I still don't understand how all that infrastructure is supposed to be financed by just a handful of whales.
All those developers, analysts, designers, etc. could surely make more money in a proper business.
I think you underestimate the whales. I've played competitive games like Evony and Diablo, one server can have 100+ people who spend $10k to be elite. Now remember they can have hundreds of servers.
Depending on the developer, and the scale of their game, these things can also be incredible cheap to produce too. If your gameplay/monetary loop is something designed to arbitrarily force a player to wait to accomplish something or otherwise spend money, then you can drastically reduce the amount of content that needs to be added as long as you have an adequate base.
Even if you spend money, loot box mechanics and randomized stats can push players to continue to spend because while they got an item, they didn't get the perfect item. Base builders, team combat titles and character based games are very, very effective at this.
For developers like the one behind Evony, they can be a lot cheaper because that game, and a hundreds like it have existed all the way back as far as farmville and earlier. They just got better at the monetization loop over time.
A team of 10 can get a game in front of 100,000,000 people. At that ratio it doesn’t take that many to fund a project. Bigger companies of course reach more people. Mobile games in general are made cheaper in all aspects so it works out.
It's not hard for someone to become at least... a small whale too.
'Microtransactions', when you're spending a few bucks at a time, it's real easy for someone to lose track of how much money they've spent overall.
Doesn't help much but I block the ads and ad companies when I can if they do fake ads.
You don't block all ads?
So...are there any mobile games that are actually what these fake ads pretend to be? Has anyone done real versions? That liquid physics game looks intriguing.
Where's my water is a water physics game that's been around for a long time.
I want to say there was a game on steam that was like...a bundle of these various "ad" games.
The title is extremely long. Like, "yeah you want to play those games from the ads? Here they are!" Or something.
Nice video. Its funny how he ends it with saying not clicking on the ads. Apps with in-game ads can actually click through for you, so you end up on the store page without any user input. That feels illegal.
I have been entertaining the idea of making a video about these ads as well, in the form of what's being advertised and what's actually in the game. Also the claims they make in the ads should be scrutinized. I want to raise awareness for these types of ads because reporting them to Google won't do anything and is notoriously hard (a dark pattern in itself, very convenient to Google).
Would there be any interest in videos like this? I have a bunch of ads recorded that are questionable as fuck and it might be a very depressing journey.
I’d be interested if Google was actually contacted about it and see if there’s any response.
Honestly I think probably all android games are mostly trash designed to trick me, I only take games seriously when they are ports or emulators as an example here's what I have
https://files.catbox.moe/bxe0t7.png
Wow it's so hard to post an image on lemmy I'm not sure if I'll try again.
If it's hard to post images on Lemmy... Maybe use a better app?
Voyager works really well for this. I'm most others should work as well.
Any recommendation for how to find good ROMs? I have tried a few but the colors were all wrong and part of the screen weren't rendering well. I was using a well-regarded emulator, so I assume the problem was on the ROM side.
What are some mobile friendly PSP games? I've played through Chrono trigger and all the gbc/gba Pokemon games way too many times at this point
Turn based rpgs mostly although you can of course connect a Bluetooth controller and the psp has really nice library .
Jeanne D'Arc, Disgaea 1 and 2, final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre would strike me as the most touchscreen friendly type of games being trpgs.
