03/31/2024
Some mobile games are made to pass the time like waiting for the bus or something. That’s a nice way to pass the time. Better than nothing. The worst thing that could happen would be missing the bus because of them. You can play them whenever you want for however long you want. When you’re able to use your computer or console, you should play a better game instead of a silly little mobile game.
Most mobile games have shifted away from passing waiting time to interupting your entire day with notifications to get you to play their games. Every three or four hours for example for opening loot boxes or using energy. That’s 5–7 times a day at least because you don’t play while sleeping and larger loot boxes are available for overnight. They interrupt you while you’re doing better things with your time. “Are you working, watching a movie/tv show/Netflix/Youtube, playing a good PC/console game? In short, are you actually having fun? That’s a problem. How about you open this chest instead? Or use some energy? It’s full you know. You don’t want to waste energy or chests.”
You’re psychologically forced to play those games. Not when you want to, but when they want to. Those are horrible practices. Highly immoral. And I haven’t even talked about microtransactions or paid loot boxes that cost dozens of dollars each. Also constantly having to repeat levels in order to grind because the enemies are too strong instead of just being able to play level 1 to the last level in a row without any grinding in between.
People praise those games if they happened to be made in collaboration with their favourite YouTuber for example. It’s fine because it’s FREE! And that’s a great price! The developers are so selfless for giving us this game for free! Hundreds of hours of grinding and thousands of interruptions in order to save five dollars that the game would have cost if it was a paid game. The absolute perfect version of the game without any microtransactions, loot boxes or interruptions. But no, people want to save $5 instead of having a good game. Then many people spend $5 on a single loot box that potentially takes a little bit of grinding away. Congratulations, you’ve just rewarded them for predatory practices and paid the same as the entire game would be worth if it was perfect (as perfect as they are able to make it). It actually took more time to make the game worse when it’s finished. 99% of the time is spent making 1% of the gameplay (the actual content) while 1% of the time is spent making 99% of the gameplay (implementing a grinding mechanic). An amazingly efficient way to make the game way more profitable (a month of adsense probably earns them $5 and players play for many months), but also way worse. Stretch a game too thin and it becomes extremely boring and objectively repetitive.
Those kind of mobile games are the cancer that ruined an entire industry (mobile gaming) and is also making another industry worse (PC/console gaming) with slow grinding and microtransactions and loot boxes. At least those AAA games are still pretty good despite that. That’s because they can’t send you notifications. That wouldn’t make sense. You don’t walk around with your console plus TV all day long as opposed to your smartphone.
