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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

I still have a hard time understanding how mobile gaming diverged so hard from traditional computer gaming to be the lootbox cesspool that it is. The majority of the market is filled "free" exploitative ad-filled knockoffs with less effort put into their actual gameplay than 2005 flash games. The actual paid market is barren in comparison, with most of the top rated games just being ports of decent PC games. Even coin-based arcades weren't this bad; it's like the mere presence of a FAANG is enough to suck all the genuine creativity and passion out of a market and replace it with growth-optimized exploitation

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It’s not hard to understand. The mobile app stores trained people to expect sub $1 prices for everything. Games that were priced fairly did not sell well. They still don’t. The five (or fifty) people on HN who insist they’d pay full price for a game with no loot box mechanics do not a sustainable market make.

Unfortunately the loot box mechanic is so lucrative that all you have left in the market is unscrupulous companies.

It’s a natural consequence of gamers insisting that the content they love to consume cannot possibly cost what it does and the industry must be full of exploitative sharks.

Funnily enough, 15 years of this has not resulted in good games getting cheaper but rather good developers leaving the industry. Who could have seen that coming?

The interface just sucks. I really think that's more or less enough to explain it. You can only do so much when your only mode of interaction is pawing at a tiny screen, so people who want to design good games mostly don't bother. In the absence of real games, the void is filled by cynically engineered malware for your brain.

The iPad was slightly more promising as a games platform, but it just isn't popular enough.

Maybe because mobile games are played in very short bursts of time, like sometimes 5 minutes max? People just want something fairly mindless to distract between errands or what have you.

Sports celebrities pimping themselves out selling it probably is a big factor.

It’s simple. Mobile users are genpop while PC gaming users are more technical.

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