So what, you just buy games at random and hope maybe you landed on something good? Without anything that would make for an informed purchase? Sounds like a horribly inefficient way of running headfirst into Sturgeon's Law.
Mobile is so thoroughly dominated by gacha that any game that tries to have an ethical business model has almost no hope of succeeding on the platform, no hope of competing with the endless sea of gacha.
And I'm sure you're about to cherry-pick like two counterexamples, but I know you know that those exceptions are so scarce that I have every reason to decide that it simply isn't worth my time to go out of my way looking for them.
Word of mouth is certainly a large part of it, yes. People talk about successful games. One way or another, the games I like make it onto my radar when I see buzz about them.
But what are the most successful games on mobile? What are the games mobile gamers talk about? Gacha. It's all gacha. Whatever else is out there, nobody's talking about it and I'm never going to see it. Nor do I have any reason to go searching through a toxic cesspit in the hopes that maybe I'll eventually find something, when it is far easier to look elsewhere, on platforms that haven't been thoroughly corrupted by the race to the bottom.
But again, the real takeaway I want to stress is that the market has been this way for long enough that both gamers and developers know the well is poisoned, and it will never be unpoisoned. The fact that mobile has become dominated by gacha has reinforced itself - everyone not interested in gacha has left the platform, and mobile developers will keep selling more gacha because that's what the remaining audience wants. They even know that the average mobile gamer won't spend money on a more ethical business model.
I know that developers know that I know that this is what mobile is. The way I see it, mobile itself has become a red flag. If a game is trying to be more than gacha trash, well why don't the developers have the sense to put it on other platforms where non-gacha gamers are? If not, they're shooting themselves in the foot and I have no pity.
We all know that decent games exist, somewhere. But the amount of effort it would take to wade through all the shovelware and gacha to try to find an even halfway passable game on Google Play simply isn't worth my time.
And with the mobile market being what it is, it arguably isn't worth it for developers to try and sell any serious game as mobile-first, because it's so difficult for those types of games to succeed when mobile gamers want gacha and those that don't simply aren't playing on mobile. If it's truly worth my time, it should be ported to other platforms.
I'd say the DS was the best handheld of all time, and GBA was close behind it. 3DS had its share of bangers, but if you compare its library to the DS it's not even close.
3DS was the era where we started to see the conflict between handhelds being a place for experimental low budget titles, versus the need for larger budgets on better hardware. This also just made it more difficult to juggle supporting handheld and console platforms at the same time. And halfway through the system's lifespan, mobile gaming exploded in popularity, which really ate into the system's marketshare. There's a very observable trend in how third party support kept dropping over time.
I'm just at a point where so few new releases excite me anymore. The mainstream AAA industry has moved far away from my tastes, and when it comes to the niche stuff I like most, I've already got my favorite forever games so it's actually hard for something new to tear me away from grinding those.
They're not charging for performance upgrades. The only paid DLC packs are the ones that are, well, actual DLC. What makes that more "disgusting" than any other DLC?
Hoping to see more third-party devs update their games. It's ironic that the worst ports are the ones that benefit the most. Games that were just thrown onto the Switch 1 with no effort to reach acceptable performance suddenly perform well now. As long as the framerate wasn't capped, it might just hit 60 on Switch 2.
But games that were downgraded to properly fit onto the system can't revert those downgrades. Capped framerates remain so, those games need patches to uncap them.
Some of the games I most want to play on Switch 2 are ones that remain stuck at 30fps still...
If you don't already have a Switch 1, it's got a pretty great library to catch up on. And I would still recommend getting a Switch 2 over buying a Switch 1 now, because that'll last you this whole generation too. It's also worth noting that the Switch 2 kinda has a secret bonus library of ports that ran poorly on Switch 1 but are miraculously good now.
I also have to be that guy and say to take most of the negativity here with a grain of salt. Put it this way, if you want informed opinions on the system, ask people who actually have one rather than people who don't.
Nudity isn't always pornographic or sexual depending on the context. But in this context it absolutely is. The Sun put tits there to sexually arouse readers, that was the point.
This weird little persecution complex came out of nowhere. The post-gamergate crowd randomly latched onto this game thinking it's somehow gonna own the libs, and when no one gave them the reaction they wanted, they decided to declare themselves the winner of a battle nobody was actually fighting them on.
No one cares bud. Go play your game, whatever, have fun, no one's stopping you.
A Silent Voice. I watched it while I was going through a rough time, and the visual metaphor used to portray the main character's isolation hit me so hard.
So you want it to be everyone else's job to fact check your bot for you? If you can't be bothered to check your own bot, why should we take it seriously either?
If they want to share that creativity, share it on a platform where the people who would most appreciate it will actually play it.