Well, I talked about the insidious practice of microtransactions yesterday, might as well prolong this depressing dive into the cooperate-driven side of games with a new target: Mobile gaming. Most gamers in the world are, in fact, mobile gamers. Techjury estimates that there around 2.2 billion active Mobile users in the world today. With this in mind, why is it that there are practically no worthwhile games on the mobile marketplace? You'd think someone would have made one on accident by this point! But somehow, even after all this time, all the worst practises in the gaming world stem from the Mobile market, wherein they are called 'feautres'. Microtransactions: Birthed by the Mobile market. Artificial time gates: A literal requirement for any modern mobile game. Lootboxes: They perfected those systems long ago.
Mobile games are characterized most prominently by the way how they are generally lacking in gameplay. That isn't a comment on the restrictions of the mobile platform but rather a condemnation of the apathy of big budget mobile developers. Modern day smart phones are leagues more powerful than many of the consoles back in the day. Last time I checked (Which was 4 years ago) my old smart phone could run a Gameboy, N64 and Gamecube emulator with decent performance allround. (Though things did get a little choppy for some Gamecube games.) With that in mind, where is our high quality mobile game? Where is our Twilight Princess, or Resident Evil? And I'm not talking about ports, I'm taking original high quality properties made for the phone.
It's not that the companies aren't there to make the games. Square Enix have published original mobile games before, Bethesda have done it twice and Epic have now stepped in. However, none of them would ever waste the time to develop a worthwhile original title for the mobile market, because they know they don't need to. Mobile customers are nowhere near as discerning as customers on any other platform, so developers know that they can get away with putting out shallow, structureless wastes of drive space, and make more money than they could ever do with a dedicated project. As a result, the best mobile games on offer are all ports of console and PC titles. All mobile originals are trivialized, 'casual' experiences that are hyper focused around the pursuit of recurrent monetisation.
For clarity's sake, I'll say that I don't hate the mobile market just because it is 'casual', like some do. I like it when a more casual audience have a little gateway into gaming. The way I see it, the more people playing games the better. My umbrage comes from the fact that mobile games are, almost universally, bottom-of-the-barrel exploitative trash blatantly designed with the intention of fleecing as much as humanly possible from its players. It is embarrassing, as a gamer, to think that the face of your hobby, the only example that the public sees, is a platform that features the most ugly, cynical corporate cash grabs that the industry has to offer. What's worse, those same crappy mobile rip-offs account for the lions share of video game revenue! Ever wonder how much money King make off of Candy Crush? Too much money, is the answer.
How does the mobile market manage to make so much money, year after year, whilst distributing nothing but low effort garbage? Through psychological manipulation, obviously. King and it's competitors recently admitted (In a roundabout, deceitful way) to hiring the services of 'Psycology' experts in order to help them design their games with all these tips and tricks to mind. I mentioned something about 'psycology tricks' yesterday when talking about the way that Lootboxes are designed to provide a hit to your dopamine levels. But just so everyone is on the same page, I should likely explain exactly what I mean by that.
Firstly, I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, so I will be using very general language as I go on with this explanation. It's not for your benefit, it's for mine. As I understand it, dopamine is a chemical in your brain that provides pleasurable sensations when it is stimulated. Similar to adrenaline, dopamine levels can rise and fall due to random external stimulus that we go through in our daily lives. Every now and then we conduct actions that get us little hits of dopamine, this makes us feel happy and excited, feelings that most people want to experience more, so we are drawn to seek more experiences that reward us with the same sensations. One way that Dopamine can be stimulated is by completing a hard task, clocking off at the end of a hard days work, hitting 'publish' on a finished blog, or buying a Lootbox. You'll notice, whenever you watch a digital box opening in one of these games, that are often accompanied with a flashy show, sometimes with sparkly animations. They'll hold off on showing you exactly what you've received straight away in favour of a little bit of pageantry that is designed to build anticipation. All of this hits up on your Dopamine levels to get you feeling excited and happy. After a while you start associating that exciting feeling with opening loot boxes so you seek out some more and then you end up hooked.
Of course the topic of dopamine it is a lot more complicated than I make it seem. It would have to be, seeing as how dopamine exploitation is at the heart of gambling and addiction. People pen dissertations on lighter topics then this. I'm just some sleep-deprived fool sitting at desk trying to make sense of the world. But from the little bits I've read and heard on the issue, the process of dopamine exploitation is similar to the training of Pavlov's dogs; positive reinforcement breeds recurrent habits. This may seem like a gross over-simplification but we are, at the end of the day, all still just animals, thus we are still susceptible to many of the primal weakness' of our less evolved brethren. Mobile game's companies know this all too well, and they also know exactly how to exploit this in order to fill their pockets.
Mobile game's companies don't just throw all their eggs into one basket, however. Dopamine can lessen in effect the more you are exposed to it, meaning that the best way to get players coming back again and again to regulate their game time. How do you manage this without literally standing over players with a stopwatch? Digitally standing over players with a stopwatch, of course! Many 'free-to-play' games make use of, the aforementioned, 'artificial time gates' to stop players from experiencing too much and satisfying their dopamine urges. Remember when you play a mobile game and you always end up having to wait for some ridiculous energy bar to fill before you do an action? That isn't just there to annoy you into spending money on a 'skip'. That functions as a timed gate to make sure the player comes back tomorrow, and the next day and so on.
Those are all main tactics of the 'high effort' cash grabs, what about that low-effort garbage that I was talking about earlier. Well, if you've ever gone on the Android/Apple store and done a bit of experimental downloading here and there, chances are you've noticed something. Many of the games on the mobile market are the exact same game with a different skin.You've seen the archetypes: City builders with obnoxious amounts of resource management, amateurish platformers with bright aesthetics and endless darn battle royale games. Now, I'm not going to sit here and lament on the lack of creativity displayed in Mobile stores, (although that is a huge problem) when I can just point to how some of these games feel like they were made from a template. That's because they were.
With a two second google search, you can find a handful of 'City Builder templates' for the enterprising mobile developer. An easy how-to guide that requires little more from the purchaser then to change some assets before slapping it up on the mobile store. Not that there is anything wrong with templates and guides themselves. They are actually great tools for budding developers to figure out how to assemble a game. But they are best utilized as tutorials not easy-build-it kits. After a whilse of searching, I haven't yet found the exact template that a lot of the high-fantasy city builders use, but you can be sure that it exists. As long as both Apple and Google refuse to take their mobile marketplace seriously and start actually regulating it proactively, consumers will continue to be met with this barrage of copy-and-paste time wasters, and all those small indie gems that I am told actually exist will remain buried.
You may have picked up on the fact that I am more than a little passionate about the absolute state of the mobile marketplace. That's because I vividly remember the days when I wanted to play games but was lacking a console. I would browse the mobile game store and find fun little games that I would share with my friends.(Back when I had those.) When I look at the mobile store today, I see none of those cool, imaginative little games that made mobile gaming worthwhile. The store front is dominated by cash grabs, big budget ones and build-a-game ones. Were I a console-less child seeking gaming fun on mobile today, I wouldn't be surprised if child-me went off of games all together; and then went outside and did something active like >shudder< sports!
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