Let me be clear... (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, October 24, 2013, 14:32 (3839 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The problem is that many folks just don't know what types of games are good on a touch screen, nor how to design them.

Partially this, but also thanks to a culture of entitlement being spurred on by VC-funded apps, the wind got taken out of the sails of mobile app / game developers just as it got started. I paid £10 for my very first iPhone game in 2008 (Super Monkey Ball) and considered it a bargain compared to the £40 it would have cost for a console, but within a very short space of time perceptions rapidly shifted such that this was considered egregiously expensive. Now a lot of players won't even pay $2 for a game, and so developers have had to come up with new ways of making the game profitable. Mostly this comes in the form of gameplay mechanics designed around consumables bought with In-App Purchase, and a ‘free’ base game (Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga etc.)

These games are successful and popular in spite of having mechanics which I think a lot of people on this forum would take issue with, but it's against that kind of toxic ecosystem that other developers are struggling to make games that are fun and work. Take Plants vs Zombies 2 for example. Made by Popcap, but published by EA, so naturally the stereotypical EA-hating reddit reading hivemind already has it in for them, especially as it features IAP. In actual fact it's a great little game that makes no hard sell to encourage you to purchase the IAP content (I still haven't; you can unlock almost all of it through natural, patient progression). But by all accounts it's not done well for EA financially, and so I have to imagine the lesson learned will be they need to be pushing IAP far more heavily in future.

It's ever so slightly depressing.