Cultivating more informed mobile gamers

With King's success getting to their heads resulting some legal shenanigans, and EA doing yet another headdesk worthy gaff with the new Dungeon Keeper, it makes me wonder just how true is the stereotype that people who play mobile video games are just a bunch of gullible fools being exploited by some heartless corporations using colorful thinly-veiled Skinner Boxes?

I won't argue as to how much truth is there in that stereotype but one way to combat that stereotype would be to have a campaign (funded by someone, of course... hopefully with a clean rep with society) of some sort to inform people who mostly play games on their phones and tablets of which mobile game companies are being unethical or sue-happy at the moment.

Promoting the Humble Mobile Bundles might help. Pay-what-you-want, charity, supporting indie games (some of them) and a lot of them don't have sleazy pay-to-win items or ads.

I still say that there needs to be like 1 minute dedicated to video games on TV news programs. 1 minute to expose all the scandals.

Better extend it to PC as well.

IA Ps have started showing up in flash games D:

edited 7th Feb '14 6:47:30 PM by PageofSpace

hi

I think this is just one of those things that simply has to run its course until it becomes a Discredited Trope, kinda like FPS games set in World War II with gratuitous levels of Real Is Brown before it. Sooner or later the market's going to become oversaturated. I suspect it's already started its decline, but it's still the path of least resistance for many shovelware developers. But eventually there will come another bandwagon.

From the looks of things, I think pay-to-win games are basically today's equivalent of Justin Bieber a couple years ago. There's no lack of people online who vocally hate it, but there's a shrinking minority who still spend enough money on it to make it profitable to the companies behind it.

edited 8th Feb '14 12:47:13 AM by PoochyEXE

Extra 1: Poochy Ain't Stupid

Personally, I'd rather all kinds of media news be relegated to its own news programs rather than allowing for the TV news programs to shunt out even more news stories than most news programs already do, but, y'know, whatever.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

Anyone ever fear that non-mobile gaming w/ traditional payment models would go the way of the dinosaur (or perhaps the Dodo if one feels that it is being forced into extinction)?

No. Systems like Steam promote the older models still, and despite the fact that there's a lot of fuss over the Mobile Games I have yet to see regular games slacken off at all.

The truth of the matter is that despite whatever hack "industry analyst" states is that the vast majority of mobile games are trashware. The successful ones are so entrenched in their "play for 5 minutes at the dentist office" model that they will never encroach on console\pc\handheld territory in any substantial way.

Whenever some developer does go into mobile gaming then the quality of their work has almost always spiraled totally downhill. E.G Square Enix and Final Fantasy. The "analysts" who claim such things like "X developer should move into mobile gaming ASAP! Consoles and handhelds are doomed, the spreadsheets have spoken!" fail to grasp basic concepts of the industry and should be working at the nearest Burger King.

edited 8th Feb '14 5:30:59 PM by mr.gaben

Uhhh no.

While it's true that the majority of games published on the App stores are just very, very cheaply made Pay-to-Win cash-grabs, there are some games with a decent budget, graphics, and gameplay that are starting to appear. Gunner Z, Battle Supremacy, Vector and Republique come to mind. Only one of those is an F 2 P game that entices you to use real-world cash to win - namely Gunner Z - and despite that the game is surprisingly fair about the whole thing, allowing you to gain the premium currency gradually through gameplay if you don't mind a bit of a grind.

But anyways, the bottom line I'm trying to make is that high-quality smartphone games worthy of attention are slowly beginning to appear. While it won't ever kill the PC or consoles, it may eventually be the death knell for both the Nintendo DS and Play Station Vita. I suspect the missing link that will finally bridge the gap will be related to the Smartphones finally figuring out a good control system for their games, meaning that larger game developers will now have an incentive to build games for both smartphone and handheld game devices and take away sales.

I believe a cruel joke of metafiction needs to be played on the ignorant mobile consumers as an attempt to wake them up.

And accomplish what exactly, pray tell?

Informed customers? lol.

Our only hope is government legally calling mobile IAP gambling and placing restrictions.

People addicted to mobile gaming are addicted the same way people get addicted to gambling. People just don't realize it yet.

Make them question their choice of mobile games. Question whether their game is being little more than a scam and whether or not the company has been ethical recently.

edited 13th Feb '14 9:31:08 AM by Worlder

That would imply mobile gaming consumers would be able to recognize said joke.

It wouldn't hurt to try.

@Thorn: You realize that one could make the very same argument about videogames bought in a store, right? That an addicted player will spent his earnings on new, frivolous $60 dollar games that he may rarely even play or solely for collections sake? It may not be the exact same idea of "PAY MORE TO GET BETTER GEAR!!!", but at the core it is a form of addiction nonetheless.

It's a knife that cuts both ways, hence why I'm not a big fan of persecuting mobile and Facebook games, even despite their crappiness. Besides they're not all horrible: I've actually got a couple of decent ones on my I-Phone 5S such as Vector and Battle Supremacy that are fairly priced and fun to play as well.

How well crafted does cruel joke have to be in order to elicit "Ah touche" instead of "You bastard!"?

Given that probably more than 75% of the mobile game players are just casuals and honestly don't care about the internal politics of gaming? I don't think it's worth it, it may very well just go over their heads or sound just downright obnoxious.

Very well how about a game that teaches the values of being an informed consumer in general (from games to food to clothing)?

You mean like the Sims or Animal Crossing? Yeah, I don't see that working either cause they tend to make up a considerable amount of the Farmville-type games.

I think it's better to just accept that many players, whether on mobile phones, P Cs, or consoles are going to occasionally indulge in some dumb behavior at some point regarding the Pay to Win games and actually waste money on them. Not out of desperation, but out of a much deeper-seated need to win at all costs and excel at something, anything, even if it's just a mere game. This sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior also appears in card-battle collectors or even model collectors, so assuming the issue will go away because of a few awareness commercials or awareness campaigns is kinda naïve.... they'll just hide their desires in a different outlet.