I got so frustrated with mobile gaming and it’s ads i bought myself steamdeck and now I’m happy

As a dev who has worked on mobile games:

1. The stores have a serious problem with discovery which makes it unreasonably difficult to find the good original games in the sea of shovelware, but the good stuff IS out there.

2. People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise. Almost no one pays for premium mobile games, and that’s why no one bothers making them.

3. People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.

Largely? Garbage. But I may have a problem with Microsoft Solitaire.

Mobile gaming has become too money hungry. The OG Angry Birds and Plants Vs Zombies games were enormously fun. They were worth buying. But now I wouldnt touch them with a 10 foot pole with all the microtransactions.

Kimd of funny story though, back when R6 came out I was a seriously good competitive player, but I started to take it a little too seriously and I had pretty bad emotional control skills back then so I decided to cool it and play something else for a while. I decided to play Angry Birds again for a while and just goof. Well I got talking to one of my wifes workmates husbands at a thing and he was like “Im a GAMER!” I said yeah, me too and he got all enthusiastic and asked what I was playing now I said “Ah Im playing Angry Birds right now, I was pla-” and the guy went full 4chan copypasta autist and started giving me a lecture about how that isnt gaming and if I was a real gamer like him Id play something like Siege. “Really, maybe I should get it and you can show me a thing or two” so I got his deets and added him on steam… and I spent an evening casually steamrolling his ass across every map we played while he gradually got less and less condescending over chat as he figured out it wasnt luck and I really was just casually making him look like a total scrub. When he was like “Im gonna go for the night man, have a good one” I just said “Yeah, catch you… Im just gonna play some Angry Birds before bed”

I love collecting pngs of anime women and I do not care what you think about it

In my mobile I use only games from F-Droid (puzzles, boardgames) for in between. My wife use Eternium, a free single player RPG old school (Optional cosmetic buys in the game menu, no Pay2Win), very nice on Mobile (Gesture driven) and PC (Mouse, keyboard), infinite gameplay. In the stores and in Steam

I’ve wrestled with Mobile games for years. As a player, I love the idea of playing games on my phone. But most phones games outside of flash like games (Angry Birds) weren’t fun.

So I tried to make them myself.

After 5 years of trial and error my conclusion was thus. Phones are a bad platform for games. Not because they aren’t capable, they are extremely capable. But because they have no proper inputs.

Games are built for the common input method. PC games have a keyboard and mouse mode. Console games are built with a controller. And mobile games need to use touch.

The problem with touch, is that it’s a bad input method for all games. Very good for simple visual games, but for the rest, you are touching a textureless, featureless, tiny surface, with no tactile feedback. This means that anything more complicated than angry birds or bejeweled will be difficult to play if it doesn’t play itself.

It’s possible to make games for phones. But due to the design constraints, the game needs to be simple, or not time dependent. Strategy games, puzzle games, board games will work, but action games, or shooters are doomed to be worse than their competitors on non-mobile platforms.

I like the AAA and pc games that have come to mobile. I prefer to buy games outright upfront over getting Nickle and dimes or constrained by time limits which is so pervasive in mobile gaming. Like I like games like Grid Autosports and retro ports like the rockstar collection.

I prefer to play with an attached controller like my razor Kishi. I hope more developers will port their games to mobile because I hate made for mobile games

I didn’t have a console or PC growing up, so the only games I played were flash games on school computers. When I got a smart phone I mostly switched to mobile games. So I like mobile games. Not all of them, there’s a lot of garbage out there. But there’s some good ones. It’s a great platform for indie games and I love it when a game actually takes advantage of the touchscreen as an input, rather than simply trying to emulate a controller. I especially love the multiplayer games. It was so awesome in highschool whenever we had a break, we’d just look at each and break out whatever the hottest game was locally and play a round.

I have a Steam deck now and I’m more busy, so don’t play mobile games as often as I used to, but there’s a few that still play pretty often: Pubg mobile, Bombsquad, True surf, Shredsauce. Pubg mobile in particular I don’t think gets enough credit for how well they pulled off mobile controls. Insanely customizable, and with gyro turned on, I would rather play an fps on a phone then with a gamepad anyday. Even with the steam deck, the extra weight makes quick, precise movements with the gyro more clumsy than on my phone.

I wish there were more premium games didn’t have egregious ads or micro transactions and respected your time. I pretty much dismiss all free to play games on mobile.

Play Pass is a god send for playing mobile games if you care enough to do so. Not only do you just get a whole bunch of premium games, it also removes ads and microtransactions in a good chunk of free to play games as well (but that usually puts the game balance out of whack - but that also accentuates how shitty some of those games are, being designed fully around them)

I prefer fixed place games. Just build a game that can’t be moved from one location and all your worries are over.

Pokemmo. Play on pc then switch over to the phone seamlessly. Great game.

I really respect mobile gaming. There are a lot of good and entertaining games.

They are really accessible to most of the population even in third world countries, and the communities are generally really nice. I’ve found them to be nicer than PC gaming communities at least.

It’s really really incredible how good people can get at certain games and I like how a lot of their communities are run on mobile. A lot of the mobile gaming youtubers even edit their videos on mobile.

Games like COD Mobile and all of the SuperCell games are examples with great communities and games that don’t have any ads. Sure they still be toxic, but it doesn’t compare to communities like Overwatch.

There are also a lot of beautiful games out there. Mobile gaming is a now niche gaming space where the game has to actually be fun or else it won’t grow all that much.

They can’t just buy their way into being popular through the name of the IP or through beautiful graphics. The mentality of Art Style over Graphic Fidelity is still alive on mobile. Look at games like Monument Valley, Kensho, Pirate Outlaws, Rusty Lake, Pocket City, Mini Metro, etc. and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s also a great platform for indie games with low spec requirements.

I only play arcade type games, the kind that you only play for 20 minutes while you’re in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.

Does the dolphin emulator count? I use it to play luigis mansion on my phone. But other than that the only real “mobile” game I play is runescape. Other than that I don’t really see mobile gaming as, for the lack of a better word, “real” gaming. More just time passers as I wait for something or someone.