out.
@@DonkoXI A Dark Room is one of those experimental games that not everyone enjoys, but if you're one of the people who can enjoy it, it hits you hard.
It's also one of those games that's really hard to talk about without spoiling anything.
@@hoodiesticks I've been playing it for the past ~2 hours and it's very cool. It's taken a few unexpected twists already.
Ever since watching this, every single RUclips video I've watched has been showing me ads for the same couple of color sorting puzzle games. Thanks.
What about those terrible games that commit the unforgivable sin of False Advertising?
*cough cough **_Cyberpunk 2077_** cough cough*
@@utisti4976 Or those cockroaches of ads of mobile games you get on RUclips.
@@utisti4976 That was more over ambition and poor planning rather than false advertising.
Pull away barriers to redirect lava and water. Pick which tool should be used on which problem. Work out which number is bigger than the other number. These games could easily be made! ...but, of course, the actual games are all match-3s with microtransactions.
@@utisti4976 Or _Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity._ Marketed as a prequel to Breath of the Wild; turns out to be someone's alternate-timeline fanfic.
It is interesting that there was some inside info from an employee in Mihoyo on how a lot of Mobile "developers" hated Genshin Impact just because they decided to make something that requires effort to do and cannot be intantly copy pasted for a quick buck. Say whatever you want about the faults that the game has but if it in the future its seen as the game that finally forced mobile gaming to stop being lazy fucks and start doing actual games, i will take it as a win... not happy if they all become gacha tho.
Yeah, Genshin sets a really high bar. Ironically people at first called it a Zelda clone, which was just unfair. The game is fantastic.
@@insertcoolnamelater9334 the production value is great. the monetization and time sink is still bullcrap
What I find funny about this is the sort of "journey" Mihoyo has gone through, basically until after Genshin impact, every subsequent release from Mihoyo has been bigger and bigger. Starting with flyme2themoon you got some generic mobile game, then there was GGZ a pretty decent mobile game, then Honkai impact a pretty damn good mobile game but a sorta eh pc game, and then we arrive at Genshin impact and we all know the story from there.
Given the state of mobile gaming, calling it a Zelda clone wasn't really an insult.
@@insertcoolnamelater9334 It was called a Breath of the Wild clone because it blatantly is one. That doesn't mean it's not a good game. But I'll stick to BotW and other games that allow me to pay one price and receive a full game with zero microtransactions pushed on you by progress-gates.
shout out to this format that just lets yaht's writing chops just roam freely. really enjoying this series
Well this was incredibly cathartic, thanks! I made a couple mobile games in college, because as you mentioned, the design has to be simple and elegant and it’s just a fun medium to create for. I wish there was a way to focus on that without needing to join the rat race of mobile development. I interviewed at a mobile studio right after graduating and not only were the hours horrifying, but there was no artistry to the design. It was pure numbers and data crunching to continually figure out the newest, most optimal hit to succeed in an extremely over saturated market.
Whenever I see my mom on her tablet, she's always playing that ball sort puzzle game. I remember looking at the screen and seeing her on level 252 or something. No way could that many levels be handcrafted in interesting ways. And seeing the number of similar games in that genre, I would readily believe they've got algorithms to just generate games now.
Ironically, a gacha game, the cash-grabbiest of all kinds of games, still gives me hope for mobile. Arknights constantly innovates with their tower defense gameplay. Not only adding new mechanics with events, but then reusing those mechanics in meticulously designed and challenging CC events and annihilation missions. The rogue-lite mode is also interesting. They also have artistic non-gameplay elements like the character-themed music, and the lore complete with infection-racism, bara furries, and depresso espresso bear girls contemplating committing un-alive.
I've recently been playing Hunter Assassin. The notion of being a stealthy killer wiping out entire warehouses full of enemies intrigued me, but now that I'm at level 170 (with no end in sight, I might add), it's starting to feel like this was a wrong choice.
Nice to see a fellow Doktah in this comment section, lmao. You hit the nail on the head with that last paragraph, there's still hope for mobile games yet.
Becoming a Dokutah is what got me out of the lockdown rut way back when. Even if it is a bit formulaic and tropey, you can tell that the game was made by people that want to build a world that one can escape into. Among many other things, there's an interesting worldwide zeitgeist with the divide between the Infected and the Healthy, the world itself is very interesting to learn about and explore, and most importantly, you can't help but think about how you might insert yourself into the game as your own character, which is to my mind a sign of worldbuilding done well.
Goddamn, reviving Extra Punctuation in video format was a 24-carat solid gold move on the Escapist's/Yahtzee's part. I'm loving it; long may it continue!
The only game I really still play on my phone is "Flow" because the devs aren't jackasses with their monetization being shoved in your face and the game (and all it's different forms) is relaxing to me
Thank you, I used to play that game all the time but I could't remember what it was called. Yeah I actually brought a couple of the micro transactions for that game because it had earned my respect as a real game not an ad revenue generator.
@@Clara_Page I don't pay for hints ever, I did pay for the extra levels and just watch ads to get hints since they're easy to grind, but eventually I just stopped using hints altogether haha
@@Mickspad I didn't even know you could get hints tbh. I brought a couple of alternate colour palettes for the lines.
@@Clara_Page oh I gotcha, I just always relate the term microtransaction to "consumable items that cost money that can be replenished" so that's why I thought you meant hints
Flow Hexes is the best casual puzzle game
That whole gold rush rant was just perfect!
I remember us all looking forward to the day video games became mainstream. They finally are, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. Major AAA studios are overworking their employee to death to create visually overly polished games that sell well but are decades behind in gameplay innovation. Not to mention the near unplayable state most major games come out these days that we now accept as normal. Meanwhile, the mobile games have become pocket casinos, suckering people to spend hundreds of dollars or watch the same amount in ads. The worst is when the two collides and mobile game-y design worms it's way into AAA games.
So it is under-the-radar games that we find solace in, novel indy games or retro games we grew up with. I have never been so disillusioned with gaming, but the past decade was a sad eye opener. Valve, Blizzard, Rockstar, Ubisoft... It's impossible to look up to these names anymore like I once did.
I mean as much as valve started it with loot boxes what have they done more recently?
@@Jay_Johnson I used to be a big Valve fan, so part of the problem is that I held them to a higher standard.
In a nut shell; They went from being innovators to trend chasers, and their odd company structure is leading them to create very polished games on launch, that gradually turn into a mess (or get completely abandoned) down the line.
TF2's aggressively priced store is still raking them a good amount of money, yet they can't even be bothered to bring their game to a playable state. There is a "bot apocalypse" going on, where the majority of public servers are dominated by hackers. This is so underregulated, that these hackers actually advertise their presence as much as possible (with spamming sound items etc). They halfheartedly implemented some changes that didn't help the issue at all and only made it worse by taking away features from free to play players. This was just the nail in the coffin, as around the time Overwatch launched, it was becoming evident that Valve was being lazy with the game, as every update the game got was a bug riddled, unfinished mess. Cactus Canyon, Asteroids, Mann-Power mode are just a few examples of this. What truly killed the game (to the extent that most major players migrated to other games) was the completely dysfunctional "competitive" mode they released after allegedly working on it for 5 years.
TF2's art style is a masterpiece, yet they continually added community cosmetics that butchered it to oblivion. So when they announced that Dota 2 would have cosmetics, the community expressed their concern that the game would turn into a visually uncoherent mess as well. At the time, Valve promised this wouldn't be the case, going as far as removing some of the cosmetics from the game upon hearing complaints. Fast forward to today, and I legitimately cannot enjoy playing the game, nor even watching streams of it because the annoyingly goofy cosmetics, taunts and voice clips completely ruin the game for me. This is obviously a "me" problem, but I lost a lot of respect for them when they started prioritizing attention grabbing cosmetics (many of which cost hundreds of dollars to get via battlepasses) over a visually (and audibly) coherent and pleasing experience.
Speaking of cosmetics, most of them (practically all of them) are made by the community. Yet Valve's lack of communication really puts community creators in a difficult position. Dota2 Workshop artists in particular where hit hard when Valve implemented unannounced monetization changes that cut their profits to such a level, that a lot of them had to leave the workshop scene all together.
I attribute a lot of these issues to Valve's unorthodox company structure; The games turn into a hodgepodge of ideas (none of which given enough time to go anywhere) instead of keeping their distinct identity they had at launch. I used to respect them a lot more for being innovative, but their games and updates have been very trend-chasing in recent history. LoL was popular, so they made Dota2. Heartstone was popular, so they made Artifact. The best thing that happened to Valve recently, was the complete failure of Artifact. Turns out, you can't just hire someone (even if they're a pioneer of the field) to make you a different version of something that's popular today, and release it years after the trend you are chasing dies out, while launching it with aggressive monetization. I truly believe Half Life Alyx wouldn't have been made, if this failure didn't serve as a wake-up call. They lost so many of their talented artists and writers over the years, no doubt because they took ages to get any project done and likely half-finished a hundred along the way, and all the real development efforts were focused on the in-game stores of their multiplayer games.
As you can tell from my long rant, this is mostly from the perspective of a bitter fan. The other game companies mentioned show much clearer signs of problems (botched annual games and mistreated employees). This might be partially due to Valve's secrecy, but I will at least give them that; They are no Blizzard or Ubisoft.
@@Mick0Mania Yeah I don't play TF2 or Dota and they essentially haven't made another game except for Alyx which according to reviews was definitely innovative (shame no-one can play it tho)
Indeed, is sa to think the best moment for games, were when they were niche stuff, for me the moment i realize just how bad things are where with MK11 and street figther 5, in MK11, all womans are cover, Kitana with a burka, and the final boss, i see a guy that play like a god, and the final boss was so hard and so full of BS, it was not fun, the only reason he buy t was because the terminator character, but outside that said that the characters and mecanics are lifless the womans are so ugly that it didint bring atention and these is a guy that love MK.
For me was with streetfigther 5, i love street figther, i win the second one like a million times , i play four a lot, i remember going to arcades to watch 3.
But 5, what a bunch of crap, the only good thing was Mika, and they censor her, they censor her but slapp, half the rooster, half the rooster lock, stages, stages locks, music, the music suck, and loading times are unberable, and it looks worst, the story is bs that put the main characters nearly as secondary, Chun li, CHun li is a side character.
And six, street figther six, logo loocks like bs, Ruy, Ryu, looks like the hulk, and instead of ken a guy that looks like MMA ninja appear.
And five, mi, the only character i cared was Mika, Cammy was mi fave, but now they get rid of her leg tatoos, and instead one of the most powerful characters in canoon she is second to Yuri, a boring character that is evil because evil and lesbian, censor also, i mean when i see that i really see what games are, nothing.
Also when i find good games in obile better than triple AAA is sad, mi last seen of how bad are games, come in mi last visit to one of the last game palces in mi hometow, the guy there, siad, that games are a disaster now, the last GTA, loocks more or less the same, games come broken, and something these triple AAA companies is taht they focus only in rich regions, for latino america, the console, or computer, plus the game and all of that combine when the game doesnt work or is buggy or is a grind fest to push loot boxes, at least mobile games are free, you can play a bit, for free.
Yes games in the moment are a shadow of theyre former self, as both enterteinment and art, i mean come on, very few games generse ike strategy and 4 try to do soemthing else and yet they barely prosper
Thanks!
That ending is certainly interesting. Basically said “Maybe I’m not the intended audience for this and I don’t care”
Except the intended audience is people with gambling problems to exploit till they’re broke. It should be illegal but hey, it’s just games!
@@jacopovilla1590 do whatever you want. Yahtzee doesn’t seem to care
The mentality of letting people hurt themselves is such a shit mentality
Takes a lot of maturity to say “Do whatever you want. Yahtzee doesn’t seem to care”
@@jacopovilla1590 dude are you alright? What are you doing?
On the other hand, the premium market on mobile games has evolved very well. There are actual mobile ports now of really good games. Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells. They all have mobile ports. Heck even League of Legends has a mostly one to one mobile port now.
There are a few gems that do actually put quality on the market. It's just unfortunate that they're drowning in a pile of shit.
On game quality, big companies are doing great strides. On the hope of innovations from mobile games, consider it dead.
There are definitely some good ported games. Should probably check Stardew Valley.
But as Yahtzee said, touch screen requires a different mindset and design.
I spent impressive amount of time playing Xcom, Supergiant or HBS games on mobile. But only because they are had some what sensible controls. For shooter ports you better to just take a laptop and be done with it.
I remember really complex and innovative games around n-gage era: Ancient Empires, Revival, Deep 3D/GoF, Doom RPG/OaE series. Most of them are actually being ported to iOS/Android.
But now you just google "top mobile games of 20XX", see "Raid Shadow whatever" top 1, and delete the rest of the list after testing it for 2 hours. Sometimes you actually better installing a GBA emulator with the same game, but better and without ads.
Very creative perspective on a market strife with issues.
This has only gotten more true now that RUclips shorts are bombarded with these ads of shooty side scrollers that flat-out lie about what the game is truly like, because at best they're just mini games that only occur five times throughout the whole thing. I swear to god, I'm seeing like 7 of these things pass by on a daily basis.
The thing I love about mobile gaming is that there are still diamonds in the rough, like Battleheart and ~Sdorica: Sunset - which pretty much describe where mobile gaming could have gone based off Yahtzee’s optimistic early thoughts.
This gave me intense nostalgia for a time I had completely forgotten. Showing freinds games on an ipod-touch and being so totally captivated by the new input mechanics. I think it'll come back around like traditional video games did. if not I'll still have the memories.
I miss mobile games from 2011-2013. Even games like Angry Birds were solid with neat physics gameplay. I remember feeling like N.O.V.A. 3 and Chaos Rings would bring about more console quality games to mobile but then people bitched about them being expensive (they weren't) and the rest is history. Only till recently have I seen somewhat of a surge in more quality titles, but they are still drowned out by a bunch of shameless filth.
probably my favourite mobile game is infinity blade. Having an rpg as a mobile game seems odd at first but it being a sort of looping boss run game was amazing. You could just pick it up, fight boss, check area, close game, rinse & repeat. It had everything, simple progression, fun gameplay and a rewarding story.
About a month ago I published my first mobile game with ads, Super Sky Knights. At it’s peak I had up to 80 downloads in one day with a retention that plummeted after the ads kicked in after the first couple levels. This earned me about $0.60. Looking back I would have rather earned nothing and kept my players engaged longer. I think I made a relatively fun game for my first attempt, but I ruined it by choosing monetization over player experience
I would say that there is nothing inherently wrong with choosing monetization. After all, after putting in all of that effort to create something that, hopefully, many will get to experience and actually enjoy, getting a little money out of it is a tangible reward and would certainly feel nice. It is just that monetization is so overwhelming stacked over everything else that choosing it only leads to what you experienced. Given your experience, you could probably tell us how much control over monetization you were given, though I am betting that it was a binary choice: monetize or not. I'm sure if you had any choice of level of monetization, you would've scaled it down as much as you could have gotten away with.
It just sucks @$$ that, like internships, the people in charge expect you to net them massive profits while giving you very little, if anything at all.
Completely agree. In my experience, the three add types I could chose from were banner, video, and rewarded ads. I chose the video ones to play after each player death thinking they would be the least annoying, unfortunately these are the most common ones that force the player to watch 5-10 seconds of the types of games Yahtzee described in this video. In retrospect, mobile developers may be better off just charging a flat rate for their games
I guess now you know more about the ads. As for what you do with them, whether you monetize or not, well, that will be up to you should you continue to develop and publish games. Still, you had put in the effort, so it is a bit of a shame that this happened. Hopefully, should you publish another, it will not go as badly.
@@spd9190 Well, I'm not sure of the specifics behind each option,
but if the "rewarded ads" are the ones I'm thinking of, then perhaps you should try those?
Those might get a better "reception" than the other options.
(Assuming those work the way I think they do anyway...)
So my understanding of the rewarded ads is that when the player clicks on them and watches the entire ad it takes a survey they are rewarded with something to use in game. Out of the three I agree that would be the ideal option, but unfortunately my game doesn’t have any sort of in game currency or items to give. It would probably work best for something like Clash of Clans
The South Park Freemium Gaming episode encapsulates the predatory nature of modern mobile gaming perfectly.
We have seen through the charade
Honestly surprised that Yahtzee would call Angry Birds “creative” or “innovative” in the same video his chastises mobile games for being mostly knockoffs, considering Angry Birds is just a knockoff of a popular flash game.
Doesn’t matter who did it first, Angry Birds did it best at the time
Not really. Castle Crushers (I believe that’s the name) was more complex and had better physics.
@@alexanderfreeman3406 and also an ost by waterflame??
@@alexanderfreeman3406 The name you're looking for is Crush the Castle. Castle Crushers is most likely a misremembering of that name and that of Castle Crashers, which is the comedy beat 'em up flash game where you and up to 3 friends play as knights trying to save kidnapped princesses.
The original creator of Crush the Castle just released The Last Stand (hurk!) Aftermath. He's doing alright at least
God damn this editorial was all killer no filler
Angry Birds is part of the problem, IMO. The concept existed as those Storm The Castle flash games for years before the smart phone. They just added cuter graphics, and then started licensing other properties, like frigging Star Wars. Flappy Bird was another one, I played Flappy Bird on New Grounds in like 2002 or so. It was a helicopter in a cave rather than a bird flying through inexplicable Mario pipes, but it was there. App'd up to make a buck on mobile.
Of course it’s you opinion Captain IMO, nobody was confused who typed this…
@@MaztRPwn what an unnecessary clapback over a completely innocuous instance of a very common ordinary turn of phrase lol
In discussions like these, I'm happy that The Room and its sequels are so good
I thought you were talking about the movie for a second
@@blxrwtch I thought of that after I posted it, but that might just draw some extra eyes to this comment, so I don't mind ;P
Some games that I keep in my mobile menagerie that actually have soul:
Downwell, Baba is You, Song of Bloom, Samsara Room, The White Door, Minit, Ordia, Thunderdogs, Burrito Bison, Bloons TD 5/6, Hidden Folks, Dont Starve, Bad North, Black Box, Miracle Mixtures, Mini Metro, and Huper Life Drifter
So yeah the games you can get on steam that have been ported mostly lmao
I've been playing games on mobile a lot more recently due to my change of employer and it's weird that the developers that we used to slight for their scumminess are actually turning into the good guys like Supercell. And I'm being serious as much as we like to make fun of clash of clans and clash Royale for kick starting the flood of games in their genre, they really aren't that bad. They are well-designed with a team that actively develops their games, and they aren't stuffed with ads
Aren't that bad compared to what? The radioactive wasteland they encouraged?
@@thejusmar they're time wasters meant to be played in short bursts over a long period of time, and then monetized for people who are to impatient.
@@thejusmar They didn't create the radioactive wasteland, the money-grubbers made it from their garden.
These two games have some genuine strategic depth and good mechanics, it's too bad that to play these games on any decent level you either need to fork out thousands of dollars or grind it out for actual years. Don't understate their extremely shitty practices just because their games aren't some mindless ball-sorting puzzle.
I was surprised on how much I got into Brawl Stars. I turned my nose up to it as a game for little children, but it has offered me so many hours of fun and I have yet to find the need to spend a bunch of money like some other games. The progression (at least where I'm at) is still steady. I'm sure later on I would have to spend some, but there is enough modes and a solid gameplay loop to keep the game engaging. Clash Royale was also fun. Their games are super polished as well.
Remember Infinity Blade and its sequels? That was around 2010 and micro-transactions were not yet a thing, or just barely in their infancy. We all had a glimmer of hope. Now look at mobile gaming.
First time watching Extra Punctuation and admittedly it's fairly surprising to see how chill Yahtzee is when he's not playing up the character lol
I heard a story once (don't know if it's true) that when he and Jim Sterling were going to be on a panel together, they'd never met before and Jim had to tell him back stage to feel free and cut loose on stage with his ascerbic public persona, since that's what people were there for.
I don't think you could do this job and be angry all the time. You'd die of aneurism in your early 30s.
This video hits on a really sad point I have been noticing recently too. I remember years ago I could go in the play store and find at least 1 or 2 games that look interesting and unique, especially in my recommended. Now in the past year or so I have completely given up, I dont even check the play stores recommended anymore, after the 100th time of seeing the same cloned gamed and nothing new or unique ever popping up. Now I just go back and play old games I downloaded when I am bored on my phone, but its just sad knowing that realistically nothing new will come of mobile gaming
Can't wait for Yahtzee to make this video again in a few years, but about AAA gaming.
Every reviewer eventually becomes James Stephanie Sterling
Thank God for him!
Some of my favorite games ever were mobile games from back in the day.
Infinity Blade, Nova, Galaxy on Fire 2, Plague, the Lifeline series. And those are just the ones off the top of my head. I miss those days before we were over saturated.
I've tried to get into moble games but the log in every day thing always killed my ability to enjoy it. Without fail I went from this is alright, to why am I doing this? Normally within about a week. Anyone else got something like this.
It took me 3 years to break an addiction to a gacha puzzle RPG game.
I'm sure we have all heard stories about how people spend so much money they go broke. Well that didn't happen to me, luckily I had sense to budget myself.
But what no one talks about is how much time they suck out of you. Really, that's what I'm never getting back and I am still sad that I got addicted to begin with, all because the games clan / alliance system makes you feel obligated to log in and repeat the same tasks daily. I wish I would've been honest with myself and those teammates sooner, that I just didn't feel like playing anymore.
@@DavidCosmanCozySmash thank you for bringing your story to this chat. There are many people who would benefit from understanding your experience.
The difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Logging in every day isn't fun, but it gets you to open the game and well, at that point you've got the game open so you might as well play, and so on and so forth.
@@AccountProto5X your right. I just sort of expected that a market place this big would have a product that cattered to me instead of being more or less all built from the same flat pack. It's all so very generic, and boring...
@@Tyler-gg6xt The idea on mobile seems to generally be that you, the customer, are part of a captive market. If the only thing you're offered is crap, then you'll take it. They don't want you to have the choice between something good and something bad, they want the entire market to be flooded with homogenously bad games, all with the same depressing "flat pack" design. Maximum returns for minimum effort.
That Infinity Blade is not only discontinued, but has been removed from the App Store entirely, is a perfect and depressing example of exactly what you're talking about.
Why was it removed? Surely no foreign algorithm machine could have cloned it?
Yatzee: "People want simplicity in mobile gaming."
Me playing flight simulators on my GameBoy Advance: "Yeah, no!"
I agree, but to be fair, at 6:02 he did clarify that he was talking about "most of the guaranteed audience".
Most people gaming on their phones aren't even casual gamers. Unlike portable consoles, which everybody buys specifically to game, phones, for most people, aren't purchased with gaming in mind.
The kind of experience "gamers by opportunity" (accidental mobile gamers) want, might be significantly different from the kind of experience portable gamers want.
"Gamers by opportunity" are people who didn't necessarily intend to game on their phone. So the kind of experience that might convince them to, is probably different than the kind of experience that convinces someone to purchase a dedicated gaming device.
@@danielalorbi I knew exactly what he meant, it was meant to be a joke. Though GBA flight simulators are a real thing, as wild as it sounds.
He likely also differentiates between mobile and handheld gaming. Could there be a flight sim on a device with only a touch screen and no buttons?
@@ZipplyZane Plenty actually, I remember playing a version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on an old Palm Pilot many years ago. Had some interesting physics too: if you rolled the plane inverted and then stalled, you would fall up! Think most the phone ones these days use tilt controls, though I haven't actually played any of them.
@@scottthewaterwarrior I believe it. The GBA is surprisingly powerful. If anything controller inputs and screen real estate are what makes it hard to swallow.
Favourite extra punctuation yet, nice to hear Yahtzee speak casually about something he’s interested in
Mobile gaming is like RUclips, where there's genuine good content with thought and soul poured into it, but the videos with the red cirlcles and shocked faces on the thumbnail and the *"BOLD LETTERS AS IF I'M SCREAMING"* titles are the one that get's the most exposure and shows up in the front page. You have to do some good ol digging and narrowing down your searches to get the annoying garbage out the way to get to the (usually)less popular but more meaningful games.
It is certainly a shame that we even HAVE to dig in order to get to these games in the first place.
I remember when pushing the envelope on the alternative medium that was touchscreen gaming was the goal, I lived through that rise and fall when I was younger. Galaxy on Fire 2 lives in my mind forever as an excellent example of a full-scale yet concise game, that could naturally be picked up and put down rapidly with minimal sacrifice to game design.
Tbh the only mobile games i have on my phone now are the nintendo ones cause not only do they have a solid gameplay loop but they also don't force ads on ya while you are playing the game
Knowing that there's an editor who does the visual separately now adds a funny little back and forth between Yahtzee and his editor especially with the 'Everybody has a phone" comment coupled with the Diablo Immortal devs shot, lmao.
Yahtzee means it literally, the editor means it ironically.
fortunently there are still some good mobile transports form certain PC games. Dead Cells is one of those few that work to use on a phone, and it is a fun game all the same from what I'v heard.
There's also plenty of great games that aren't PC ports
Dead Cells is an S-tier game, it's great with tons of replayability. I don't have the mobile version because I already have it on Switch and on PC, but I've heard the mobile version works pretty well.
Dead cells is great, but the mobile version is not up to date apparently.
The real depressing thing is, mobile games still DO have variety and entertainment value, but that's only because of the rare few that actively seek that out or create it! It's like if your local toy shop was some genuinely quality items buried under a million ton landfill of dollar store toys
my problem with them is, the advertisements and of course the black hole for money most of them are, there are many stories about families going bankrupt because they and or their kids did not understand that they were buying stuff to continue the game.
Snake is the ultimate mobile game for me, simply, challenging, and no ads, as they had not been invented for phones at the time,
I'm certain I can get a Snake Game today, but it will be contaminated with ads to an unplayable degree.
I know a lot of the games cease to have ads once you buy it, often for a token amount, but still.
As a frequent user of ball sort puzzle type stuff, here's a little tip:
go to your phones settings and turn of the apps acces to any form of internet.
Since it can't load in any apps, you can just keep on playing, only getting disturbed every now and again to ask you if you want to purchase an add free version, which, you know... isn't neccesary anymore
So basically, a mixture of laziness and greed ruined this platform of the game industry. Makes sense.
I wish it wasn't starting to infect the rest of the industry though.
Staring? It already started when EA went to the dark side and started eating children when a game doesn’t satisfy their sales projections.
I too miss the days when Jack Thompson and Uwe Boll were the biggest enemies of the game industry, not the industry itself and its obsession with greed
The game industry, the main game industry was going to be like that even when mobile wouldnt have ocurr, later rather than sooner
It was doing it before the mobile market was even a thing. Online connectivity on its own fucking DESTROYED the game industry, whilst not the only culprit.
Yahtzee is the most consistent and on point content creator of the past decade.
The answer:
Follow the money.
Kingdom Rush, a tower defense game from newgrounds, is actually a pretty awesome game on mobile and one of the only mobile games I genuinely enjoyed. Played all the sequels too.
Also, og pocket tanks is on mobile too. And it's great.
Wha Happun’d? Everything. Everything happened to mobile gaming. Their are land dumps with more beauty in it than the Mobile gaming industry.
That's the duality of most media tbh: engaging vs distracting, stimulating vs numbing.
Huh, that's a good way of putting it.
2010-2014 was the “golden age” of mobile gaming.
Preservation is another issue. You can't even play Canabalt on Android anymore, because it's incompatible with modern versions of the OS and the web version required Flash.
This is a great video. Mobile gaming is sad, that's the best way to describe it. But you're only covering 1/2 of the industry. Japanese gacha games are some of the most profitable games today, with gameplay rivaling tax forms. These are even worse because they often pull attention and resources away from the franchises they're leeching off of, not to mention their role in cultivating a national gambling addiction. I'd like to see you do a video covering those.
2:27 Angry birds ripped off the flash game Crush the Castle (which in itself was a copy of Castle Clout) and stuck ugly blobs over the lovely tapestry people in the original. It still makes me angry. Mobile games have always been copycats.
I think the opposite is happening, there was a definite gully in the quality of mobile games over time (and the developers are still pumping out trash), but there is a growing section of really good ports and games, Genshin is the best example but Apple Arcade has really helped push high quality games with no focus on money/ads.
Some of my favorite games were on mobile. Superbrothers Sword and Sworcery as well as Device 6 in particular.
They aren’t games, they’re complex ad delivery systems
I remember that VSauce 3 used to have a weekly or monthly video series exploring new and interesting mobile games. You can track the degradation of quality in mobile game history based on how that series petered out.
As a teen, all I had for unregulated gaming was my 5th gen iPod Touch, way back in the mid-2010s. *Every Night I Have the Same Dream, Device 6, Out There, The Room* games, and even *Hatfall* were just a few genuinely excellent experiences I found on mobile. Hell, I got my first taste of Minecraft there too, leading to what is probably a four digit total playtime on that sodding block builder.
The good stuff is there if you know where to look, but it's ironically a lot like RUclips nowadays. Beneath the red circles, *(GONE WRONG GONE SEXUAL)*s and other attention grabbing nonsense, there will always be quality experiences worth having.
Just wish they were a little easier to come by nowadays, especially since Idle games are apparently the new trend.
You know dang well that the analogy at the end made sense.
Laziness and money
It's almost like the general concept of the slot machine: loud noises and blinking lights process one button and you might win a fortune.
It's why the only thing I play on mobile nowadays ARE the freemium slot machines. At least they're upfront about wanting all your money
im surprised he didn't bring up wordle. not exclusively a mobile game (it can be played in browser) but it is displaying right this moment the whole phenomenon of imitators and quick cash ins following its wake. I guess wordle might be an outlier cause it's not an app and relies more on the social aspect instead of the tactile satisfaction most mobile games build around
There's an episode of South Park which is about Freemium gaming.
It's pretty much a documentary about what happened to mobile gaming.
Good god, remember when it was all about strange pixel art house games which you hoped would one day get an Android release and getting then all for £1 on Humble Bundle?
_sigh_
Good times.
Good times.
_cries_
Part Time UFO still remains one of the best mobile games in a long time. And it was made by HAL who made Kirby.
I think I saw a trailer for the Switch version of the game, it looked fun.
This was a really good article/opinion piece tbh!
I bought Unpacking the moment I heard about it and loved every moment of it. Then, while browsing through mobile games, I found this rip off. I downloaded it, because I needed to see if it WAS a ripoff, and when I did, I gave it a low rating and deleted it. I hate this crap.
I think personally, the best example of a mobile game I've played is Armory and Machine 2 - Idle Soul. A&M is a series of incremental idle games, if you like (or liked) Crank, A Dark Room, or Cookie Clicker, you might like this, but it leans way more towards the first two. The premise is simple. You are in a room, with a machine core housing an AI. You are the machine's operator, and you must power the machine. The machine provides you with healing in exchange, as well as materials to improve it's functionality. Eventually, however, you unlock fuel. This fuel can be used to unlock portals. You can create an armory to equip yourself and go through the portals to find resources, whilst fighting enemies with unique time-based countdown mechanics. The only semblance of life is a market you can go to that requires a special, hard to manufacture fuel to access and a special craftable currency to buy from. And even though this game is an idle game, and it does have in-app purchases, I was actually hooked, intrigued even, because it was a mystery and for whatever fucking reason, the mystery combined with the "Number Go Up" thing that is idle games, made me hooked and want to keep powering and operating the machine, because I wanted answers. Just what the fuck is the machine? how am I being healed by it? why is it that whenever I go outside, it is described as a wasteland? And, when I go to the store page for it, one of the images used is this weird maze-like... thing that's never actually seen in-game. What does it mean? to this day, none of the people that have played the game, and there is actually a small community around it, have figured out the answer to the last question. I mean, yeah, it's a code, you input it and you get a storage perk and some
On top of that, there are no forced ads in the game. You CAN choose to recieve "Signals" as the game calls them to gain precious resources such as Evos to evolve the machine, or DrillBots that give you even MORE resources while out in the wastelands. But you're never forced to watch an ad, you have to confirm whenever you want to recieve a signal, and you wont get an ad shoved in your face for no reason. On top of that, the only real thing you get from ads that can't be gained anywhere else is Gems, which even that is a lie, since you can get them from quests or manufacture them for a ludicrous amount of Shards, a not that rare resource often found alongside Evos.
This... Might have been Yahtzee at his most depressing.
3:20 You were supposed to say "Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and ball colour sort puzzle
What demoralized me most about mobile gaming was when epic decided to completely remove all traces of their infinity blade trilogy from the game store. Those were, in my opinion, one of the most groundbreaking and excellent games ever made for mobile. They were a perfect example of the heights that mobile gaming could reach. Once they were taken away, that former gold standard of what mobile games should be striving to achieve has now been almost entirely forgotten.
I installed Evony for a laugh.
I'm enjoying ignoring all the Spend Money Now buttons
I've really come to like Extra Punctuation. Interesting, well-thought out and concise ruminations on the broader aspects of the medium aren't all that common.
That said, I need to get on my soapbox here and scream to the rooftops that 'No, angry birds was never original; it was a blatant rip-off of Crush the Castle, reskinned for bland, broad appeal and ported from Flash to phones.' Which, in all fairness, was a winning move. But the bones at the core of it all - the bones of a good game - were just as stolen as any of today's mobile money-grubbers.
well here I disagree angry birds didn't just rip off crush the castle it did more. it added more mechanics then crush the castle ever did so I wouldn't call it a ripoff id call it inspired
The thing that really gets me about Mobile Games is that loads of them were just adaptations/ports/knockoffs of Flash Games. Candy Crush was just Diamond Mine, Angry Birds was just Crush the Castle 2, Canabalt was straight up a Flash Game, and Flash Games like When Penguins Attack 4 and Age of War straight up had ports.
One could go on a long tangent about how mobile gaming has devolved into casinos with extra steps that just drip people dopamine until they’re willing to pay actual money for their next hit, but honestly does anyone care? Reminds me of the shadow lands from Lion King. Everyone knows it’s terrible but just ignore it. No point in trying to fix it
i actually am playing a lot on mobile as my computer is broken now and those are mostly:
- nds and psp emulations (other consoles too, but to a lesser extent)
- pc and console ports
- paid games
- actually interesting free games with ad free (additionally lots of money if the monetary system is broken) mods
- two gacha games that don't have ads and are not pushy in terms of monetisation (haven't spent a dime on them)
- stardew valley. A LOT of stardew valley
No one else saw a positive outlook for mobile gaming. it’s a barely regulated scam shop where predatory companies meet mainstream audience. Of course it is going to turn out crap.
I used to write for a long defunct mobile game review site, I went to the East Coast Game Conference in like 2013 or 2014. There was a seminar about mobile game design. I thought it'd be about control with a touch screen or unique design philosophies or something. Nope.
It was all about interrupting the game play loop with frustration points to encourage micro transactions. Basically, breaking the enjoyment of your game to squeeze a few bucks out here and there and occasionally grab a big whale, who at least at that time according to that speaker, made up most of the profits for most games.
I thought the industry was in a bit of trouble then.
I remember the iOS same "Alive 4 Ever". It had local bluetooth multiple so my brother and I would play in the car. You don't see stuff like that anymore.