The Soulless Death of Mobile Gaming

0:00 You ever look at this and think, "Man, I wish I could do that, but on the go." Yeah, this is probably better. When you hear the term mobile gaming, you probably think of those quick bite-sized games you play on your phone. I guess it could also mean something like this, but that's not what we're talking about today. Everyone has played a mobile game at some point in their lives, whether it be a game specifically made for a touchcreen, a console game ported to phone, or even one of those text message games. and I along with many others have very fond memories of the games we played as a kid. However, if you've played mobile games as of late, you've probably noticed that they just don't feel the same anymore. And I'm not just talking from a place of nostalgia. If you compare an older mobile game to a newer one, you'd think that this game is from 2013 and this from 2025. But no,

0:45 it's the other way around. And it's not that there's just a couple of bad games. It feels like the vast majority of what is being released today looks like, I don't know, this. Solve the equation. [Music] I don't think I'm alone in saying that mobile games today just feel so forgettable. If you were held at gunpoint and asked to name a mobile game released in the past 3 years, your best chance at survival would be naming a random object with do.io at the end. But despite everyone almost unanimously agreeing that mobile games today are worse, it seems like no one really knows why. Sure, it's easy just to blame it on the absurd amount of ads these games have or their terrible visuals, but the games everyone seems to point to as the good mobile games also had ads and they didn't always have the best visuals. So,

1:30 clearly something else is causing this change and I want to get to the bottom of it. But in order to truly figure out what is going on here, we need to travel back in time to the very beginning of mobile gaming. June 29th, 2007 is the day the first iPhone was released. And from this point forward, the smartphone game market would never be the same. As in the market didn't exist before this point. There were a few attempts at phone games prior to the invention of smartphones, but those looked like, well, this. But with the introduction of the iPhone came the App Store. And as much as we take it for granted today, this was a huge step for the future of mobile gaming. The App Store allowed for thirdparty developers to make iPhone apps easily accessible to people using an iPhone, which wasn't really possible on older phones. And this was a big deal, not just for the large gaming

2:16 developers, but for anyone who was interested in making a game. Me, never before was it this easy for a game developer to make a game and instantly have it in the eyes of people using the exact device their game is for. And because of this, we enter into what I'm going to call the golden age of mobile gaming. This is the era of mobile gaming I think most people are nostalgic for. You got your Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Subway Surfers, Jetack Joy Ride. And what made the App Store so unique is a majority of the most popular games on this thing were made by small independent developers. Contrary to what you would expect, a majority of the biggest mobile game franchises of all time were made by independent teams of less than 10 people, sometimes even a single person. Angry Birds. Ever heard of that game before? It was made by seven people and became one of the largest franchises, not just in mobile gaming, but of all time. It's not that

3:03 major gaming companies weren't interested in mobile gaming. Heck, they'd be stupid not to dip their toes into it. It's a device that can be carried around with you anywhere, and more people owned one than a video game console. So, why wouldn't we make Resident Evil mobile edition? This was a mistake. Yeah, most major gaming companies just saw mobile gaming as another medium for them to sell their console games. While small indie studios worked on games specifically made for the iPhone's hardware, the larger companies fell behind as console ports to phone just weren't very appealing. I mean, if you take Mega Man for mobile and put it next to Cut the Rope, you'd look at this and think, "Yeah, I'd want to play that on a phone." And this and think, "Oh, I'd rather play this on anything but a phone." Large developers just didn't seem to understand what it is that makes mobile gaming appealing. It's not the fact that you can play a game anywhere.

3:50 It's the fact that you can play a game that was made to be played anywhere, anywhere. So because of this, independent developers picked up the steam. They crafted games that felt intuitive to play, taking advantage of the iPhone's touchcreen. Angry Birds had you pulling back on a slingshot. Where's My Water carving a path through dirt and cut the rope? You literally cut the rope. All these being things that weren't possible on a traditional gaming controller. And it really looked promising for the future of mobile gaming. In fact, there was a period of time when people thought that console gaming was going to become completely irrelevant due to the popularity of mobile gaming. New innovative games were releasing left and right, and it seemed like nothing could stop mobile gaming. Until it didn't. Down the hatch. Oh my god, our mouth is getting so big. We're swallowing the city. This is Whole IO, and it's one of the most addictive mobile games. Around 2011 to 2013 is

4:36 when the first cracks in the mobile gaming market started to form. And you might not believe me when I say this, but a lot of it had to do with money. When mobile gaming first hit the market, the idea of creating a free-to-play game was unfathomable. You spent months, maybe years, pouring your heart and soul into a game just to release it for free. How am I supposed to make money? Inapp purchases weren't a thing before 2009. So, for the early years of mobile gaming, most games were a one-time purchase, meaning you bought the game and that was it. Because of this, most early mobile games, at least the level-based ones, followed the design philosophy of full release console games. You play through a series of levels slowly increasing in difficulty and face challenges that can be hard to figure out but feel fair and rewarding when you finally do figure them out. And with developers only worried about selling their game once, their effort went into crafting a genuinely fun

5:22 experience for the player through and through, focusing solely on the game's mechanics because that's all that people cared about. But this all changed in 2009 when Apple introduced in-app purchases to the app store. Now, in the beginning, I actually think in-app purchases were very healthy for mobile gaming and even benefited the consumer in many ways. This might be a controversial take here, but people like things that are free. And although these paid games sold very well, there was still an untapped potential into the market of users who only downloaded free games. And so, once inapp purchases were added to the app store, many games experimented with the idea of premium experiences. Basically, you could download the game for free, but only a certain amount of the game was available to you before you had to pay to unlock the rest. And this right here is the healthiest state I think mobile gaming has ever been in. It was a win-win

6:07 scenario for everyone. You could download a game for free without the risk of paying for something you ended up not liking. And if you did end up buying the full game, the developers would make their money without having to shove a million ads in your face. Or some games would even opt to having their whole game be available for free. The only caveat being you would have to deal with ads. But if you wanted to pay a little extra money, you could remove the ads entirely and have an uninterrupted experience. Both are very consumer-friendly practices that only help to increase the accessibility of these games. And if you did decide to pay, what you were paying for was the game itself. But as with all good things in life, this didn't last long. Developers quickly realize that if we can charge people to unlock levels, why can't they also pay to get coins or to make the level easier or to gamble? And slowly, these apps morphed from

6:53 trying to sell you on the game itself to trying to figure out how they could design their game to include as many in-app purchases as humanly possible. And there was no better example of this than quite possibly the most popular mobile gaming franchise of all time, Angry Birds. Everyone knows Angry Birds. You launch your birds from a slingshot to knock down the pig's towers, and you score points at the end of each level trying to get a perfect three stars. It's a great evolution of the Crush the Castle formula. However, as the years went on, you can see a noticeable shift in the direction these games took. The early Angry Birds games were all designed with the core purpose of being a fun time. You'd progress through levels that utilized the game's unique mechanics in cool and interesting ways. And although the levels would get difficult, they ultimately were puzzles that were meant for you to solve, and the series became beloved because of it.

7:40 Eventually though, people got tired of the same old formula. So, Roio needed to pivot. They made a few spin-off titles that to this day are still really good games if they were still on the app store. But the franchise started to struggle financially. They went from making a lot of money to making a lot of money, but now a little less. And so with their next game, they needed to do something big. And that something big was making a casino for toddlers. Angry Birds 2 hit the scene in 2015. And you can instantly tell with this game that something about the whole thing is just off. The original Angry Birds was a game where you would launch funny birds at a tower, but now you have gems that can be used to buy chests. There's a card tower that essentially is just a gambling game, and if you lose, you can continue with gems. There's these pearls, which you use to buy hats for your birds that can make them more powerful, but you

8:25 also use gems to spin this wheel of chance that might give you more pearls. There's a daily event that if you lose, you have to spend gems to continue, a battle pass, loot boxes, offers popping up in your screen every 5 seconds, cooldowns galore, and even the main menu of this game is basically all places for you to spend your money with the actual levels being crammed into the corner here. And once you do get into the main game, it's even worse. This game uses a card system for your birds, which on paper is an interesting idea. It allows you to choose which bird you want to play next, and if done properly, it could add a ton of strategy to the game simple formula. But they don't do any of that. And it's very clear the only reason this card system is in place is to entice you into spending money. These levels are purposefully designed to just be slightly too long or slightly too hard for the amount of cards you have. And when you run out, you can always spend some gems or watch an ad to get a

9:11 few more. And this would all be fine if you could just restart the level. It'd be a fun challenge to figure out how to beat it with the amount of cards you're given. But you are actively encouraged not to try again because you have to spend these energy points which you only get a limited amount of every few hours just to retry the level a single time. It costs 10 energy points to retry a level or even just start it and you only get 60 max. It's a purposefully frustrating game loop that only exists to try and reach into your wallet. And the levels are actively worse because of it. While the original Angry Birds had smartly designed levels that challenged you on figuring out where to shoot your birds, it feels like in Angry Birds 2, they purposfully space out the towers and divide the levels into segments so you are forced to use more cards, which means you're more likely to run out and then pay money. And I think you get what

9:57 I'm saying here. It's really unfortunate because they do have some really interesting ideas in this game that I think if done right could be an incredible modernization of the original Angry Birds game. But no, why would they do that when they can just shove a price tag in your face? and mobile games across the board are switching to this philosophy of making good money over making a good game. Angry Birds 2 at least includes some interesting gameplay elements, but the vast majority of games populating mobile stores today don't even bother on that end. And why would they when it's been proven to be financially beneficial to prioritize player retention over actual gameplay? That's why it's so hard to find anything that feels like those classic mobile games of the past. All these developers are so focused on making a monetizable experience that they forget to make a fun game in the process. They're either so brain dead easy with super short

10:43 levels so you think, "Oh, one more couldn't hurt." Or so frustratingly difficult that you become determined to solve it. Compared to games of the past that actually respected your ability to solve challenges and didn't use all these retention tactics. And combine that with the fact that majority of the games being made today are by large corporations and no longer independent developers, and it's pretty clear why things just don't hit the same anymore. They don't care if anyone enjoys their game as long as they make a few dollars in the process. And at its core, this is why mobile gaming today just doesn't feel the same. It's not the terrible game ads we've all seen. It's not how many ads they shove into your face. In fact, it's not even the inapp purchases themselves. These things would all be fine enough if the games themselves actively tried to be good. But they don't. And it's because the design philosophy has changed. They're not even trying to be good. Now, I'm not saying

11:29 that every mobile game today is bad. In fact, I can think of a couple that I've played in the past few years that I thoroughly enjoyed. But unfortunately, that only makes up a small portion of the gaming market today. If you removed all this slop from the app store, I honestly don't think people would see mobile gaming in such a negative light. There is still good stuff out there, but when it feels like the majority of the industry is trying to cram their hands into your wallet, it can be hard to enjoy even the games that are genuinely well-made. I guess what I'm trying to say is, yeah, mobile gaming might not be quite what it used to be, but that shouldn't stop you from being able to also see the good. And honestly, understanding why these games are the way they are kind of makes me appreciate them in a way. Sure, they're soulless money hungry products, but I can respect them for what they are. And if you enjoy these types of games, then don't let anyone stop you from enjoying what you do. Unless if that's something as Kiss

12:15 in Public Simulator. You need to get help. [Music]