Nintendo and Going Mobile

It was a short line in my previous post, but I mentioned briefly that "mobile gaming" was dead before it started.

rip in peace

I don't mean to imply that it's not a money maker or not something that businesses can use to trick young, distracted children and middle aged people looking for time to kill into spending anywhere from 1 to 20 to hundreds of dollars on immaterial, fake currencies for games they will quit playing in less than a month (usually a week), but as a concept of being a viable method of actual gaming, it fails. It's just absolutely the worst. Anyone who praises the successes of mobile gaming isn't talking about how good the games are and how much fun people have playing them, but their monetary success or large "player base" (if we want to call it that).

So, sure, we can say mobile gaming is "successful" in the same way that McDonald's is successful - making absolute garbage that appeals to a large number of very wide and diverse audiences. But we are hesitant to call Candy Crush "gaming" in the same way that we are hesitant to call McDonald's "food."

McDonald's shipment preparing for delivery to the store

Even I play mobile games here and there. I have written about them before, but I've also written about how they are often... unsatisfying. They leave you feeling like you've almost been cheated, like you didn't get quite what you were expecting from the experience. Kind of like McDonald's.

So what does any of this have to do with the post title? Well, I can go ahead and assume we've all heard about Pokemon Go, the new mobile game where you go out into the actual world and catch pokemon which have been superimposed onto the landscape of that actual world. There are other things that happen too. Frankly, I only know the basics because I don't actually play it, but that's okay since this article isn't about Pokemon Go, but rather about this concept of mobile gaming and how it relates to Nintendo.

Bad Mobile Land

I've said before that I like mobile games, but I feel like they will be forever jammed into their awful, freemium, pay to win, ad-riddled format due to their nature. No other "platform," if you'd call it that, is as saturated in 'in-game purchases' as mobile games. It's understandable, since they offer a different experience and mostly target a completely different audience. They don't have to worry about creating games that will convince you to buy a smart phone because basically everyone under 40 already has one - they just have to throw games at people until one sticks.

and some are unfortunately way too sticky

It was undeniably uncomfortable to hear about major gaming companies planning to release more games on mobile. When we're talking about mobile games, it is entirely reasonable to assume it will be "Free*" with more in-app purchases than you can handle. Nintendo released two free to download Pokemon games in their store for the 3DS that follow the same model, it's not unreasonable to assume their mobile games will do the same thing.

pokemon trozei- I mean, shuffle

They aren't going to be making mobile games so that they can break out of the stereotypical freemium game styles and revolutionize what we know about mobile gaming, no, they're making them to take advantage of that model. If it wasn't profitable, people wouldn't be doing it en masse as they are.

It doesn't help when you realize that they are putting less resources into making actual games in order to chase this freemium mobile gaming model. A browse around your local app store tends to come up with nothing but sorrow and despair. It makes the entire aspect of a legitimate mobile gaming format seem hopeless.

But amidst all the pay to win, wait ten days for your action to complete, 'any purchase will remove all ads' games, there are a couple gems. I found one such gem a few days ago.

Cell Phones and Gaming

I recently got a new smartphone. I asked for something decent that I could take good pictures with (I did not mention outright to the employee that it was to take pictures of my cats) and I took the first thing he showed me because it was free with a 100 dollar mail in rebate, was clearly leagues ahead of my old phone, and seemed fine from the 5 minutes I fiddled with it.

Turned out it was actually a pretty powerful phone with 2GB of ram. So, naturally, now that I had a powerful electronic device intended to be used to communicate with other people, I started looking for games to play on it to avoid communicating with people.

I've written before about idle games, and how I actually like them, and had previously been looking at some sort of dragon game that cookie clicker was advertising, but it was not available on the web.

obviously I want to play this

It was the first game I downloaded on my new phone. It follows the same general guidelines as cookie clicker - click/tap on the egg/gem for points, buy things that give you auto-points, so you can get points faster and buy better things that give you more points even faster so you can buy better things that give you more points... etc. The only thing is, because it was a cell phone game, it had an obligatory 'pay to win' item you can purchase with real money. Of course it did.

Idle Gaming - When You're Too Lazy to Actually Game

unrealistic number of cookies

Ah, idle games. The very phrase elicits feelings of... staring vacantly at numbers. Endlessly clicking on things to earn resources to build and buy more things to get more resources to build or buy other things that give you more or maybe different resources to use to buy and build... other things and, sometimes, you... don't really know why you're playing.

Currently, the most famous of these games is probably cookie clicker. It's probably also the best example of one of the addictive power of these games. If you've ever been sucked in by an idle game, then you already know what I mean. The thing about most games like these is there really isn't... a point.

The goal feels like it's to accumulate more resources and build all the things to completion, but some games have no end. Some games add incentives to restart your game, putting you spiraling into an infinite loop of cookies or cabbages or what have you. Some of them do end, but to be honest, the end is always disappointing.

Idle games have been around for quite a long time - I remember playing one when I was still in middle school, in the early 2000s, before the term "idle game" was even coined. Now, there are a ton of them, sometimes their addictive powers being used for evil, exploiting the 'idle' aspect of them to riddle the games with microtransactions...

...while some people genuinely make great idle games for entertainment.