Ok, let’s just cut to the chase here: mobile gaming fucking sucks. It’s awful, and the people who spend real money on this shit are stupid.
I’m seeing this post as a kind of PSA here; a warning to the youth. If you spend money on these games you are being duped. Don’t be a sucker.
Here’s the thing: the games themselves suck.
Many if not most of the games I’ve seen on mobile are ripoffs of old games that I played as a kid on consoles like the NES and Sega Genesis, or they are broken copies of old arcade games.
Broken, you say? Well, yes. What I think the developers of these games do is play a NES game, copy it, and then break it intentionally, with the intent of forcing players to spend lots of real money on the fix, so that they can climb over the “paywall”.
Seriously, some of the stuff I’ve seen in these games borders on the criminal. Like games stealing graphics, dialogue and actual music tracks from the games I played as a kid, perhaps with very minor changes to skirt copyright laws, with the only appreciable difference between the new games and the old ones being that the newer games are dumber, shallower and purposefully broken.
The mobile gaming ecosystem is really, really bad.
Over the years I’ve heard horror stories of people spending ungodly amounts of money on these stupid games. I mean like thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands on dollars, on literally a single game.
I’m sorry but that is fucking stupid. I’ve seen people brag otherwise, but no, they are wrong. I’ve seen screenshots from people where you can see that they spent “X” thousands of dollars this month on a single fucking game, with the hopes of getting a item or a character.
People… Jesus Christ. Seriously.
Most of the problem here has to do with “casual gamers”, meaning people who have no idea as to what a good game actually looks and feels like, who have no idea how much they’re being fucked over.
Guys, don’t be a casual gamer. Learn what a good game is, and how to spot one. It will broaden and enhance your life.
Try playing some of the old Mario and Zelda games, or some of the old ID Software PC games. And then realize how cheap these games were in comparison to what is released today.
Games back then cost virtually nothing.
I know that some people these days claim otherwise, noting that a console game back then cost an average of $50, new.
What they fail to realize is that most games back then were bought used, for a fraction of the price. I had friends back in the day who bought a stack of games before every summer for something like 20 dollars, that lasted them all the way until next summer, when they would sell the old used ones to pay for new used ones.
Seriously, used games, especially the common (read: good) ones, were dirt cheap back then. I remember buying a few good games for actual pennies back in the day. I think I remember buying a final fantasy gameboy game, used, for a dime.
Used games could be so cheap that the retailers couldn’t charge sales tax on them.
So when I read stories about people, typically younger people, spending a thousand bucks on a single character in the new final fantasy mobile game, I just… cringe. Holy shit, guys.
I read a comment on zerohedge once where the poster said that he had a friend who spent a hundred grand on some dumb mobile game about Vikings. His family and friends staged an intervention, and his defense was that he could afford it, since he had a high paying job, something that paid like $400K a year, or something. The game was thus his “hobby”, and his friends and family, in his mind, were acting selfishly in criticizing him.
That is… really, really stupid. I see this argument crop up a lot with mobile whales (i.e. the big dupes). They can “afford it” so why not? It brings them happiness, right?
Little thought in these guy’s minds seems to be on the inevitable moment when the game’s servers are turned off and their “investment” disappears forever into the aether.
I have games I bought used 30+ years ago still in my possession. All of them work as well today as they did when I got them. Come to think of it, so do the old games I have that I bought new, too. Everything on them works, including battery backups, and those batteries are decades old at this point.
Seriously guys, don’t spend a cent on these fucking mobile games. They aren’t worth it.
Honestly, even the worst games on the SNES are better than 99% of the games in the apple app store. The SNES games, no matter their quality, just “work”. No commercials, no paywalls, and few if any bugs, and what bugs there are are never game-breaking. No data mining, no toxic cyberbullying, no unfathomably big “updates” that introduce new problems and imbalances to make people pay for the fixes, just… no bullshit, in general.
Modern games, no matter what they do, come with way too much… I don’t know, nonsense, and what’s unfortunate is that people, especially younger people, don’t seem to realize how shitty they are, and how much crap the developers pull. And this isn’t just mobile gaming, here. This is console as well.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t play them. If you do, fine, I do as well, but for god’s sake don’t spend actual money on them.
I know that people need hobbies, and sometimes these hobbies can get expensive, relatively speaking. I mean sometimes you can get something out of them that is worth the expense. I get it.
But this one is not worth the expense.
I had a hobby, once, of collecting gold coins. I mean, real ones, not video game ones. I still have them.
Today, I could sell back my entire collection and get what I paid for them, every single one. And in fact in some cases I could sell them back for much much more than I paid for them. At worst I would break even.
In my desk drawer I have a little plastic cup with a collection of coins and rounds in it. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and some rhodium. I probably spent $25K on all of it, and it’s probably worth $75K right now in melt value. It will be valuable the rest of my life, no doubt, and probably far beyond.
For a collection, why not try something like this instead of spending 25K on some shitty, temporary virtual “gold” in some shitty, broken, fourth rate video game?
Well, whatever. This post is done.
I need to start ending my posts better, lol.