Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed. There’s a few proper games that trickle out now and then, and the App Store editors do try to highlight them, but they’re still few and far between and buried under crap. And now days even paid games aren’t immune to gambling and pay to win scams either.

It is sort of surreal how little the needle has moved since the F2P boom. I bought the first gen iPad, and back then there was a ton of excitement about gaming possibilities on the platform, and some good stuff came out.

I left with the 2nd gen and hadn’t touched one since but a couple years ago I got a new current gen iPad on sale, and was surprised to find that basically, a lot of the best games were still just the same ones that were out back then for the iPad 2. And then the switch to 64-bit happened and we lost a ton of those older games entirely that never got updated.

It’s really depressing. I don’t really even try to find mobile games anymore either.

> and the App Store editors do try to highlight them,

That’s funny, because I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the App Store.

The one function I’ve been waiting for, both directly as a customer and as a parental control, is to be able to have the app store search filter out results with in-app purchases.

Right now there is no way to effectively -find- real premium games, let alone purchase them. Of course they’re going to die under the flood of freemium garbage.

They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out. People seem to pay more with in-app purchases than up front purchases, so it makes little sense for them to offer such a feature.

And in-app purchases can be done well (e.g. pay to remove ads functions basically like a free trial for me), but they've become predatory since they've started influencing game design.

> They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out.

Oh, I agree - which is why I don’t buy the idea that the App Store editors try to highlight “premium” games. Making them easily discoverable would be trivial - but cuts against their profit motive.

Hopefully things get better with the Apple Game subscription this fall that will not have ads or in app purchases.

The worst is the old games (even ones that I paid for) that have now added all the ads.

pockettactics.com is a good place to start. They highlight the quality games, frequently put out "best-of" lists, and avoid F2P games unless a F2P game is particularly exceptional.

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