Mobile Gaming – An Exercise in Frustration

mobile-gaming

One of the many frustrations I have as a gamer with a smart phone is that of untapped potential. I hold in my pocket a device more powerful than many of the consoles I grew up playing, and want nothing more than the ideal first brought on by hand-held gaming systems: I want a worthwhile gaming interface with decent games to keep me entertained when I have some down time.

Instead what I’m presented with is awkward control schemes, nonexistent peripheral support, and a marketplace that is the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces against the wall.

One of the biggest plagues to strike the mobile gaming landscape in micro transactions. Mobile game developers put a lot of effort into making their products just entertaining enough and just polished enough to catch your interest, and once you get involved… BAM. You hit a wall.

That wall is different for each game, but most often boils down to a decision: You can sit here and wait for 5 minutes to move forward in the game, or you can give us a couple bucks now and play immediately.

Now I wouldn’t have a big problem with this approach if it was isolated and well-publicized – say in bolded text required in game descriptions – but as it is now there is no way to tell which games have micro transactions and which do not.

I’ve downloaded at least 20 games (not an exaggeration) where I uninstalled them within ten minutes due to the digital panhandling I was subjected to. There needs to be a concerted effort to blame and shame these money-grubbing developers.

The platform is powerful enough for epic RPGs spanning dozens of hours of gameplay, or true mobile multiplayer experiences that rival the best MMOs, but instead we are swarmed with money-grubbing developers who want to wring your wallet dry one buck at a time.

I have no problem with developers making money, but I would much rather pay $20 for an excellent product than $1 twenty times for a product that is just good enough to keep me playing.

My other primary frustration is in control schemes. Nearly every smartphone ships with Bluetooth at the moment, but these smartphones – which people are using more and more often for both business and leisure – have yet to settle upon a worthwhile controller standard that is truly universal. This is most evident in emulation.

One of my goals is to use my phone as an emulation device, having old NES and SNES games at my beck and call wherever I go, but I have yet to find a control scheme that is actually worthwhile and tolerable for more than 20 minutes of play.

Even finding a worthwhile Bluetooth or wireless controller for these devices is an exercise in futility – searches are swamped with game console controllers that can kind-of-sort-of be adapted, or low-budget gimmicks that only work about half the time.

Mobile gaming has a lot of potential, and is something I would absolutely love to see handled in a competent manner. However, the community and the practices around its development and execution need to change before potential customers are alienated completely.

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