The Deck has basically become my dedicated Emulation Pad with how simple and convenient EmuDeck is to use as well as the fact that outside of 2D platformers and boomer shooters, 6th gen and below console games are the only things that don't completely drain the battery in like 2 fucking hours.
Been playing God Hand and Metal Arms: Glitch In The System on it recently and I have to say 6yo me would have been absolutely SALIVATING at the idea of playing full-ass console quality games like that on the go with basically no compromises in quality or performance.
I've run into a couple problems with Darktide and Remnant II, but otherwise it eats up everything I throw at it. It handles Elden Ring better than my desktop.
Mobile gaming replaced handheld games consoles. Why bother making a whole new system when you can just put it on the thing nearly everyone on the planet has in their pocket at all times?
Granted mobile gaming is in a rough state but that's another story entirely.
One of my pet theories is that redditors hate mobile games because many of us had a GBA or DS and experienced peak to the extent that we are perpetually disappointed that mobile games lack the same effort
edit: And it's not even unfair because the Nintendo Switch went on to sell 100 billion units because mobile games rarely ascend beyond mid lol--there would otherwise not be a need to buy essentially a special nintendo android tablet
A lot pf us also hate it because we remember when Mobile Gaming was a new frontier full of brand new ideas and promise. Squeenix used to have an entire line of mobile only RPGs that were actuslly REALLY good. Chaos Rings 2, Song Summoner. These were full.fledged RPGs with tons of effort and charm. And then Gacha came. And it's all gone now
Yeah the title of this post should be “I think gacha games did more damage to the games industry then people realize”.
Only issue with that title is that most people *do* realize this unless they themselves have been sucked into the gacha pit and are currently mentally fighting sunk cost fallacy.
We could have full fledged RPGs on our phones. The tech is beyond there, touch screen controls aren’t an issue for menu based gameplay systems. But why would you make a regular rpg when you could put 1/4 the effort into making a gacha rpg and make way more money if it catches a few whales?
No one actually put their money where their mouth was and purchased the experimental smaller scale RPGs on mobile. From the start, live service gacha style dominated the mobile market. Otherwise, it was those $5 or lower games like Threes.
It then became an ouroboros feedback loop where the only way to get successful in the mobile market is to release gachas, so people kept pushing out gachas. No one wants to pay above $10 for a video game on your phone, and mainstream video game companies obviously value their games at way higher than $10. Whereas a gacha is free to install but could generate higher income than the range of an initial price of $10-30.
I can't remember whose take it was but there was definitely somebody who said that the mobile game market was completely destroyed by the simple decision of _the pricing of Angry Birds_ and every issue with it has spiraled out from that decision in some way.
Mighta been Derek (SSFF).
I don't even think it was a bad business decision to price your game according to the one mechanic gimmick you made, i.e. Angry Birds's flicking or Flappy Bird's balancing.
The mobile games market just wasn't regulated (or colluded by the Big Guys like in console gaming) at all which was just the biggest domino effect for the market.
God, Song Summoner! I remember downloading the demo & then not buying the full version because playing on the iPod was insufferable. Such a fun little idea.
Also we were told not to worry about mobile gaming taking over because the potential of GBA/DS tier games on mobile was obviously going to be the next step. Don't worry, it'll still be quality bro
There are some really solid mobile games, but you have to wade through an ocean of shit to find them. And even the good ones will give you the option to throw infinite money at them because it's free for them to do so--which really fucks up friends of mine with bipolar disorder or gambling addiction. It's gotten to the point where I've had to support enough friends with problems that I just get mad every time I see "gems."
The nice thing about the GBA SP was that if you took it on a road trip you literally couldn't spend money on it. You played Pokemon or Fire Emblem and it never once offered you garbage while you were playing.
For me it's literally as simple as disliking touchscreen controls. Can't stand 'em. I need tactile feedback, I need to know the game is accepting my inputs.
For a while I played smartphone games using a portable controller but even though it was too tiny to really be comfortable to use, it was still a pain to fit it in and out of my pocket and attach it to the phone so I stopped using it.
The problem is that we really need new types of games with new control schemes designed for the hardware, but serious designers have been pushed out of mobile, so nobody is working on it. There's all kinds of cool things you could do with a touch screen, but it requires a totally different approach from games made for a d-pad and two buttons. Look at the slingshot in Angry Birds, for example.
Some types of games just can't work as well with touch screen though (which is why DS is great, it had both). Like I wouldn't want to play anything with direct control of moving a character on touchscreen over actual buttons.
Like just thinking of playing say one of my favorite GBA games, Metroid Fusion on a touch screen only device and I don't think it could work (without being significantly inferior to play).
We're conditioned to define genres by their control schemes, but I don't think there's actually anything about a Metroid game that dictates you move the character with four directional buttons. It's possible to make a game that's fun in the same way but uses radically different controls. Look at the DS Zelda games, they adapted to using a touchscreen just fine.
One of the cool things about most of the Metroid games though is there's some cool platforming tech that uses precise controls. I just don't see using walljumping to get somewhere early to be something that would even be fun to try using touchscreens.
Is this even a theory? Mobile games are objectively worse games, made shitty on purpose and extremely derivative of each other, of course mostly derivative of the worst parts of each other.
The vast majority of them are just glorified funnels to their in-game store/gambling, most of the good ones are ports of old pc games and then the last .001% are companies like Capcom/Squinix trying to make 1 or 2 actual good games unique to the platform.
A lot of that can be true on PC too but it really seems that 99% of the mobile market is equivalent to the bottom 5% of the pc market
Plus outside to the whole monetization stuff, touch screen emulated buttons are a really bad substitute for buttons. Like I've played a decent bit of Mighty Doom and my reoccurring thought was "man, this would be actually good on like console or something that used a controller."
I think its a very outdated look on gacha games honestly. Not even heated but it really stinks of knowledge that was crystallised back in 2011 and that knowledge was never updated.
There are still large swaths of absolute dogshit gacha/mobile games out there, but the good games do exist.
Even the good ones are designed to be daily grind addiction machines whose business model encourages power creep so they can sell you the new hotness every few weeks. Anything of worth in there exists in spite of the genre.
I cannot overstate how much the business model hobbles these games. They're like sharks in that they need to keep moving forward in order to survive. They dedicate no resources to retouching old content and balance is always compromised by that need to push new characters. If the new one isn't more powerful it loses the devs money, and there's no incentive to adjust underpowered or broken characters.
On top of that, so much of the talk I see around gachas boils down to how to best grind and manage currencies so you can make number go up quicker and get more pulls. Optimising that process is a baked in part of the genre, and it's joyless drudgery.
I don't disagree by any means. However this is the usual discourse when someone who doesn't play gacha games talk about how bad it can be in the genre.
I play some gacha games like Arknights or Nikke, their business model 100% sucks but moving on from that discussion, they're good games with decent writing, characters or worldbuilding. There's quite literally the rest of the game to discuss regardless of the shitty business model. Some of those games even have fun gameplay if you can believe it. I am reluctant to talk about Mihoyo games as I'm a bit of a hater for their games, but even I can admit the games they make are held to a really high standard even outside of the gacha standard.
If we wanted to highlight shitty business models in all of the gaming industry I feel the need to point out that battle passes have pushed back video games by several decades and battle passes were not invented by gachas.
Here's the thing, I do play. Every 6 to 12 months I'll be drawn in by something, have a month or so of fun but end up leaving with a rotten taste in my mouth.
I've just stopped playing Nikke after about 6 weeks. A combination of badly translated main story content, Last Kingdom's 2nd half being kind of a wet fart and starting to approach that 160 wall flipped the switch from "this is fun" to "I'm wasting my time."
There's stuff to like in there, sure. I enjoy sad robots fighting for humanity's survival and trying to find purpose in their lives. Team composition requires a bit of thought and the process of shooting is simple and fun. But if I'd spent 6 weeks playing any other game (or games) daily I'd have gotten so much more enjoyment out of that time.
No, there are dogshit gacha games, and *better* gacha games, but there are no GOOD gacha games because gacha is dogshit. It is a shackle that stops a game from ever reaching higher than it, because if that's how the game makes money, then everything it does has to link back into it, like an infection that spreads through every part of the design
The weirdest part was that mobile games were actually better in the past compared to now. You had stuff like World of Goo, Infinity Blade, PVZ, the whole library of what i call "3-star games" like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water etc. Hell even the P2W stuff like whatever Glu made still had some game in it.
Now you'd be hard pressed to find anything that isn't gacha, AFK, or a city builder.
There are great mobile games too! I didn't think this was possible at first without the haptic feedback and bad mobile connections, but Clash Royale was extremely fun for me, only ruined by the predatory monetization. In Germany we have really spotty mobile internet connection, but I could still play against other people on my commute without ever really having disconnects or other connection issues.
If someone were to make a good PvP game with short non-comittal rounds and without pay-to-win features I would be all over it.
Vlambeer actually started as a mobile developer. They made ridiculous fishing, which had a single upfront price and no other monetization. Then they moved to regular PC dev.
>mobile games lack the same effort
thing is they actually don't, there's a lotta good mobile games
and the nerds here are really forgetting how much dreck was on the gba
> and the nerds here are really forgetting how much dreck was on the gba
They probably didn't play any of it because there was just so many great games and it was easy to pick them out. Like I can't think of a single bad GBA game, because I didn't play any, because I knew better than to buy any.
There's dreck on every console and platform honestly. It's funny that the mobile industry gets singled out for it when dogshit shovelware gets pushed out to every console every minute.
Every other platform has actual moderation of some kind and never suffered the "race to the bottom" that mobile gaming did, where games are expected to have no upfront purchase price, so the average game *has* to have some kind of MTX or Gacha, meaning the average game is simply just worse on a base level. Consoles and PC have their flagship titles, the most popular games that are all normal paid games where you buy the game and play it, but if I open the Google play store and look at the top 10... the top 10 IS dreck. It's all MTX infested minigames, no story focused titles except one puzzle game whose store page looks like it's full of bullshots. There's no DEPTH to any of these, they're all as vapid as the next. Most of the good actual mobile titles are older generations of PC and Console games that got ported over, and the rare gem like Stone Story or Infinitode
It's because it's so in your face about pushing crap. It's like the inverse of other platforms. The bad games get pushed to the top of visibility while the good ones are way more difficult to find.
I don't disagree, but you can go to a local Gamestop or Target to see that it's really not all that different for console/handheld platforms.
Or nowadays on Steam browsing the New Releases section. Tons of dogshit shovelware or cheaply made porn games being released every day.
You say its the inverse, I think it's cause on the hardcore gaming platforms the "better" games tend to get much more marketing by way of actual advertising or proper word of mouth. You get that a lot less on mobile.
> One of my pet theories is that redditors hate mobile games because many of us had a GBA or DS and experienced peak to the extent that we are perpetually disappointed that mobile games lack the same effort
Eh it's just the controls
A virtual d-pad has never ever come close to replicating the feel of an actual one or a stick, it just feels bad and having to cover the screen to control it also feel sbad
I mean it works fine for some games where you're just tapping fruits or icons or whatever but my best memories of handheld gaming are curling up and playing like, jrpgs, or platformers, or whatever on my GBA SP or DS Lite, these are the kinds of games I want to play, not like fruit tapper or sudoku.
or at least, not always fruit tapper or sudoku
The psychology of the mobile gamer is somewhat fascinating to me. The average mobile gamer user ardently refuses to purchase a game. Yet, gachas and other “free” games make billions a year. So clearly the average user is willing to spend money but that upfront cost just completely destroys their ideal of what a mobile game is.
I wonder if traditional games like we had on mobile consoles could see success by having a prologue that’s “free” and then selling the rest of the game in smaller chunks.
Did they release it on the Wii U like that or do you mean the Wii U game they released on mobile like that? In my experience mobile players get got in a death by a thousand cuts style. A dollar here, five dollars there. But I don’t think console players, especially the people who had been willing to buy a Wii U would like that model.
I was talking about being released on the Wii U, which is what I thought you meant, because I know at least a couple games released on mobile had already been doing that for a while, mainly Ace Attorney and Ghost tricks which released their content into chunks on mobile initially.
What did a GBA or 3DS game cost back in the day? Let's say $30. You made me realize I would balk so hard if I saw a mobile game cost $30, even if that then had no microtransactions afterwards. I'm not saying it's rational, but it's how I would honestly act.
Super Mario Run was $10 (I believe) and people still balked at it. Even though that $10 got you a complete game with no further purchases attached, the idea of paying for a game is absurd in the mobile games market, even though those "free" games then drain far more than $10 from many players through microtransactions, but they don't feel the price shock from it.
It's the same psychology where nowadays people will be repulsed by a $35 price tag with $8 shipping, but won't have the same immediate reaction to a $49 price tag with free shipping.
Mobile games make most of their money off of a small minority of mobile gamers by exploiting their gaming addictions, and these gamers are called whales. The average mobile user is not giving developers any money, outside of watching ads in-game. Predatory and intentionally addictive, simplistic game design is how mobile games make money, save for mobile games that are ports from other platforms (e.g. Minecraft, Stardew).
Nothing I’ve read paints whales as a defacto majority of revenue for mobile games (as in 80-90+%, from what I’ve seen depending on game they’re 50%). Normal people still tend to spend money. It’s not like you have some line in the sand and on one side is whales spending 10k a month and the other is every other player. Sure a live service gacha game constantly putting out new content needs whales to survive. But take a regular game and split it into 5$ chunks and I bet you could get some of the normal crowd.
It’s not like I’m saying a full on 100 million dollar budget AAA game could survive this way. I’m saying games we used to get on 3ds could, something like stardew valley.
Nintendo made the same mistake as everybody else, instead of taking mobile seriously they consulted with mobile "experts" (who worship satan) to add a bunch of tacky casino bullshit.
Hopefully at some point we'll see a crash in mobile, and these fake game developer marketing scumbags will have to go back to robbing corpses.
Yeah, and then the game itself was short spurts of bland actual gameplay broken up by a bunch of flashy menus where you can "buy" things. They might not have actually been trying to get more of your money, but the design was infected by that same algorithmic brainrot where every mobile game needs to be a flashing neon Skinner box.
I think you misunderstood what happened. If you paid $10, you got the whole game no strings attached. There was no casino bullshit. It was just the game
And people hated it anyway.
I think this is what the ancient ones referred to as a "demo". A lot of real mobile games used to have those, before they got bought out by scumbags and turned into casinos.
I think part of it comes from the same logic that WoW has with Rested XP.
Originally it would remove your XP bonus and you would get 75%, people hated it so they changed the wording to be 125% and nothing else.
In that same thinking pattern, When you present something for free, but then cut off until you pay, people will feel like you took something away from them rather then giving it.
How they get around this with mobile game is selling and giving you things, and not making it apparent that they took things, even tough they are the one's putting the limitation in place.
This is something not easy to hide for a normal game where you can unlock the full story.
I want to make a mobile game that has fake gacha in it to unlock each chapter, and you have to actually buy the gacha, making the final price of the gacha guaranteed to pay out at the price of an actual game, and just trick mobile gamers into playing an actual game
Mobile gaming used to be so good but now it seems there's only 2 kinds of mobile games: "games" focused on showing you as much adverts as possible or microtransaction riddled grindfests that actively prey on you to spend money on them either to refill your energy bar (because otherwise you gotta wait!) or for a chance to get some anime girl.
Like, thank god you actually get a decent port of an Indie game now and again otherwise there'd be nothing of value on mobile devices.
Well that’s kind of a fallacy for the same reason of why did you bother trying to make a battle royle when fortnight already exists. Making a moblie game now when you aren’t mihoyo is a complete waste of time and money. A company at this point thinking they are going to make money off the mobile market is like a child dreaming about becoming a rockstar or pro athlete when they grow up.
I don't know how much of any of this holds water, dude.
Mobile games as a market have still been more profitable than the console and PC market combined. You can absolutely make money in the mobile market (especially due to the lower barriers of entry, and an inherently larger possible user base), it's just a matter of quality and marketing.
It's unlikely, but I feel like it's either ignorant or disingenuous to say that it's impossible for an indie company to make money off a mobile game.
Nah, mobile is wildly profitable for like 5 companies and the there are a million other companies trying and failing to get a piece of that pie, in exactly the same way companies tried to a piece of that final fantasy money or that pokemon money or that call of duty money or that fortnight money.
yeah and now they're found on Steam or Switch. They're somewhat drowned out by bigger games, but those games still exist.
What you think Bravely Default 2 wouldn't have been a 3DS2 game if a fictional Nintendo handheld that wasn't a Switch showed up?
a New Shantae game is coming up that was literally a GBA title. It will just also be a PS5, Xbox Series, Steam, and Switch title now.
It's unironically really cool that they're doing a limited release of the Shantae one on actual GBA cartridges so you can play it as originally intended
Ds was so cool for me because that was the first real handheld i had. I played the shit out of pretty much every game i got for it no matter the quality.
Custom robo ds was my favorite for my whole childhood
> capcom would be long dead had it not been for the psp
Capcom owes alot to monster hunter freedom unite. I feel that game planted a seed that finally bloomed when world came out.
MHP2/P2G was my jumping off point, which comboed into Tri's release on the Wii. My entire friend group that played World stemmed from the ravings of a madman that pirated the japanese version on a cracked PSP.
Handhelds really helped companies that struggled to adapt to the massive rise of HD development and costs. All those mid-tier budget titles we used to get were able to move to handhelds until companies started to adapt to the new hardware more regularly, especially JRPG franchises.
I think of in particular Kingdom Hearts and how many handheld titles we got in between 2 and 3. Sure, they were far from perfect and spread a bit too widely between systems, but at least it meant we got a bunch of games that at least tried to feel like those consoles entries. Meanwhile nowadays all we’ve gotten has been an mostly asset-flip rhythm game and a bunch of mobile titles that we mostly can’t even play anymore.
The mobile ones are crazy because from what I can tell they've had absolutely critical lore reveals that are just actually inaccessible now because they were delisted
There was already a shift in the market even when there were Handhelds.
Most developers migrated to Mobile devices and development costs for things like 3DS or Vita titles were getting closer to console developments.
There was a certain type of pick up and play, immediately accessible, fast and snappy game that only existed on handhelds. Stuff like Patapon which you could fire up and play a bite sized level, or Kuru Kuru Kururin. Games that were clear and readable, and parseable on a 2.5 inch screen or whatever.
This sort of style of game is mostly the purview of mobile gaming nowadays, but you're basically stuck with far less mechanically interesting experiences because of touch as the sole input.
Pubs like Squeenix were carrying the torch though until semi recently with games like Paranormasight and a lot of their AA output, but that's probably over. But yeah it did mean a lot more experimentation from major pubs. Feels like those days are mostly over and never coming back. Indie scene is where its at and those indie devs basically live with one foot in the grave with how disastrously things can go and how bad discoverability can be, so like, buy indie games you want to succeed.
Real talk, there are franchises that I don't think work all that well in 1080p, wide screen, with a giant TV. Pokemon is chief among them, and same with Animal Crossing. And yeah, we are losing that sort of low budget game that companies can use as smaller stopgaps now that everything needs to look as good as possible, like Contra and quite a few licensed games.
Mobile is a very different environment, not just monetization wise but price and expectation wise. I don't ever remember a mobile game costing more than five bucks, even though I know they exist. Most of them were expected to either be free or a dollar.
I miss my DS being my main console, I played Chrono Trigger, Ghost Trick, The World Ends With You, Dragon Quest, the best Pokemon games and so much more on that thing.
Yeah but notice how Sony was the only one besides Nintendo to even attempt making a handheld console, and Nintendo solidly ate their lunch both times.
* PSP - 80 million units; Nintendo DS - 154 million units
* Vita - 16 million units; Nintendo 3DS - 75 million units
The Vita in particular was a death knell because iirc that's the biggest % loss to a direct competitor that Sony's ever had.
The fact that the Steam Deck exists is only because Valve has money to burn. They've sold what...2 million units? And according to Gaben they priced it at a "painful" margin in order to prove that it was viable.
Tl;dr: There's pretty much the same handheld market that there's always been - Nintendo and one distant competitor.
Also Valve isn't necessarily trying to compete with any other companies, they just made the Steam Deck because they wanted to. So even if you don't sell a lot compared to the Switch for example, you still have other metrics to measure success by.
Me and a friend tried to piece together their mark strategy because yeah, it seemed like the original base deck was where all the mark up went as more storage and the no glare screen seemed to be at cost.
The strategy is that they already dominate one market (PC) and they want to break into a new market that's dominated by somebody else (Nintendo) so they'll eat a loss if they have to.
Part of it is that at least with console shovelware I know I'm paying an up front fee for something that might just be not very good.
With mobile I don't pay anything up front but I have to navigate ads that might try to get me to click on them, a bajillion different currencies and dark patterns that are trying to get me to spend money I don't know I'm spending, or prey on my compulsive behaviors and gambling tendencies, and then the underlying game is often pretty shit to boot outside of the giants of the space.
The downside to buying some bad shovelware on GBA was usually "welp I guess I'll play an older game instead". On mobile it can be anywhere from mildly inconvenient to "oh I guess I have substantial credit card debt now".
It really depends. On one hand, mobile development and Steam's open-market for making games have made a LOT of slop. Not just mobile games. Yeah, it's easy to put the blame on Mobile but then you open up "sort by new releases" on Steam and see some truly abhorrent stuff.
Still, I do think as of late people have a lot of rose-tinted goggles about the prior generations. There were a shitton of mediocre-to-hotdog-water-games, but we only remember the iconic classics because nobody fucking remembers Neopets: The PS2 Game because it was some quick slop.,
Don't misunderstand me, I don't think that the love guru (ps2) is a quality game, I just think that its better on average than rise of battle kingdoms fantasy empires ages.
I'd rather play ten bad asset flips made by sincere teenagers than a mobile game that's desperately trying to trick me into buying Monopoly money because it was made by evil marketing hustlers who have never seen a videogame.
> significantly more expensive than other handhelds though
holy shit this is somehow underselling the price jump to over a grand. I'll amend my statement and say "something less expensive then the steam deck that I already own and should just set up as an emulator but I kinda just want something I can stick in my pocket that's not just my phone cause I'd rather have something dedicated to games and not just get distracted by tiktok"
For sure, I don't even want another "handheld Pc" because I barely do any "PC" work with my steamdeck since I have a laptop. I'd also rather use an ipad if I had to go even more minimalist. Oh well. I'll keep waiting.
I just loved playing $40, top of the line, 1st party Nintendo titles. With the switch, even their most basic games start at $60 nowadays (with a few exceptions).
I also believe that handheld consoles presented a nice platform for lower cost games, since a AA game looked much more appealing on a weaker hardware.
I just can't imagine a world where 2D Castlevania and Megaman could've kept releasing new games if DS, PSP and GBA weren't a thing and they could only develop for home consoles.
I actually kinda miss the era when AAA games got cheap handheld ports.
I have such fond memories of playing Modern Warfare and Force Unleashed on my DS.
As someone who is currently getting into emulation on my Android, lemme tell you, a phone CAN be a good console. Hell, you can even get GTA games on Netflix.
It's rough playing San Andreas without a proper controller but if these zoomers can do so, I think I'll deal with it.
Recently RetroArch came out on iOS and I’m drowning in handheld nostalgia playing GBA games I missed out on. Having the game sound 10 inches from my face just hits different
what are you talking about, the big western publishers all have indie labels now that they use to do exactly this. Private Division, EA Originals, etc. Japan hasn't gotten with the program because, well, Japan, also their indie scene sucks compared to ours.
Japan's indie scene is massive. Their Indies still sell CD copies of their games that they burned themselves at meet-ups and festivals. Touhou still sells their new games this way even after putting their games on Steam. You just don't know about it because it's not in English or it requires you to go to physical locations in Japan.
I am quite aware of Comiket, and it's a lovely thing from a community and hobbyist perspective, but from a 'this is an actual fucking industry' perspective it's not really anywhere near the market presence that indies have occupied in the west since 2010. Japanese indies have only started catching up on that front very recently.
Just because they reject using large publishers, they don't count? Western market presence is your metric?? Halo and CoD has no market presence in Japan, so what does that make them? What a dumb, short sighted, culturally ignorant take on indie gaming.
>Just because they reject using large publishers, they don't count? Western market presence is your metric??
Market presence *period* is my metric, publisher or not. I don't understand why it's so hard to grasp that a dev scene in which games are often distributed by the dev physically handing you a copy at a convention is kinda hard to make a serious enterprise in.
>What a dumb, short sighted, culturally ignorant take on indie gaming.
The real culturally ignorant take is equating two fundamentally different media landscapes. The reasons indie can be as big a deal in the West are that it benefits from startup culture (and the talent that brings), mobile isn't *quite* running the table so there's some room, and lots of people have PCs to game on. None of those are true in Japan. There is no Japanese equivalent of Devolver Digital, that space is taken up by mobile. My last point is one that is, thankfully, both changing and becoming less relevant as turnkey engines make platform choice less difficult, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
*The real culturally ignorant take is equating two fundamentally different media landscapes. The reasons indie can be as big a deal in the West are that it benefits from startup culture*
*Comiket, and it's a lovely thing from a community and hobbyist perspective, but from a 'this is an actual fucking industry' perspective*
You know fucking nothing. Pre Covid, Comiket (both of them) had attendance numbers exceeding 700,000 people. That's a fuckton of eyes glancing at your booth and seeing that your indie game exists. Japanese indie game makers can live off convention sales alone by selling at sites like Comiket and smaller across Japan. You are literally ignorant about the extensive and supportive indie game scene is in Japan. The first Touhou game came out in the 90s and your spewing nonsense about indie games in the West getting recognition in the 2010s and that somehow makes it bigger?? You wanna talk about start-up culture? Let's talk about how you only need a card table of space at a convention in Japan to get over 100,000 eyeballs on it vs the money you would need to spend in the West to get similar viewership. Or maybe you would rather bend over for a publisher to cover those costs but lose say over aspects of your game (which would not make you indie anymore). No digital devolver equivalent in Japan, you say? That's because they don't need one.
You also didn't reply to my question about the market presence status of games like Halo or CoD in Japan. I know you won't because it makes your stupid market presence argument fall apart.
>Pre Covid, Comiket (both of them) had attendance numbers exceeding 700,000 people. That's a fuckton of eyes glancing at your booth and seeing that your indie game exists.
But if that's the only place you are that's a really small upper bound. Compared to millions and millions.
>Japanese indie game makers can live off convention sales alone by selling at sites like Comiket and smaller across Japan.
With how big a dev team?
>The first Touhou game came out in the 90s and your spewing nonsense about indie games in the West getting recognition in the 2010s and that somehow makes it bigger??
I'm not talking about 'recognition', I'm talking about, as I said, market presence. ZUN is artistically very significant but he's just one dude. And IIRC even Touhou couldn't be purchased outside those events until like 2015 or later. Also, if you're gonna go straight for the biggest gun you can to prove a point I wanna remind you that your competition here is goddamn MINECRAFT.
>You also didn't reply to my question about the market presence status of games like Halo or CoD in Japan. I know you won't because it makes your stupid market presence argument fall apart.
That was the beginning of my post you yutz. Market presence anywhere. Yeah, CoD isn't in Japan, but it's still overwhelmingly bigger than any of the games we're discussing. MH4 wasn't big in the West but it was still gigantic, Comiket games aren't big in either place.
*But if that's the only place you are that's a really small upper bound. Compared to millions and millions.*
You know damn well that there are more than 2 conventions in Japan. Don't act like you're that stupid. Compared to millions of millions of what?? People that give a shit about new blood indies? Steam has tens of thousands of games made by indies that still struggle to get a hundred likes or wishlisted status. Nobody has to click on your link to your steam page but thousands of people gotta walk past your table at a convention.
*With how big a dev team?*
One? Two? Five? Who cares, you're indie. You're small. Don't confuse indie with Single A (as opposed to Triple A) development studios working under publishers who are abusing the indie label for marketing (which I honestly think you've done here).
*ZUN. Touhou. Minecraft*
One dude is all you need to be to be an indie developer. Touhou was available online. People uploaded their copies and ZUN did not try to stop it. He understood that not everyone could physically buy a copy and that community growth was more important for long term success. For example, they still make those mochi dolls of Touhou characters and doujin works are still being sold in stores. It has fantastic market presence. Minecraft was incorporated in 2010. It had a CEO. You are comparing a genuine 1 man indie developer/artist/musician/salesman to an incorpated studio with a dedicated CEO with the resources to develop more than one game at a time.
>One? Two? Five? Who cares, you're indie. You're small. Don't confuse indie with Single A (as opposed to Triple A) development studios working under publishers who are abusing the indie label for marketing (which I honestly think you've done here).
Ah, you're a purist. That explains the asshole attitude I guess. And considering I started this topic discussing AAA publishers' indie labels and *not* one-guy-in-a-garage operations I think that in fact *you* are the one who is confusing things.
Me, playing 50% of my games on a Steam Deck or undocked Switch: I agree.
Gotta save my PC for the intensive stuff like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud.
Live and drink, redditor.
Slurp time, water sib.
The Deck has basically become my dedicated Emulation Pad with how simple and convenient EmuDeck is to use as well as the fact that outside of 2D platformers and boomer shooters, 6th gen and below console games are the only things that don't completely drain the battery in like 2 fucking hours. Been playing God Hand and Metal Arms: Glitch In The System on it recently and I have to say 6yo me would have been absolutely SALIVATING at the idea of playing full-ass console quality games like that on the go with basically no compromises in quality or performance.
It's the Sega Nomad if it didn't kill 6AA batteries every 2 - 3 hours
When i tore my ACL my switch and Fire Emblem 3 Houses was the only thing keeping me sane as I was bed bound.
I never boot up anything but my steam deck anymore, its playing the majority of steam games just fine is unreal.
I've run into a couple problems with Darktide and Remnant II, but otherwise it eats up everything I throw at it. It handles Elden Ring better than my desktop.
For me it's more like 90%. It's really just multiplayer games and FPS games that I play on PC these days. I love this damn thing way too much.
I will literally play my Switch undocked with the dock 5 feet away from me, and just end the session when the battery runs out
I haven't plugged my switch dock in since the last time I played Smash Bros with a friend online during COVID
Wait what does unlocking a switch do?
Undocked, as in not connected to the TV
oof I also read unlocked switch.
Hell yeah brother
Mobile gaming replaced handheld games consoles. Why bother making a whole new system when you can just put it on the thing nearly everyone on the planet has in their pocket at all times? Granted mobile gaming is in a rough state but that's another story entirely.
One of my pet theories is that redditors hate mobile games because many of us had a GBA or DS and experienced peak to the extent that we are perpetually disappointed that mobile games lack the same effort edit: And it's not even unfair because the Nintendo Switch went on to sell 100 billion units because mobile games rarely ascend beyond mid lol--there would otherwise not be a need to buy essentially a special nintendo android tablet
A lot pf us also hate it because we remember when Mobile Gaming was a new frontier full of brand new ideas and promise. Squeenix used to have an entire line of mobile only RPGs that were actuslly REALLY good. Chaos Rings 2, Song Summoner. These were full.fledged RPGs with tons of effort and charm. And then Gacha came. And it's all gone now
Yeah its rare to find a NEW mobile game that doesn't have a gatcha mechanic. All the good ones are from the early days like Kingdom Rush.
Yeah the title of this post should be “I think gacha games did more damage to the games industry then people realize”. Only issue with that title is that most people *do* realize this unless they themselves have been sucked into the gacha pit and are currently mentally fighting sunk cost fallacy. We could have full fledged RPGs on our phones. The tech is beyond there, touch screen controls aren’t an issue for menu based gameplay systems. But why would you make a regular rpg when you could put 1/4 the effort into making a gacha rpg and make way more money if it catches a few whales?
No one actually put their money where their mouth was and purchased the experimental smaller scale RPGs on mobile. From the start, live service gacha style dominated the mobile market. Otherwise, it was those $5 or lower games like Threes. It then became an ouroboros feedback loop where the only way to get successful in the mobile market is to release gachas, so people kept pushing out gachas. No one wants to pay above $10 for a video game on your phone, and mainstream video game companies obviously value their games at way higher than $10. Whereas a gacha is free to install but could generate higher income than the range of an initial price of $10-30.
I can't remember whose take it was but there was definitely somebody who said that the mobile game market was completely destroyed by the simple decision of _the pricing of Angry Birds_ and every issue with it has spiraled out from that decision in some way. Mighta been Derek (SSFF).
I don't even think it was a bad business decision to price your game according to the one mechanic gimmick you made, i.e. Angry Birds's flicking or Flappy Bird's balancing. The mobile games market just wasn't regulated (or colluded by the Big Guys like in console gaming) at all which was just the biggest domino effect for the market.
God, Song Summoner! I remember downloading the demo & then not buying the full version because playing on the iPod was insufferable. Such a fun little idea.
> Song Summoner It's weird how this was probably in the first 5 Squeenix games I played. But honestly, peak.
And what effort is left is often ports of handheld and console games. Layton, Phoenix Wright, KotOR, San Andreas, most of the pre-HD FFs and DQs. ect.
Also we were told not to worry about mobile gaming taking over because the potential of GBA/DS tier games on mobile was obviously going to be the next step. Don't worry, it'll still be quality bro
There are some really solid mobile games, but you have to wade through an ocean of shit to find them. And even the good ones will give you the option to throw infinite money at them because it's free for them to do so--which really fucks up friends of mine with bipolar disorder or gambling addiction. It's gotten to the point where I've had to support enough friends with problems that I just get mad every time I see "gems." The nice thing about the GBA SP was that if you took it on a road trip you literally couldn't spend money on it. You played Pokemon or Fire Emblem and it never once offered you garbage while you were playing.
For me it's literally as simple as disliking touchscreen controls. Can't stand 'em. I need tactile feedback, I need to know the game is accepting my inputs. For a while I played smartphone games using a portable controller but even though it was too tiny to really be comfortable to use, it was still a pain to fit it in and out of my pocket and attach it to the phone so I stopped using it.
The problem is that we really need new types of games with new control schemes designed for the hardware, but serious designers have been pushed out of mobile, so nobody is working on it. There's all kinds of cool things you could do with a touch screen, but it requires a totally different approach from games made for a d-pad and two buttons. Look at the slingshot in Angry Birds, for example.
Some types of games just can't work as well with touch screen though (which is why DS is great, it had both). Like I wouldn't want to play anything with direct control of moving a character on touchscreen over actual buttons. Like just thinking of playing say one of my favorite GBA games, Metroid Fusion on a touch screen only device and I don't think it could work (without being significantly inferior to play).
We're conditioned to define genres by their control schemes, but I don't think there's actually anything about a Metroid game that dictates you move the character with four directional buttons. It's possible to make a game that's fun in the same way but uses radically different controls. Look at the DS Zelda games, they adapted to using a touchscreen just fine.
One of the cool things about most of the Metroid games though is there's some cool platforming tech that uses precise controls. I just don't see using walljumping to get somewhere early to be something that would even be fun to try using touchscreens.
Is this even a theory? Mobile games are objectively worse games, made shitty on purpose and extremely derivative of each other, of course mostly derivative of the worst parts of each other. The vast majority of them are just glorified funnels to their in-game store/gambling, most of the good ones are ports of old pc games and then the last .001% are companies like Capcom/Squinix trying to make 1 or 2 actual good games unique to the platform. A lot of that can be true on PC too but it really seems that 99% of the mobile market is equivalent to the bottom 5% of the pc market
Plus outside to the whole monetization stuff, touch screen emulated buttons are a really bad substitute for buttons. Like I've played a decent bit of Mighty Doom and my reoccurring thought was "man, this would be actually good on like console or something that used a controller."
> Is this even a theory Some people get *very* heated on this topic when you insult their favorite gacha/f2p of the week so yes for some it can be.
I think its a very outdated look on gacha games honestly. Not even heated but it really stinks of knowledge that was crystallised back in 2011 and that knowledge was never updated. There are still large swaths of absolute dogshit gacha/mobile games out there, but the good games do exist.
Even the good ones are designed to be daily grind addiction machines whose business model encourages power creep so they can sell you the new hotness every few weeks. Anything of worth in there exists in spite of the genre. I cannot overstate how much the business model hobbles these games. They're like sharks in that they need to keep moving forward in order to survive. They dedicate no resources to retouching old content and balance is always compromised by that need to push new characters. If the new one isn't more powerful it loses the devs money, and there's no incentive to adjust underpowered or broken characters. On top of that, so much of the talk I see around gachas boils down to how to best grind and manage currencies so you can make number go up quicker and get more pulls. Optimising that process is a baked in part of the genre, and it's joyless drudgery.
I don't disagree by any means. However this is the usual discourse when someone who doesn't play gacha games talk about how bad it can be in the genre. I play some gacha games like Arknights or Nikke, their business model 100% sucks but moving on from that discussion, they're good games with decent writing, characters or worldbuilding. There's quite literally the rest of the game to discuss regardless of the shitty business model. Some of those games even have fun gameplay if you can believe it. I am reluctant to talk about Mihoyo games as I'm a bit of a hater for their games, but even I can admit the games they make are held to a really high standard even outside of the gacha standard. If we wanted to highlight shitty business models in all of the gaming industry I feel the need to point out that battle passes have pushed back video games by several decades and battle passes were not invented by gachas.
Here's the thing, I do play. Every 6 to 12 months I'll be drawn in by something, have a month or so of fun but end up leaving with a rotten taste in my mouth. I've just stopped playing Nikke after about 6 weeks. A combination of badly translated main story content, Last Kingdom's 2nd half being kind of a wet fart and starting to approach that 160 wall flipped the switch from "this is fun" to "I'm wasting my time." There's stuff to like in there, sure. I enjoy sad robots fighting for humanity's survival and trying to find purpose in their lives. Team composition requires a bit of thought and the process of shooting is simple and fun. But if I'd spent 6 weeks playing any other game (or games) daily I'd have gotten so much more enjoyment out of that time.
No, there are dogshit gacha games, and *better* gacha games, but there are no GOOD gacha games because gacha is dogshit. It is a shackle that stops a game from ever reaching higher than it, because if that's how the game makes money, then everything it does has to link back into it, like an infection that spreads through every part of the design
The weirdest part was that mobile games were actually better in the past compared to now. You had stuff like World of Goo, Infinity Blade, PVZ, the whole library of what i call "3-star games" like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water etc. Hell even the P2W stuff like whatever Glu made still had some game in it. Now you'd be hard pressed to find anything that isn't gacha, AFK, or a city builder.
There are great mobile games too! I didn't think this was possible at first without the haptic feedback and bad mobile connections, but Clash Royale was extremely fun for me, only ruined by the predatory monetization. In Germany we have really spotty mobile internet connection, but I could still play against other people on my commute without ever really having disconnects or other connection issues. If someone were to make a good PvP game with short non-comittal rounds and without pay-to-win features I would be all over it.
Vlambeer actually started as a mobile developer. They made ridiculous fishing, which had a single upfront price and no other monetization. Then they moved to regular PC dev.
>mobile games lack the same effort thing is they actually don't, there's a lotta good mobile games and the nerds here are really forgetting how much dreck was on the gba
> and the nerds here are really forgetting how much dreck was on the gba They probably didn't play any of it because there was just so many great games and it was easy to pick them out. Like I can't think of a single bad GBA game, because I didn't play any, because I knew better than to buy any.
There's dreck on every console and platform honestly. It's funny that the mobile industry gets singled out for it when dogshit shovelware gets pushed out to every console every minute.
Every other platform has actual moderation of some kind and never suffered the "race to the bottom" that mobile gaming did, where games are expected to have no upfront purchase price, so the average game *has* to have some kind of MTX or Gacha, meaning the average game is simply just worse on a base level. Consoles and PC have their flagship titles, the most popular games that are all normal paid games where you buy the game and play it, but if I open the Google play store and look at the top 10... the top 10 IS dreck. It's all MTX infested minigames, no story focused titles except one puzzle game whose store page looks like it's full of bullshots. There's no DEPTH to any of these, they're all as vapid as the next. Most of the good actual mobile titles are older generations of PC and Console games that got ported over, and the rare gem like Stone Story or Infinitode
It's because it's so in your face about pushing crap. It's like the inverse of other platforms. The bad games get pushed to the top of visibility while the good ones are way more difficult to find.
I don't disagree, but you can go to a local Gamestop or Target to see that it's really not all that different for console/handheld platforms. Or nowadays on Steam browsing the New Releases section. Tons of dogshit shovelware or cheaply made porn games being released every day. You say its the inverse, I think it's cause on the hardcore gaming platforms the "better" games tend to get much more marketing by way of actual advertising or proper word of mouth. You get that a lot less on mobile.
> One of my pet theories is that redditors hate mobile games because many of us had a GBA or DS and experienced peak to the extent that we are perpetually disappointed that mobile games lack the same effort Eh it's just the controls A virtual d-pad has never ever come close to replicating the feel of an actual one or a stick, it just feels bad and having to cover the screen to control it also feel sbad I mean it works fine for some games where you're just tapping fruits or icons or whatever but my best memories of handheld gaming are curling up and playing like, jrpgs, or platformers, or whatever on my GBA SP or DS Lite, these are the kinds of games I want to play, not like fruit tapper or sudoku. or at least, not always fruit tapper or sudoku
The psychology of the mobile gamer is somewhat fascinating to me. The average mobile gamer user ardently refuses to purchase a game. Yet, gachas and other “free” games make billions a year. So clearly the average user is willing to spend money but that upfront cost just completely destroys their ideal of what a mobile game is. I wonder if traditional games like we had on mobile consoles could see success by having a prologue that’s “free” and then selling the rest of the game in smaller chunks.
Nintendo tried that with Fatal Frame on the Wii U, and everyone complained about it, so I have my doubts.
Did they release it on the Wii U like that or do you mean the Wii U game they released on mobile like that? In my experience mobile players get got in a death by a thousand cuts style. A dollar here, five dollars there. But I don’t think console players, especially the people who had been willing to buy a Wii U would like that model.
I was talking about being released on the Wii U, which is what I thought you meant, because I know at least a couple games released on mobile had already been doing that for a while, mainly Ace Attorney and Ghost tricks which released their content into chunks on mobile initially.
What did a GBA or 3DS game cost back in the day? Let's say $30. You made me realize I would balk so hard if I saw a mobile game cost $30, even if that then had no microtransactions afterwards. I'm not saying it's rational, but it's how I would honestly act.
Super Mario Run was $10 (I believe) and people still balked at it. Even though that $10 got you a complete game with no further purchases attached, the idea of paying for a game is absurd in the mobile games market, even though those "free" games then drain far more than $10 from many players through microtransactions, but they don't feel the price shock from it. It's the same psychology where nowadays people will be repulsed by a $35 price tag with $8 shipping, but won't have the same immediate reaction to a $49 price tag with free shipping.
Mobile games make most of their money off of a small minority of mobile gamers by exploiting their gaming addictions, and these gamers are called whales. The average mobile user is not giving developers any money, outside of watching ads in-game. Predatory and intentionally addictive, simplistic game design is how mobile games make money, save for mobile games that are ports from other platforms (e.g. Minecraft, Stardew).
Nothing I’ve read paints whales as a defacto majority of revenue for mobile games (as in 80-90+%, from what I’ve seen depending on game they’re 50%). Normal people still tend to spend money. It’s not like you have some line in the sand and on one side is whales spending 10k a month and the other is every other player. Sure a live service gacha game constantly putting out new content needs whales to survive. But take a regular game and split it into 5$ chunks and I bet you could get some of the normal crowd. It’s not like I’m saying a full on 100 million dollar budget AAA game could survive this way. I’m saying games we used to get on 3ds could, something like stardew valley.
Mario run tried something like that and ppl fucking HATED it, they thought the game was trying to pull one over on them by postponing the paywall
Nintendo made the same mistake as everybody else, instead of taking mobile seriously they consulted with mobile "experts" (who worship satan) to add a bunch of tacky casino bullshit. Hopefully at some point we'll see a crash in mobile, and these fake game developer marketing scumbags will have to go back to robbing corpses.
What? Mario run was the opposite of tacky casino bullshit. Pay 10 bucks and you get the whole game.
Yeah, and then the game itself was short spurts of bland actual gameplay broken up by a bunch of flashy menus where you can "buy" things. They might not have actually been trying to get more of your money, but the design was infected by that same algorithmic brainrot where every mobile game needs to be a flashing neon Skinner box.
I think you misunderstood what happened. If you paid $10, you got the whole game no strings attached. There was no casino bullshit. It was just the game And people hated it anyway.
Not Satan, Mammon. Ya gotta invoke the right demon with this stuff.
I think this is what the ancient ones referred to as a "demo". A lot of real mobile games used to have those, before they got bought out by scumbags and turned into casinos.
I think part of it comes from the same logic that WoW has with Rested XP. Originally it would remove your XP bonus and you would get 75%, people hated it so they changed the wording to be 125% and nothing else. In that same thinking pattern, When you present something for free, but then cut off until you pay, people will feel like you took something away from them rather then giving it. How they get around this with mobile game is selling and giving you things, and not making it apparent that they took things, even tough they are the one's putting the limitation in place. This is something not easy to hide for a normal game where you can unlock the full story.
I want to make a mobile game that has fake gacha in it to unlock each chapter, and you have to actually buy the gacha, making the final price of the gacha guaranteed to pay out at the price of an actual game, and just trick mobile gamers into playing an actual game
That's called limbus company
Mobile gaming used to be so good but now it seems there's only 2 kinds of mobile games: "games" focused on showing you as much adverts as possible or microtransaction riddled grindfests that actively prey on you to spend money on them either to refill your energy bar (because otherwise you gotta wait!) or for a chance to get some anime girl. Like, thank god you actually get a decent port of an Indie game now and again otherwise there'd be nothing of value on mobile devices.
Well that’s kind of a fallacy for the same reason of why did you bother trying to make a battle royle when fortnight already exists. Making a moblie game now when you aren’t mihoyo is a complete waste of time and money. A company at this point thinking they are going to make money off the mobile market is like a child dreaming about becoming a rockstar or pro athlete when they grow up.
I don't know how much of any of this holds water, dude. Mobile games as a market have still been more profitable than the console and PC market combined. You can absolutely make money in the mobile market (especially due to the lower barriers of entry, and an inherently larger possible user base), it's just a matter of quality and marketing. It's unlikely, but I feel like it's either ignorant or disingenuous to say that it's impossible for an indie company to make money off a mobile game.
Nah, mobile is wildly profitable for like 5 companies and the there are a million other companies trying and failing to get a piece of that pie, in exactly the same way companies tried to a piece of that final fantasy money or that pokemon money or that call of duty money or that fortnight money.
You got a source for that?
Skullgirls, the fighting game, has a mobile gacha. It's been active for years. Still being updated and still making money.
Literally some of the best games EVER MADE were on the GBA and (3)DS.
Correct.
yeah and now they're found on Steam or Switch. They're somewhat drowned out by bigger games, but those games still exist. What you think Bravely Default 2 wouldn't have been a 3DS2 game if a fictional Nintendo handheld that wasn't a Switch showed up? a New Shantae game is coming up that was literally a GBA title. It will just also be a PS5, Xbox Series, Steam, and Switch title now.
It's unironically really cool that they're doing a limited release of the Shantae one on actual GBA cartridges so you can play it as originally intended
You are right I just wanna know what your list is homie
Ds was so cool for me because that was the first real handheld i had. I played the shit out of pretty much every game i got for it no matter the quality. Custom robo ds was my favorite for my whole childhood
> capcom would be long dead had it not been for the psp Capcom owes alot to monster hunter freedom unite. I feel that game planted a seed that finally bloomed when world came out.
MHP2/P2G was my jumping off point, which comboed into Tri's release on the Wii. My entire friend group that played World stemmed from the ravings of a madman that pirated the japanese version on a cracked PSP.
Handhelds really helped companies that struggled to adapt to the massive rise of HD development and costs. All those mid-tier budget titles we used to get were able to move to handhelds until companies started to adapt to the new hardware more regularly, especially JRPG franchises. I think of in particular Kingdom Hearts and how many handheld titles we got in between 2 and 3. Sure, they were far from perfect and spread a bit too widely between systems, but at least it meant we got a bunch of games that at least tried to feel like those consoles entries. Meanwhile nowadays all we’ve gotten has been an mostly asset-flip rhythm game and a bunch of mobile titles that we mostly can’t even play anymore.
Yeah, between metal gear 3 and 4 you got both acid games, portable ops. New smaller projects in big series
The mobile ones are crazy because from what I can tell they've had absolutely critical lore reveals that are just actually inaccessible now because they were delisted
Makes me wonder how Pokemon would've fared if the DS never existed or it was the last handheld made.
There was already a shift in the market even when there were Handhelds. Most developers migrated to Mobile devices and development costs for things like 3DS or Vita titles were getting closer to console developments.
There was a certain type of pick up and play, immediately accessible, fast and snappy game that only existed on handhelds. Stuff like Patapon which you could fire up and play a bite sized level, or Kuru Kuru Kururin. Games that were clear and readable, and parseable on a 2.5 inch screen or whatever. This sort of style of game is mostly the purview of mobile gaming nowadays, but you're basically stuck with far less mechanically interesting experiences because of touch as the sole input. Pubs like Squeenix were carrying the torch though until semi recently with games like Paranormasight and a lot of their AA output, but that's probably over. But yeah it did mean a lot more experimentation from major pubs. Feels like those days are mostly over and never coming back. Indie scene is where its at and those indie devs basically live with one foot in the grave with how disastrously things can go and how bad discoverability can be, so like, buy indie games you want to succeed.
Real talk, there are franchises that I don't think work all that well in 1080p, wide screen, with a giant TV. Pokemon is chief among them, and same with Animal Crossing. And yeah, we are losing that sort of low budget game that companies can use as smaller stopgaps now that everything needs to look as good as possible, like Contra and quite a few licensed games. Mobile is a very different environment, not just monetization wise but price and expectation wise. I don't ever remember a mobile game costing more than five bucks, even though I know they exist. Most of them were expected to either be free or a dollar.
I miss my DS being my main console, I played Chrono Trigger, Ghost Trick, The World Ends With You, Dragon Quest, the best Pokemon games and so much more on that thing.
Yeah but notice how Sony was the only one besides Nintendo to even attempt making a handheld console, and Nintendo solidly ate their lunch both times. * PSP - 80 million units; Nintendo DS - 154 million units * Vita - 16 million units; Nintendo 3DS - 75 million units The Vita in particular was a death knell because iirc that's the biggest % loss to a direct competitor that Sony's ever had. The fact that the Steam Deck exists is only because Valve has money to burn. They've sold what...2 million units? And according to Gaben they priced it at a "painful" margin in order to prove that it was viable. Tl;dr: There's pretty much the same handheld market that there's always been - Nintendo and one distant competitor.
Also Valve isn't necessarily trying to compete with any other companies, they just made the Steam Deck because they wanted to. So even if you don't sell a lot compared to the Switch for example, you still have other metrics to measure success by.
Me and a friend tried to piece together their mark strategy because yeah, it seemed like the original base deck was where all the mark up went as more storage and the no glare screen seemed to be at cost.
The strategy is that they already dominate one market (PC) and they want to break into a new market that's dominated by somebody else (Nintendo) so they'll eat a loss if they have to.
I feel like lots of indie games would probably do better as budget handheld experiences.
I mean they churn so much in mobile gaming
It’s all low effort trash that gets shut down. Handhelds had good things.
Handhelds had lot of trash too, like five rip offs of snoods
Sounds like your in the pocket of big snood
Idk I feel like the average shovelware is still better than the average shitty mobile game.
Who would win: Raid Shadow Legends or M&M's Beach Party?
Part of it is that at least with console shovelware I know I'm paying an up front fee for something that might just be not very good. With mobile I don't pay anything up front but I have to navigate ads that might try to get me to click on them, a bajillion different currencies and dark patterns that are trying to get me to spend money I don't know I'm spending, or prey on my compulsive behaviors and gambling tendencies, and then the underlying game is often pretty shit to boot outside of the giants of the space. The downside to buying some bad shovelware on GBA was usually "welp I guess I'll play an older game instead". On mobile it can be anywhere from mildly inconvenient to "oh I guess I have substantial credit card debt now".
It really depends. On one hand, mobile development and Steam's open-market for making games have made a LOT of slop. Not just mobile games. Yeah, it's easy to put the blame on Mobile but then you open up "sort by new releases" on Steam and see some truly abhorrent stuff. Still, I do think as of late people have a lot of rose-tinted goggles about the prior generations. There were a shitton of mediocre-to-hotdog-water-games, but we only remember the iconic classics because nobody fucking remembers Neopets: The PS2 Game because it was some quick slop.,
Don't misunderstand me, I don't think that the love guru (ps2) is a quality game, I just think that its better on average than rise of battle kingdoms fantasy empires ages.
I'd rather play ten bad asset flips made by sincere teenagers than a mobile game that's desperately trying to trick me into buying Monopoly money because it was made by evil marketing hustlers who have never seen a videogame.
Indie PC games plus handheld PC or a switch are pretty close.
I do as much gaming on the switch (which I never bother to dock) as I do on my computer so uuuuuuuuuuuuh yeah, agreed.
I just miss having a pocketable gaming console. I know I can get emulators on my phone but I hate using on screen controls.
Consider looking into a Miyoo Mini or a Retroid Pocket
The day that someone makes an emulator like these that can give me a proper DS feel i'm in.
Most of them run DS fine, but if you want dual screens there's the Aya Neo Flip DS, it's significantly more expensive than other handhelds though.
> significantly more expensive than other handhelds though holy shit this is somehow underselling the price jump to over a grand. I'll amend my statement and say "something less expensive then the steam deck that I already own and should just set up as an emulator but I kinda just want something I can stick in my pocket that's not just my phone cause I'd rather have something dedicated to games and not just get distracted by tiktok"
Give it like a year and Anbernic will have a similar device for like $180
For sure, I don't even want another "handheld Pc" because I barely do any "PC" work with my steamdeck since I have a laptop. I'd also rather use an ipad if I had to go even more minimalist. Oh well. I'll keep waiting.
I just loved playing $40, top of the line, 1st party Nintendo titles. With the switch, even their most basic games start at $60 nowadays (with a few exceptions). I also believe that handheld consoles presented a nice platform for lower cost games, since a AA game looked much more appealing on a weaker hardware. I just can't imagine a world where 2D Castlevania and Megaman could've kept releasing new games if DS, PSP and GBA weren't a thing and they could only develop for home consoles.
Does Switch Lite not count? I've got so many hours on that thing, it's basically my main console.
No, it doesn’t count. Because no one is making smaller cheaper different games for it. It’s a console that CAN be handheld.
Fair enough. Although I'd argue some ports are that, or at least fit the bill more or less.
I'm going to hope that if it gets a price drop and keeps selling really well into the next gen, companies might start making more budget games for it
I actually kinda miss the era when AAA games got cheap handheld ports. I have such fond memories of playing Modern Warfare and Force Unleashed on my DS.
As someone who is currently getting into emulation on my Android, lemme tell you, a phone CAN be a good console. Hell, you can even get GTA games on Netflix. It's rough playing San Andreas without a proper controller but if these zoomers can do so, I think I'll deal with it.
> Just saying the gba,ds 3ds, psp and vita got some really good games on it. ok but what about the original gameboy
Phones killed that market dead I supose
Recently RetroArch came out on iOS and I’m drowning in handheld nostalgia playing GBA games I missed out on. Having the game sound 10 inches from my face just hits different
*me playing Nikke* Look you're telling me I got a story about what it means to be human and how machines can have a soul is because handhelds died?
these two arent mutually exclusive
what are you talking about, the big western publishers all have indie labels now that they use to do exactly this. Private Division, EA Originals, etc. Japan hasn't gotten with the program because, well, Japan, also their indie scene sucks compared to ours.
Japan's indie scene is massive. Their Indies still sell CD copies of their games that they burned themselves at meet-ups and festivals. Touhou still sells their new games this way even after putting their games on Steam. You just don't know about it because it's not in English or it requires you to go to physical locations in Japan.
I am quite aware of Comiket, and it's a lovely thing from a community and hobbyist perspective, but from a 'this is an actual fucking industry' perspective it's not really anywhere near the market presence that indies have occupied in the west since 2010. Japanese indies have only started catching up on that front very recently.
Just because they reject using large publishers, they don't count? Western market presence is your metric?? Halo and CoD has no market presence in Japan, so what does that make them? What a dumb, short sighted, culturally ignorant take on indie gaming.
>Just because they reject using large publishers, they don't count? Western market presence is your metric?? Market presence *period* is my metric, publisher or not. I don't understand why it's so hard to grasp that a dev scene in which games are often distributed by the dev physically handing you a copy at a convention is kinda hard to make a serious enterprise in. >What a dumb, short sighted, culturally ignorant take on indie gaming. The real culturally ignorant take is equating two fundamentally different media landscapes. The reasons indie can be as big a deal in the West are that it benefits from startup culture (and the talent that brings), mobile isn't *quite* running the table so there's some room, and lots of people have PCs to game on. None of those are true in Japan. There is no Japanese equivalent of Devolver Digital, that space is taken up by mobile. My last point is one that is, thankfully, both changing and becoming less relevant as turnkey engines make platform choice less difficult, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
*The real culturally ignorant take is equating two fundamentally different media landscapes. The reasons indie can be as big a deal in the West are that it benefits from startup culture* *Comiket, and it's a lovely thing from a community and hobbyist perspective, but from a 'this is an actual fucking industry' perspective* You know fucking nothing. Pre Covid, Comiket (both of them) had attendance numbers exceeding 700,000 people. That's a fuckton of eyes glancing at your booth and seeing that your indie game exists. Japanese indie game makers can live off convention sales alone by selling at sites like Comiket and smaller across Japan. You are literally ignorant about the extensive and supportive indie game scene is in Japan. The first Touhou game came out in the 90s and your spewing nonsense about indie games in the West getting recognition in the 2010s and that somehow makes it bigger?? You wanna talk about start-up culture? Let's talk about how you only need a card table of space at a convention in Japan to get over 100,000 eyeballs on it vs the money you would need to spend in the West to get similar viewership. Or maybe you would rather bend over for a publisher to cover those costs but lose say over aspects of your game (which would not make you indie anymore). No digital devolver equivalent in Japan, you say? That's because they don't need one. You also didn't reply to my question about the market presence status of games like Halo or CoD in Japan. I know you won't because it makes your stupid market presence argument fall apart.
>Pre Covid, Comiket (both of them) had attendance numbers exceeding 700,000 people. That's a fuckton of eyes glancing at your booth and seeing that your indie game exists. But if that's the only place you are that's a really small upper bound. Compared to millions and millions. >Japanese indie game makers can live off convention sales alone by selling at sites like Comiket and smaller across Japan. With how big a dev team? >The first Touhou game came out in the 90s and your spewing nonsense about indie games in the West getting recognition in the 2010s and that somehow makes it bigger?? I'm not talking about 'recognition', I'm talking about, as I said, market presence. ZUN is artistically very significant but he's just one dude. And IIRC even Touhou couldn't be purchased outside those events until like 2015 or later. Also, if you're gonna go straight for the biggest gun you can to prove a point I wanna remind you that your competition here is goddamn MINECRAFT. >You also didn't reply to my question about the market presence status of games like Halo or CoD in Japan. I know you won't because it makes your stupid market presence argument fall apart. That was the beginning of my post you yutz. Market presence anywhere. Yeah, CoD isn't in Japan, but it's still overwhelmingly bigger than any of the games we're discussing. MH4 wasn't big in the West but it was still gigantic, Comiket games aren't big in either place.
*But if that's the only place you are that's a really small upper bound. Compared to millions and millions.* You know damn well that there are more than 2 conventions in Japan. Don't act like you're that stupid. Compared to millions of millions of what?? People that give a shit about new blood indies? Steam has tens of thousands of games made by indies that still struggle to get a hundred likes or wishlisted status. Nobody has to click on your link to your steam page but thousands of people gotta walk past your table at a convention. *With how big a dev team?* One? Two? Five? Who cares, you're indie. You're small. Don't confuse indie with Single A (as opposed to Triple A) development studios working under publishers who are abusing the indie label for marketing (which I honestly think you've done here). *ZUN. Touhou. Minecraft* One dude is all you need to be to be an indie developer. Touhou was available online. People uploaded their copies and ZUN did not try to stop it. He understood that not everyone could physically buy a copy and that community growth was more important for long term success. For example, they still make those mochi dolls of Touhou characters and doujin works are still being sold in stores. It has fantastic market presence. Minecraft was incorporated in 2010. It had a CEO. You are comparing a genuine 1 man indie developer/artist/musician/salesman to an incorpated studio with a dedicated CEO with the resources to develop more than one game at a time.
>One? Two? Five? Who cares, you're indie. You're small. Don't confuse indie with Single A (as opposed to Triple A) development studios working under publishers who are abusing the indie label for marketing (which I honestly think you've done here). Ah, you're a purist. That explains the asshole attitude I guess. And considering I started this topic discussing AAA publishers' indie labels and *not* one-guy-in-a-garage operations I think that in fact *you* are the one who is confusing things.