It's unfortunate how bad the state of mobile gaming is, considering how powerful today's phones are.
Ive just taken to replaying old JRPGs from my childhood, they're very compatible with that playstyle. Sure, a battle may take 2-4 days to complete, but it's much more entertaining.
I think this is a huge reason a game like Clash of Clans has done so well. I could never get into it, but my brother has been playing steadily for 4 years. He likely only spends 10-15/year, but the devs haven't annoyed him enough to quit. It's the worst sort of pay-to-avoid waiting game, which is why I couldn't stand it, but somehow still less exploitative than most of the competing mobile games.
I'm just so disappointed that I'm carrying around a far more powerful device than even a PC from my childhood, and some of the best gaming experiences are old console games.
My theory of the awfulness of phone games is that it's more about the fact that phones don't have any input devices. So you see things like endless runners where the only possible command is "jump", which works well with the hardware where the only input you can provide is "I touched the screen". If the game had two commands, it wouldn't work on a phone.
I put ScummVM on my phones. It works fine; the only input an adventure game needs is mouse clicks with no time pressure. Interestingly, the current version is a huge step backwards in usability from the much older version available through f-droid -- the older version takes a screen tap to mean "click in the location of the cursor", and you move the cursor by dragging your finger around the screen. But the current version takes a screen tap to mean "click under where I tapped the screen", making clicking almost impossible.
My theory of the awfulness of phone games is that awful, cookie cutter games on phones can make lots of money, so lots of firms are happy to churn them out on an assembly line, knowing that a certain percentage will succeed.
There's enough not-awful phone games to establish that the platform doesn't inherently mandate awfulness, so it's about the market not the inherent platform features.
> If the game had two commands, it wouldn't work on a phone.
There's plenty of games with multiple commands on phones (one or two virtual directional sticks plus a handful, often contextually switched so the total number is greater than is onscreen at any one time, virtual buttons is not uncommon.
They can only do this in the absence of competition from non-awful games. You claim that those games exist, but you don't support that claim in any way. Why do you think they haven't displaced the awful games?
There's an infinite number of terrible games being constantly turned out for the PC too; the difference is that the PC also has good games.
Saying there are no good games on mobile is just ridiculous. Not just because quite a few decent PC games were closely ported to mobile, usually without predatory bullshit. But everything with a price sticker has to compete with "free". Saying the market will sort things out in favor of good games is just as ridiculous. Predatory tactics seem to work quite effectively, seem to make money for the industry and as such wont disappear anytime soon. Maybe if they go overboard and we consequently get some decent regulation.
There are a number of good reasons PC gaming is still a lot different from mobile, like how it started in a widely different position and still has quite different target audiences. But there is no indication it will stay that way, at least in terms of awful business practices.
No, they can only do this because there's actually a solid market for what I (and I assume you) see as awful games for extremely portable handheld devices; essentially, I think they are pretty much digital fidget spinners.
Pretty simple reason. There's enough games that charge $0 up front that products asking for even $1 up front, get negligible downloads. Consequently, everybody has to charge $0 up front which immediately constrains you to advertising or mostly coercive business models. And this business model then ends up meshing into the game itself. It's not easy to have a game when you have this constraint of having to coerce the user into paying. It invariably lends itself to a sort of addiction + satiation pattern. And oddly what's most addictive is not necessarily the most fun; in many cases it's not really any fun at all.
Arguably it's the same reason console gaming is dying. Increasingly often now a days you're not buying a game for $60, you're buying a starter pack which is then filled out a la carte with DLC and various microtransactions. And once again this model directly impacts the game experience itself. It's stripped down to the bare bones to attempt to coerce purchase of the 'whole' game. But to further 'incentivize' people to buy the 'whole' game, the stripped out content is often not only necessary for a complete experience but also grossly imbalanced in the player's favor. It's a very myopic business model. Fortunately PC gaming is full of independent developers who've yet to grasp the sophisticated business strategy of MBAing yourself to death, and then blaming everything except your own actions for your deteriorating longterm results.
Not just with consoles. This sort of thing is what made me stop buying AAA games altogether, and largely to stop gaming generally. Now when I occasionally want to play a game, I pretty much stick with the ones I bought a decade or more ago, or ones that I find on GOG.
"Prostitute" has negative historical connotations. For example, we will say that Mitch McConnell has prostituted himself to billionaires, but we would never call him a sex worker.
/ducks
I don't think that's technically true.
But I would say at the very least "sex work" covers dominatrices, pre-recorded and live-streaming porn performances, strip club and lap dance performances, as well as escorts. So "sex worker" isn't precisely equal to "prostitute"
This is demonstrably untrue.
I agree with your second sentiment (although I wouldn't generalize to "scumbags"), but there are a lot of people out there doing jobs that are extremely unpleasant, for far less money than prostitution can make.
If you don't have to fear your customer because the legal system has your back (making you independent of pimps and the like), prostitution is a possible way to make a significant amount of money - on your own conditions, in your own time, without the fear of being fired and all the other stuff a normal workplace imposes.
Noped out of that and started getting a lot more critical when it comes to where I work with regard to ethics.
Neither is good, but the latter is worse.
If someone has ADHD, adderall slows them down so they can concentrate. It reduces mind-fog from too much stimulus.
If you don't have ADHD, its like a super cup of coffee, but in pill form.
My doctor was trying to figure out my cognitive issue. And for a time, I was on adderall. It was pretty easy to tell that I didn't have ADHD, since I started getting upper'd. Felt nice, don't get me wrong. But I'll stick with coffee.
That is nothing like a good point at all. It sounds more like rationalizing questionable activity.
It boggles my mind that internet is not a revokable permission. Anywhere. I'd be happy to give X access to e.g. contacts, as long as it cannot upload that info, but until I ran a local VPN that hasn't been an option at all.
Why are (stock) mobile permissions so user-hostile?
No ads, no permissions beyond file storage, no issues working offline.
But you can't buy that anymore; now the only option is a 'free' version which has ads that you cannot pay away.
Fortunately I can still download the old version from the app store; now it is called 'zzSUNSET <game>' in the list of purchased apps. But I'm amazed at how consumer-hostile game companies have gotten; I guess the ads must pay out the wazoo. It makes me really hesitant to try any new mobile game, especially since I don't really have much time for them these days. I'm not going to spend 30 seconds out of every 1-5 minute diversion watching an ad, that's ridiculous.