That was a pretty good read. Makes me realize how lucky we are that some games existed before in app purchases. Could you imagine playing chess and paying for an upgraded queen?
back
6 comments
It is also a bit sad that these strategies started to leak from mobile games into other platforms. Now we can find console and PC games with random "gift boxes", daily XP limits to force you to keep playing and others.
Not that it should be blamed fully on mobile, it was already getting worse on itself, with cosmetic paid "DLC" that could be (and sometimes is) present on the base game files at release but exists purely for monetization purposes (Oblivion's horse armor) or exclusives limited to a certain retailer.
There are several concerns with dark patterns that we have to pay attention nowadays, specially when children are exposed to these games, which did not exist in the past.
I will just drop this very old Jonathan Blow video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsT-5VSqk8I which was talking about unethical games.
Console and (non-MMO) PC gaming up until the 360 and PS3 was an unusual time of transparent and straightforward monetization. Just pay once and you own the game forever.
If you go further back in time, you have arcades, which exposed children of yesteryear to the same tricks mobile is doing today.
Nintendo is still mostly like that, one-time up front payment for the main game, with infrequent optional expansion packs added for particularly popular games. I played Animal Crossing: New Horizons regularly for about two years of the pandemic, and there were only two possible places to buy anything: the original game purchase for $60, and one optional expansion pack released 18 months later for $25. There were also a bunch of free content updates in between that they didn’t nickel-and-dime you on.
> Nintendo is still mostly like that, one-time up front payment for the main game, with infrequent optional expansion packs added for particularly popular games.
Have you seen what happened to the Pokemon games?
yes; it's ... similar?
Pokémon Sword/Shield released Nov. 2019, a two part expansion released June/Oct 2020. Current costs of £50 for base game, £27 for expansion.
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl (remakes) released Nov 2021. No DLC. £50 for base game.
Pokémon Legends Arceus released Jan 2022. Free content addition in Feb. 2022. No paid DLC. £50 for base game.
Pokémon Scarlet/Violet released released Nov. 2022, a two part expansion released/releasing Sept/Q4 2023. £50 for base game, £31.50 for expansion.
So, a smaller gap between the base-game and expansion, but a comparable price differential.
Now, if you were talking about the quality of the latest games you might have a point - Sword/Shield were OK with a weak story. DB/SP were remakes, but added little to the originals (and arguably took away some things). Arceus was great! A really interesting game. Scarlet/Violet - some good ideas, but very poor execution.
Many people rented games and there were things like satellaview, a subscription gaming service, though it didn't take off.
Game rentals were a way to save money on things you weren't going to play as much, not a way for the developer to squeeze more money out of you. Remember: Nintendo fought tooth and nail to try and ban game rentals in both Japan and the US.
There are still lots of great games (mobile and board games) which aren’t like this at all. It’s just that mobile gaming is an awful platform because it has fully succumbed to financialisation.
I remember having an iPhone 5 and the quality of games were pretty good, albeit pricey. I did pay for a bunch of games at the time because I thought that was fair. Coming back to iOS a decade later and the quality of games is unrecognizable from the era I started in. Even Apple Arcade has a lot of stuff that feels like f2p/p2w stuff that is basically mobile casinos.
I tried to give a bunch of modern games a shot and they're essentially slot machines that gate game progress with pulls. I'm glad console and PC gaming hasn't been completely taken over by this, but it is very close.
Looking over the best games for Apple Arcade and it’s… Temple Run, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja. Really! That was the peak?
The Pathless. Monster's Expedition was also great, but it's not available any more. And that exposed a nasty detail of Arcade: Once a game isn't “available” any more, all of your copies instantaneously stop working.
I started playing Hitman GO again on mobile. Really enjoying that.
Unlike PC and console gaming, mobile gaming's market is practically "Everyone". So there probably are some great mobile games out there, just buried in the charts under what the masses preferred. What's most popular on mobile is going to be a reflection of a very different demographic's interests. Kind of like trying to find the "best" movie from box office charts, you will get a list of the most popular movied, not the best.
The most popular movie today is not ten years old. They have made movies since The Avengers. (Notably, Avengers: Endgame, but less facetiously, a Super Mario movie and James Cameron's Avatar sequel were pretty popular.) I'm not asking for something inventive and genre-defying, just a game that is not literally ten years old.
Mobile is really tough to monetize the way console/desktop can monetize. If you were to make an app which is identical across desktop and mobile, you would neged to charge less for the mobile version because people don't value a mobile app as much. This is even true in cases where a mobile version is superior to desktop, such as star tracking apps.
The mobile market figured out[0] a way to monetize a customer base where the median will not pay, but the mean will. Unfortunately, the method they figured out is really harmful and really profitable. Profitable enough that other platforms are copying it.
[0] Technically many Asian MMOs were already doing this for a while before mobile apps existed. But it was the mobile market that has researched and data-scienced it into the mainstream monster it is now.
In the old days one would bet in a game of chess an amount significant to ones wealth or your manhood would be in question.
> From a 'Mansuba' - A Shatranj problem had this story:
> There once was a chess-addicted prince, Murwardi, who had wagered and lost his entire fortune in an intense chess session. In his desperation he offered his beautiful wife Dilaram as stake, and was losing the game they were playing for her. In the above position his wife called out to him: "Oh Prince, sacrifice your rooks and not your wife." This her husband duly did and saved her with a combination.
(Unsolicited advice is allowed if the player would have found the moves himself. No one would have dared to suggest a woman could do something a man couldn't)
We've come a long way, or maybe not since now we [pretty much] force people to carry around gambling devices if not an entire casino.
It seems we always end up doing things against our better judgement?
On the other hand the most popular way to play shogi online is an app called Shogi Wars, which has the most explicit pay-to-win mechanic I've ever seen: there's a button you can press to have an AI play out your next few moves for you, and you can pay money to buy additional chances to press the button.
Shogi doesn't have any other sites as modern and polished as Lichess or Chess.com (except for a Lichess port (lishogi.org) which has failed to gain traction), so I think there was a vacuum that allowed something like this to become popular. If people were still playing chess only on old clunky websites then maybe Zynga would break into the market with a hot new chess app that requires Facebook login.
Wow. Great question. "Add knight moves to your queen for only 200 coins!"
During the whole NFT boom I did stumble across a chess game where you could buy and sell NFT representations of chess pieces which gave you advantages. Can’t find the name of it now but it was a laughably bad concept