> Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth.

I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price.

Mobile games can have great depth. Just like PC/console games can be extremely simple and trivial.

(Depth doesn't come from complex mechanics or controls, btw. In fact, those things are often used to mask how shallow a game really is.)

I agree that the ability to use complex control system isn't necessarily an indicator of depth, but it certainly opens up a lot of possibilities. There are entire genres that have always been and will always be terrible on touchscreen devices.

Perhaps you are also right that most developers won't even try to make a real game, due to the difficulty in getting customers to pay for them. Now that its more profitable to milk small amounts of money out of non-gamers, I think the rest of us are going to eventually get stuck playing the kick starter lottery in order to see real games hit the market.

> > Most people won't pay full price, because most mobile games lack depth.

> I think you might have this backwards: Mobile games lack depth because their developers know most people won't pay full price.

Chicken, meet egg. :(

This is why I hate the mobile space for gaming.

to be fair, you have to make the game for the market. If the market will only bear $2 then you need to make a simpler game... not "play the horses" that you can beat them into spending more money. That's why the App Store and Mac market in general was full of much smaller game companies for so long. People were putting "more love than money" into games. But along come the big companies that want to sink half a million dollars and then complain that they won't get it back. that's not reasonable expectations... but they're too rich to be told that.

Depth doesn't come from complex controls, but complex controls are almost always needed to be able to play a game with any depth.

It's hard for me to gauge whether this is true or not. There are some amazing deep games like chess and bridge that have extremely simple controls. Do these counterexamples disprove the rule, or are they rare outliers?

Games in general don't have to have control complexity in order to have depth, but some genres have to be significantly dumbed-down in order to work with touch controls.

The concept of an on-screen virtual analog stick is great in theory. I practice, its always going to be terrible in comparison to its physical counterpart. Games like Modern Combat 4 are pretty impressive when you first see them, but 5 minutes in you realize two things: The controls are bad, and the entire game has been dumbed-down because the developers know that the controls are bad. Its not even their fault. They did as good of a job as anyone has, but a capacitive touchscreen just isn't going to offer the user a pleasant experience in a 3d fps.

Certain genres are well-suited to touch controls. Many genres are not. Board games and card games work very well.

I would say any strategy game would be just fine with touch controls. Any quest or exploration game too. Many puzzle-type or construction-type games as well. So I don't think touch is a huge problem here except for some genres like hardcore "click-click-click" action or racing games.

>I would say any strategy game would be just fine with touch controls.

I'd agree that board-game style strategy/war games would work, and also quite a few turn-based strategy games.

Its also possible to make certain types of real-time strategy games. Unfortunately, complex RTS games like Starcraft probably can't be done well without extreme oversimplification.

What would be the problem with Starcraft? I can't think of a lot of things that you can't do using touch/twofinger touch/long touch.

I think you'd need to slow down starcraft for it to be playable as the same game. People hit 60-100 actions per minute, like jumping around the map and directing units, setting build queues. Without hotkeys, you'd drop to around 20apm, and you'd be unable to do any micromanagment of units in battle. So it's not that any one action is impossible, just that lots of tactics that require many actions would be impossible.

Maybe for hardcore sport-like starcraft players this is true. But when I played starcraft I never did nearly anything like 100 apm neither my game ever required me to. Yes, that'd probably mean I'd lose miserably if I ever play 1-on-1 against a hardcore sport players, but that's not why I would be playing it and I'd probably never play with them anyway, I'm not in the same league. So I think for a casual player it would be OK. And hardcore players would have their hardcore setups.

There's also the accelerometers, compass, perhaps more. X-Plane is basing the primary controls on those and I find it works amazingly well (I've been playing the Android version).

Mario. Sonic. Doom. Complex controls?

The missing element for all three of those (which are action games) is latency.

With mobile touch-screen controls the game has to somehow register a button-press as soon as a button-press is made.

But it must also never (to a first approximation) register a button-press when a button-press was not requested (e.g. an accidental brush of a finger against the screen).

It's hard enough to do this anyways, but the "input device" does no favors for the game developer either. There's a reason that input devices on consoles and computers have evolved over the years into the shapes they have, they are meant to be easy to hold in a certain position (so that you always know where the buttons are) and perhaps more important, they have tactile features that allow your finger to quickly find and stay near the buttons. It's the reason that buttons and the D-pad are not fully-flush with the shell, even though that might have been more stylish.

Imagine trying to play Super Mario World with a NES-shaped rectangular controller where there are no tactile buttons. This might have worked if you only needed Left, Right, Jump, but even that game required all of the following for the best gameplay: Left/Right, Up/Down (for pipes and to literally scroll the screen up), Jump, Run/Hold/Fireball, Spin Jump, Pause, Drop Stored Item and Shoulder Left/Right (to scroll the screen). And if the input wasn't right you'd either jump into a spike you had meant to run under or accidentally run off a cliff you'd meant to jump past.

The controls on Mario seem complex only because they were so completely intuitive when you were actually playing them but I assure you they were far more difficult to implement than you think. It's not until you start playing platformer games with horrible controls that you can realize the great job done by the development teams at Sega (for Sonic) and Nintendo.

In this context, yes. Precision jumping and strafing-while-turning-while-firing are basically impossible with touchscreen controls; at least I've yet to see them done well.

On a phone, yes, they can be harder to control.

Chess is deep but it's not complex. Starcraft is both deep and complex. Candy Crush is shallow and simple. I can't think of a game off the top of my head that's really complex and really shallow but whatever it is it's definitely not on a mobile device.

I'm not so sure. I suspect writing a near-optimal Candy Crush AI would be quite difficult.

Diablo 3 was something of a different story. Blizzard knew players would create their own functionally-IAP black market anyway, because it happened in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. So Blizzard figured they may as well bring auctions in house to make the market honest and usable for players without worrying about scammers. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What wrecked Diablo 3 was the enormous power discrepancy between what a player could reasonably find on their own and what was readily available on the auction market. The game had to be balanced around the latter to avoid auction buyers god-moding over everything, which left solo players completely screwed. With a tighter power balance between common and rare items, Diablo 3 would have continued to be playable just fine.

>There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Yes there is. Diablo 3 would have been much better if buying gear was the exception to the rule. By legitimizing it and as you mentioned, failing to provide balance, Blizzard unintentionally made the purchase of gear the only viable method of progression for most players.

With World of Warcraft, Blizzard made tons of money off of cosmetic items. If they wanted to increase revenue, they should have gone this route instead of ruining the best action-rpg franchise in the world.

I think D3's AH failing was using real money, not just balancing or buying gear by default.

Buying gear in WoW is easy and a given up to a point, but limited to in-game currency. To buy some of the best gear, you just have to be the owner of enough gold to buy something from one of the two auction houses if it shows up. That meant you were active in your server's economy (helpful) or you were buying gold from scammers (which a lot of people are scared to do) - or you were raiding at a point where that gear was equivalent to what you can get, so you just ignored it (a small minority of raiders, not just WoW players overall). If real money was involved, it'd probably turn into something worse than D3's AH fiasco where people would quit playing since everyone playing for non-RP/solo reasons would eventually be forced to spend a bunch of money on top of in-game time to be on an even footing.

Not that I think D3 should have followed the same exact footsteps as WoW in terms of how to make money, but I'm looking forward to next month to maybe get around to start playing D3 again now that the AH will be gone there.

Most gear in WoW cannot be traded. If you want to buy the best gear, you wait for a guild to farm the content, then buy the gear from the guild by doing the instance with them. People do trade real money for this service, but it is understandably quite expensive.

Current-tier raid and PVP gear can show up on the Black Market Auction House, sold by NPCs. The BMAH sells a very small number of pieces during the few months it takes people to clear content. When I played in a top 20 US 25 man guild in T14-15, our BMAH was usually camped by the other faction, so we couldn't buy stuff anyway. It didn't make any noticeable difference.

Yeah to those who see it as some catch-22 that was forged at the dawn of man, sure might as well "legitimize" IAP...

For others, like myself & Phaus, apparently, we'll just play a different damn game. I think the disconnect here is that people are like "well look its still working, isnt it?" but the idea of "ruining" a game isnt that the thing is broken now, its that casual players dont wanna get involved cuz its an all-or-nothing shitshow where youre not sure exactly when the menu is gonna pop up saying "give us more money or your time invested is now a complete waste".

i only play single-player story titles now for the most part because i know that pretty much anything else is gonna try to mess with my mind & prey on the consumer. COD & Battlefield are the best examples i can think of. They keep game prices high, get players addicted to repetitive mindless multiplayer, then charge $15 for a change of scenery (should 3 or 4 maps cost 1/4 the price of the game itself?)

If you buy, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're being ripped off & it makes you resent the gamemakers. If you don't buy, you're left with a limited set of maps that is getting duller by the second, lol

I'm avoiding by just buying downloadable PC games for between $1 - $10 each & then when its over its over. its the skinner box games that overprice DLC and this alone should be a trigger that makes people see them for what they are & have the willpower to opt out

Its especially sad i think because old-school PC gamers probly remember when COD2 & the like were very DIY, moddable titles for nerdy WW2 enthuiasts.

Now they are a massive corporation with nothing moddable & the balls to sell simple gun skins in like $15 packs :D

This is pretty much spot-on. I can't stand CoD anymore for quite a few reasons, but one of the biggest is that they charge money for map packs that are often based on old content. If I'm loyal enough to give you 60 bucks every time you come out with a new game, don't try screwing me out of extra money for maps that I already bought a year ago. Port them for free like good developers always have, or just don't do it at all.

I think valve has done the best job out of anyone when it comes to monetization in Counterstrike:GO. You can purchase custom maps and skins to use on official matchmaking servers, or you get all of the same content for free plus a wide variety of mods and use them on custom servers. They get paid, and the customers still have freedom of choice.

thats cool, i didnt know GO does that (bought it during xmas sale, haven't even played yet).

its nice to be back in the PC world. my friend gave me an xbox360 & i was playing that for a bit but now instead of a console i have geforce 770... hadn't even realized the notion of "custom servers" still existed, hah :D

The cosmetic business model has seemed to work well for Valve. Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and Dota 2 use this model, from which Dota gathered worth of $600'000 only from donations towards the game's yearly championship. The players received some in-game items from the donation, which gave them cosmetic items for playable characters and new UI skins. I personally like the idea, as the highly competetive games stay balanced as the cosmetic items do not give any edge to their owner.

Valve also gives the cosmetic items as random drops after matches or from spectating competetive games. The players are then able to sell these items to other players trough Valve's market. From the trades Valve takes a procentual fee (or margin, that is), which can raise quite high as some knives in CS cost over $300 and some couriers in Dota have been sold as high as $9000 a pop.

Even though the cosmetic business model sounds like a golden road, I've yet to across any mobile game which would have used it.

Valve also had a virtual monopoly on digital game sales, billions of dollars of alternate revenue and huge teams of engineers and artists to build that Steam market and make the initial bunch of items.

Valve is incredibly unique yet people keep telling tiny companies making mobile games that they should be like Valve.

Look at games like XCom, or Jagged Alliance. These games had better depth and AI than even current console games. They work well with a touchscreen interface.

The problem is that good game design is hard, and not particularly repeatable. Having a single simple mechanic, surrounded by a reusable monetization platform is much more formulaic and repeatable. Formulaic is bad for players, but good for businesses.

As another example, any traditional turn-based RPG can probably be controlled better on a touchscreen than a controller (navigating menus on a controller sucks) and have at least the potential to be deep. Or roguelikes... really, most turn based games can be done okay on a touchscreen.

There could possibly be a solution that has to do with legislation forcing game developers to be upfront and transparent about the kinds of purchases in their games. Lots of games, for instance, might have a very reasonable limit on in-app purchases analogous to paying for "the full game". Other games have no limit on what they'll let you buy. It could be done by an independent ratings board (much like how movies are rated for age limits).