Comment by autoexec
11 hours ago
If only those games weren't infested with micro/macro transactions to manipulate players out of their money in the first place. Mobile gaming is a cesspool of ads, gambling, greed, data collection, and bullshit all of which has been slowly spreading like a cancer to gaming on every other platform for decades. I'm not happy about Apple and Google demanding a cut of the action either, screw them too, but making these tactics even more profitable for shitty mobile game devs isn't going to benefit players.
Apple did this to itself. Reportedly it was Jobs' opinion turned policy that Apple don't do games or pornography.
Exactly this policy and their interference to app developers created a selection pressure and a cutout hole in shape of "only slightly gamelike && technically not pornographic && in high demand", and the category of apps more accurately represented as "strip clubs with casinos with no cash-out" filled the vacuum like a Ghibli film blob monster.
Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.
It doesn't happen naturally; not even pornographic game markets, let alone Steam or Itch, aren't as badly infested with gambling as App Store. It only happened artificially by how Apple ran it over the past ~15 years.
Microtransaction infested games were inevitable even if mobile gaming didn’t exist. Like, of the top 10 highest lifetime grossing games, 3 are arcade pay-per-play (the original microtransaction), 6 are f2p that got their start on PC, and only one is mobile-first / only.
Last year, 58% of PC gaming revenue was from microtransactions, and that percentage is only growing.
> Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.
Game devs discovered pretty quickly that, Apple having set the initial expectation that an iOS game should cost $0.99, the only viable way to run a business on a mobile platform was a f2p/exploitation/casino model.
At least they give the user the option to pay or not pay, unlike Apple that forces developers to not have any other option.
Is there anything wrong with walled gardens hypothetically taxing the shady microtransaction-infested unregulated-gambling games and data-mining apps 5x and using that to correspondingly reduce fees for honest indie developers?
(Setting aside the issue of defining who are the goodies and who are the baddies in a way that does not enable the baddies to purely technically comply with the goodie guidelines while remaining baddies.)
What exactly are these gardens walling against if they have microtransaction-infested unregulated-gambling games and data-mining apps?
Malware, for one.
The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.
>while doing nothing
Designing entire hardware, software, and backend platforms and investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing. If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.
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> The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.
Do you give a shit about honest indie devs? Putting them in quotes says you probably don’t.
If you did, perhaps you’d find that this is an obvious path to a better state of affairs that to walled garden operators is zero cost (or even profitable), financially and reputationally, while making it more economically viable to make good games that don’t use dark patterns to keep your kid glued to the screen and regularly asking for money to exchange for some in-game coins and lootboxes.
When games went "free to play", platform commissions for in-app purchases (sometimes misleadingly called "payment processing charges") were the only way that walled-garden game stores could make money from them.
The irony is that Japanese game platforms have been using the walled-garden licensing and platform fee business model for more than 40 years[1], and it continues today in the Nintendo eShop and PSN store. I doubt Nintendo and Sony are going to reduce their platform fees just because developers don't like them.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)
[2] https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees
Interestingly enough the Wikipedia article claims that Nintendo introduced DRM and licensing to combat shovelware. But shovelware on Nintendo platforms has continued to be a problem from the Wii to the current Switch eShop.
You are 100% right! The difference is that a phone is necessity that tends to a monopoly, unlike say a PlayStation or a handheld game platform. But no question in the game space where you can choose platforms, a walled garden is great. That's why Steam is really good, and if it wasn't you could get your games from the Windows app store, or the Epic Store..
The phone/necessity part of smartphones seems largely independent from the game store part, since you can usually choose from multiple wireless providers, sms/mms (and now rcs) all work, email works, and web browsers also work.
How dare they charge for that slot machine!
More seriously: There have always been mobile games that have a purchase price or ask for a single payment. You could find one right now. The vast majority of popular apps have in game transactions. Game developers just want to get paid for the work they do.
Interestingly, in the Apple App Store, there is no option to filter by "paid". Only free. I want an option to filter by "paid, no IAP". Actually, I don't mind IAp for things like new levels and such. It's just so badly abused by mobile games.
Apple made one concession to consumer protection law and the FTC by changing the "free" button to "get", but I'm sure they know how those slot machines work, and where the money comes from.
At one point in-app purchases were listed clearly and prominently so they were easy to inspect (and hopefully embarrassing for nonsense like $99 wheelbarrows of smurfberries[1].) Now it seems like IAP rates are hidden below the fold, unfortunately.
[1] https://www.pipelinecomics.com/smurfberries-apple-app-store-...
I'm not saying the Apple store isn't responsible for the problems of free to play. They really are. Apple has a memory of when their hardware was beholden to software like Adobe or Microsoft and they designed the store to avoid that problem. It really favors cheap apps, and they used to really discourage offering a sample and then unlocking the full app for a purchase. This was supposed to be so you didn't have "bait and switch" but really it just trained people to think no app was worth paying for. Even though they did pay so much for loot boxes..
So now there's an alternative way to pay. Let's be happy about that.
Every so often Apple will themselves feature a selection of popular pay-once-and-get-it-all games in the store as an ad capsule.
... actually, I just checked, and if you scroll down enough in the Games tab on your iPhone's App Store app, they seem to be running it now under "Pay Once & Play". Might be worth a look.
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