Category: Rant

The Social Gaming Platform

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Mobile gaming is often said to never surpass or even be near gaming on the more established platforms such as Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and PC. However, in some areas gaming on mobile is better.

The mobile easily surpasses all the above mentioned when it comes to social gaming. Despite having multiplayer both locally and online they do not have the most important key ingredient which is accessibility. Every other person, or you could say most, have a mobile phone. If you have a mobile phone you have access to a great selection of the games that can be played on it and most of those games have social aspects, if they are not already tailored around it.

It might be annoying to have the game always ask you to add friends or to get access to your contacts, but that being annoying proves how social the game is. It reminds you to add friends for its profit but also for your, the player’s, benefit. It might seem small, but sharing your creations, journeys, and achievements with friends provides enough fodder for conversation and play to fuel a good relationship with another human.

This does not come as easily with other platforms. Friends and family much first purchase the gaming platform and whichever game they want to, or have been asked to, play. On top of this, some of the other gaming platforms also require you to pay a fee to play online on their servers. Measuring this to that of mobile gaming makes it a lot more expensive and demanding to play locally and/or online.

If you are mostly interested in playing with your friends then, believe it or not, mobile gaming might be the best way.

Why Mobile Games are bad

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If you ask the average gamer to list the consoles on which they play games there is a very, very big chance that they won’t even think of their phone as a legitimate gaming console. The reason? There just are no legitimate games on mobile.

Mobile games are short, pay to play, a waiting game, and wants to know all your contacts or access your camera. Not all games, but most you will find do tick all the above mentioned. There is a constant reminder to ‘invite your friends’ or to log in with facebook to access this feature, or ‘for only £10 you can be the owner of this legendary weapon’. In worst case, ‘let us access your camera to store photos of you, your surroundings, and your friends… maybe even your cat!’.

Gamers are used to a different scene. One that is not necessarily overly social, one that does not push all these notification onto you, and also one that do not ask you to pay more than the initial price to play the whole game. The race for gamers attention, for anyone’s attention, is insane and stressful. Gaming is most of the time a stress relief and mobile gaming is definitely not that.

Why mobile games are bad is not tied to the games themselves not really, it is more tied to how they are executed. The very core of most of these games are just money grabs in fancy costumes or a sneak peak on what might have been a good full game if released on another console which do not promote the same kind of ‘bursts’ of playtime. The players do not blame the games, but the developers execution of them.

The very reason for this blog is to find the good among the forest of the bad. Because there are games, and developers, who have used this platform and created games that suit it without disappointing their players. Those are the ones who are worthy of our time, not the ones who keep asking us to pay another £20 for that cool armour or alert us with a notification every other hour asking if we are still there because no, no we are not, we are playing other games bye bye delete.