Mobile Games Are Trash and We All Know It

From the Friends Per Second podcast:

But I do think that this product, Diablo Immortal specifically, really sets a new president for how I view this company, because I don't think it's fine for us just to be like “oh, well it's a mobile game, so we just ignore it. It's OK for them to do it, that's the chance to cash in. And I wondered what you guys thought about that because I think a lot of people are like “well, we just have to assume that, it's mobile.”

I love video games, and I love some mobile games (Alto’s Odyssey, Holedown, Grindstone, Golf on Mars, to name a few), but we all know that those games aren’t what Mobile Games are all about. Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that don’t exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Fun is not the point.

Compare this to the top selling non-mobile games of May 2022:

Yes, a few of these games have microtransactions, but none of these games are on this list because they’re extracting massive sums from a few people, they’re getting a ton of people to buy them because they’re fun.

This is why I roll my eyes when someone says, “actually, iOS is the biggest platform for video games because the most money is spent on mobile.” Okay, fair enough, but it’s the absolute worst part of the industry, even if it is profitable. I really appreciate game-makers who avoid the Mobile Game B.S., but they’re few and far between, and all the mainstream stuff is whale hunting junk.