Games Journalism 2020 - Who gets the axe this time?

Rather than get into an argument about this, I’ll instead ask why it’s important to you that mobile gaming not be real and mobile gamers not be real.

What purpose does it serve for you to gatekeep this hobby from mobile users?

Maybe you’re too young to remember, but there used to be a pretty large casual gaming scene on PC. Yoda Stories, The Incredible Machine, etc. were “real” games on PC, but now that they’ve moved to mobile I guess they’re not real anymore? That doesn’t make sense, and that’s not even counting a game like Call of Duty mobile, the #1 grossing mobile game of 2019, released by…Activision.

i have nothing against these players. You can be one of them, you are cool.
I am merely describing a reality how I see it. I am wrong? maybe. No ill intend.

I think you’re both right and wrong.

You’re right that the mobile games market is definitely different than console and PCs. It’s primarily free to play, which leads to different decisions in game design, many of which are similar if not the same as gambling. But there are lots of notable exceptions, including Fortnite and Minecraft, which are incredibly popular.

And you’re again right that traditional game publishers haven’t dominated mobile gaming. I think primarily this is due to the risk/reward model. The expected return for development is pretty low, if not negative, so even if there are several billion-dollar mobile franchises now, big publishers aren’t biting. Activision and EA know the costs of getting distracted trying to make 100 mobile games in the hopes that one or two are a hit, which is what they’d have to do. And they don’t need $1 million on a moderate success - it’s just not worth their time.

So these folks have stayed at the periphery and focused on their big brands - Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty, etc.

But they’ve also invested big in already-successful companies. Activision paid more for King than Disney spent on Marvel. This is the sign of a company that knows it needs help figuring out the market.

Many big traditional western publishers have also partnered with the largest Chinese publishers as well.

But where you’re wrong is your value judgement about the games and the people who play them. I don’t think there’s any value in suggesting that the games aren’t real or that the people who play them aren’t real gamers. It smells of the same desperation as Scorsese suggesting that superhero movies aren’t “real movies,” or Spielberg suggesting that watching movies on smaller screens isn’t acceptable.

There’s just a reality here that you’re going to have to accept. Mobile games are becoming the primary entertainment of choice for an entire generation of gamers. You’re not going to succeed by alienating them. They don’t own PCs or consoles, and they don’t own TVs, but so what? They’re gamers, and we should embrace them.

“Mobile games” is often used a shorthand for “F2P/gacha” games. Personally, I think that the primary business model used by these games is fundamentally detrimental to interesting game design, so I’m not a fan of it. I also think that, like gambling, it has high potential to be exploitative.

However, that ship sailed a long time ago, and it isn’t just limited to mobile games, so I have no problem with the medium or users or anything. My issues are more with human psychology and capitalism.

I think that’s totally fair. I believe the industry has a reckoning coming regarding these gambling mechanics and I truly hope we face it voluntarily rather than through government intervention.

This typo/misspelling is just killing me.

Come along. You belong. Feel the fizz of Coo-Coo Cola!

I love Apple Arcade et al but I don’t think it’s gatekeeping to point out that the two big mobile game predictions a decade ago never happened: Nintendo’s still successfully selling consoles and what are commonly classified as AAA releases have not made their way to mobile.

Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty, PUBG, ARK, Command & Conquer, NBA 2K, Civilization, and Madden would like to disagree with you, for starters.

Tons of AAA franchises are on mobile.

Diablo Immortal is coming, too.

I forgot about a few of those (including the Civ port, which I have.) I’m not talking about later ports, small games or mobile re-imaginations of the flagship $40-100 game though. I think we could get there with widespread controller support but we aren’t there right now.

How are you defining small games? Stardew Valley is on mobile. It’s basically the same game that made millions of dollars.

Mobile is just another platform for gaming. It’s neither worse than, lacking or inherently more evil than the others. It’s just a means to get the games, sometimes the same games or sometimes other games, onto more devices. This is not a bad thing to have.

I guess I’m not understanding your definition of “made their way to mobile.”

If you’re suggesting that the only way a game is real is if it is a direct port of the PC version on mobile, then, well, with some exceptions you are right.

But who cares? That’s like saying no AAA releases have made their way to Nintendo DS or even Switch because they’re not direct ports but instead a different version of the same game, designed with both the capabilities and limits of their platforms.

Lol. That sequence is like a cultural artifact of the fetishization of soda in the 80s/90s.

TBF, GI laid off about a third of its editorial staff by corporate fiat last year, not “most of its staff.”

It’s still utterly fucked, though, and my heart goes out to them all.

Kotaku is almost certainly fucked given their vulture capitalist owners.

The future is fuckin’ bleak, man.

Yep.

And it’s not at all linked to the fact that I have a Pepsi addiction myself that I developed as a teen that both my sisters hound on me to break and there is no way, no way that I am sitting here drinking one right now.

Right, again, to be clear I really like mobile games and how much money is going into them.

It’s hard to define. But mobile’s almost never first class along with PC/Console for major titles (again hard to define, but more Red Dead Redemption than Stardew Valley or Minecraft, as much as I like SD/MC), and mobile users are almost never asked to pay those kinds of prices because the revenue will just not materialize (so there’s a chicken-egg problem.) A decade ago it seemed like that change was going to happen but generally, IP made to fit mobile isn’t much like the feature game.

I think good controller support, led by Apple, is going to change that between now and 2030. The processing/GPU power is pretty much there now and the kind of impressive work by Epic and a few others is going to work its way into other studios. Over time, there’ll be fewer afterthought mobile ports and more simultaneous releases that are close to par in features and graphics.

Honestly mobile is my preferred platform for a-synch multiplayer games.

I still have at least 3 games of Ascension going at any given time. Multiplayer board games on mobile is my scene.

Prioritizing features /graphics is a judgement call tht you’re making to consider those to be important or defining of a “first class” title, though.

There’s no particular reason that “better”, i.e. more detailed, graphics needs to be part of a game’s core offering, and no particular reason that they define first class games from a market or experiential perspective. Nintendo has been making that argument for years from inside the console space.

My question about this is:

Who cares?

Why does mobile need to be “first class” by your definition for it to be legitimate in whatever criteria you or anyone else defines?

To me, mobile isn’t better or worse than other platforms. It’s just different, and has countless incredible games perfectly suited to the platform.

I don’t want games like RDR2 or similar on my phone for the most part. I want games like What The Golf?, Grindstone, Threes, etc. incredibly well-designed games perfect for playing on a phone.

I want an iOS 13+ update to Dungeon Raid that fills my iPhone X screen.