Games Suck. Mobile Games Suck More.

I love video games. I have since I was a kid; there was something about the instant feedback and dynamic nature that soothes a particular part of my brain.1 I've spent a lot of money on games over the years and my Steam library is chock-full of games I've collected but haven't played.2 For some free-to-play games, I've spent more (much more) than a AAA title costs, and I don't have a problem with those expenses, either.

But it only takes a quick wander through any platform store (Apple, Google, Steam, etc.) to see that the dynamics at work in a lot of "popular" games are not healthy. You can download a game for "free", but at some point you'll find that continuing to play the game hits a barrier of some kind. The two most common kinds of barriers I've noticed are watching ads and increasing time delays.

Why Many Games Are Free

A lot of games are "free." Indulge me on a short digression as to why. For consoles, you can't release a game without the console maker's permission and approval and fees, and it's difficult to get into on your own. If you go through a publisher, the publisher will exert some level of quality control so they can be assured of recovering their up-front investment in fees and promotions. So, if a game is listed for $40–$80 you can be reasonably assured that it has some baseline level of quality, and there are few enough releases that you could consult some trustworthy-ish sources as to whether the publisher did their editorial job. For PC, the various platform stores (Steam, Epic, etc.) perform a similar function; while these are more friendly to indie developers, they still have "standards" and if something is egregiously bad they will de-list it and/or ban the developer.

Mobile development is... not that. Creating a new developer account is really easy, and getting past the platform review is more about not violating the technical prohibitions of the platform than any level of actual quality control. Also, there's a case to be made that the use case for mobile games is (or at least started out as) different from PC or console gaming. The latter lends itself to big-screen, longer gaming sessions that are more in depth. Mobile gaming, which occurs on smaller screens, makes these "big" games more difficult. If I've got time and I'm not on-the-go, the gaming experience on my PC is vastly superior to whatever my phone can manage, even if they can run the same game.3 Mobile gaming sessions also often occur in short spurts, where they might be interrupted, so they need to be lower-stakes or able to be instantly paused. This pushes the kinds of games available on mobile to smaller-scale games. Given this environment, expecting anyone to pay $40–$80 for a mobile game is an essentially impossible task.

This sets up a race-to-the-bottom situation. Gambling $60 on a console/PC game has a pretty good return rate; gambling even $5 on a mobile game much less so, when it's so easy to create a dev account and publish a game. Buying an app requires more trust on the part of the buyer, and that trust got abused very quickly. To reduce the risk, you lower the price... until you get to the lowest possible price.

Free.

"Free" games are not unique to mobile, but I will argue that mobile gaming is what entrenched free-to-play games as a mainstream rather than fringe model.

That Vicious Ad Cycle

So, if you're publishing a free game and you need to make money, one very easy way to do so is put ads in your game; platforms generally have stock libraries you can include to do all the work for you, and as long as that ad code runs often enough, money flows into your account. Just keep showing those ads and you'll keep getting money.

This sets up a perverse incentive on the part of the developer. Players—the nominal consumer of the developer's product—are there to have fun. They want to play a game. The developer wants to make money, but providing the player with fun doesn't directly make them money, showing ads does. Where's the limit on how many ads they can show? It's a balance between providing enough fun to keep the player engaged and not showing too many ads to drive those players away. Lean too much on the "fun" side and you make less money than you "could."

Having so many games running ads had an interesting side effect: it created an easily-identifiable audience of gamers who could be shown ads for... more games. One of the biggest challenges with game publishing on any platform is visibility. Getting more players to download a game is a key element in getting more players to download a game, so showing ads to potential gamers to get them to download other games, many of which are free and showing ads for other games is quite the closed loop.

In this gaming ouroboros there is no escape from advertising hell. Developers can't get any visibility for their game without pre-existing downloads because too many other games are already crowding the top of the lists; regardless of the quality or amount of fun it might be, if nobody sees it, nobody plays it. So developers are forced to invest money promoting a game even before it has made them any money, feeding into this cycle.

And it's easy to see that on every platform that introduces advertising, it steadily creeps more and more into the user experience. Cable TV started out as an ad-free alternative to broadcast TV's advertising-driven revenue model. It didn't take long for advertising to intrude on cable anyway. Paid streaming services? Now not ad-free, unless you want to pay more. Even AAA game titles that come at a premium price are embedding ads. There's a comical (to me) scene in Ready Player One where the villain proposes covering ever-increasing visual space in the VR world with ads, up to the limit of 80% where seizures occur.4

Those Ever-Increasing Delays

The increasing-delay pattern is incredibly pervasive and comes in many flavors. The most obvious one shows up in "city-building" games, where "upgrades" to things you have will take progressively longer to complete, but are required to unlock further progression in the game. At first these are negligible; ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds. Then minutes. Hours. Days.

Why would a game be structured this way? It clearly gets in the way of the "fun" parts of the game. This question should be obviously rhetorical: the mechanism here is to get you hooked on a game's fun parts and then dangle the promised fun as a carrot to get you to buy an in-game "enhancement" that returns the delays to more tolerable levels. The enhancements are often not permanent and also have diminishing returns over time, requiring more investment of real money to get the same amount of "fun" back. This is the same mechanism pushers of street drugs use to trap their victims. The only difference is that it's easier to walk away from a pushy game. But the mentality is the same: give away a free sample, but be sure to require a constant stream of revenue to keep the good times going.

In the worst examples of this pattern, the player is effectively blocked from doing anything during the freeze-out time. A lesser flavor of this is when there's enough of a game left to be able to have fun, but key progression is still time-gated and the higher levels require more (often exponentially more) time. Take, for example, Genshin Impact. This is an exceptionally well-made game5 and, for the most part, there is plenty to do in the game. Key end-game content (such as its highest-tier Spiral Abyss and Imaginarium Theater) requires a deep roster of high-level characters, which hits the time gates in two ways. First, even obtaining characters requires rolling the dice in the game's gacha system; one may or may not even get anything good, and without spending real money, there is a significant amount of time investment required to complete a bevy of in-game objectives to gain chances at the gacha pulls. (Many of those objectives are also not repeatable.) Once a character is obtained, they must be "leveled up", which requires obtaining in-game resources that are only available in limited quantities per day or per week. In Genshin Impact's case, this progression curve applies to a character's primary level and to each of their abilities; the weapons each character uses follow a similar progression curve. What's even more pernicious here is that a key resource used to obtain all of these other upgrade resources is rationed, so if it's spent on one character it's not available for use on another until the next day, no matter how much additional time is spent playing.

Sunk Costs

All of these mechanisms are used to drive players to the micro-transaction system to pay real money to obtain long-term or short-term boosts. Ask players to spend $80 on a game, they push back.6 Ask them to spend $30 on some downloadable content (DLC) and far fewer do than bought the original game. Give them the game for free, but ask them to pay $5 here and there, and they've spent more than $100 before they realize it.7

Not only that, but by the time players are at the point where they feel ready to spend money to "make the game fun again" they've already invested a lot of time in the game, and refusing to spend that money might mean they never get to play the fun parts of the game again. My wife did this recently with Whiteout Survival, which was initially fun and then went down the time-gate progression until it was pointless. She chose on her own to walk away from the game.

Developers who choose this mechanic do know what they are doing. They know these tactics can alienate players. There's a point, though, where it doesn't matter. Even if only a fraction of players pay money, that can be big money. Century Games reportedly makes more than two billion dollars from their games, with their top game (Whiteout Survival) accounting for half of that. Mihoyo (makers of Genshin Impact) pulls in double that.9

With money like that baiting developers, it's no wonder games are using these mechanisms. If the goal is to make money, this works. And to be sure, top-tier games require top-tier investments to produce, and any live-service game incurs significant ongoing operating expenses. But this doesn't really change the fact these these tactics are manipulative (if not outright coercive) and they make the game worse, not better.

What Can Be Done

Well, those who believe capitalism is the cure for everything have their answer: the game market is cratering, and studios are folding like a house of cards in a hurricane. Games, like movies, are a bit of a risky investment. With movies, if you make a hit, you can have hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, but if you make a dud, and you can lose hundreds of millions. When games spiral up to nine-figure budgets, few with that kind of money will want anything but a steady, risk-free return on that, so the push to coercive patterns is a business choice, not a creative one. Too much money has poured in, and now the market is burned out, and maybe—just maybe—the money will leave, somewhat.

But probably not. As long as there are players demanding these big-budget productions who are also willing to put up with microtransactions, that pattern will persist. And until mobile gamers reject advertising-driven games en masse then that revenue model will persist, too. (Spoiler alert: neither of these is likely to happen soon, if ever.)

The only thing that will ever make this change is if game developers (and note that I said developers, not studios) find a different revenue model. That's a pretty tall order.

1. Pay Up Front

One option of course is a return to paid-up-front games. This model never went away; I can go to the Steam store right now and pay a single price for games and play them indefinitely. Steam, at least, allows refunds (within a short time window) for games that are truly bad, and as I mentioned above, there's a minimal level of vetting that increases the likelihood of getting something decent. But Steam was able to build on an established history of games costing money up front; players did (and still do) expect this model. Free-to-play games and hybrid models (lower initial price plus microtransactions) are also available. It's still the primary model for console games. But for mobile games this model has been an abysmal failure, and free-to-play with microtransactions has been essentially the only viable model. Few are willing to make a game with no hope of financial return, even for the love of games.

2. Shareware Model

Another option is to use a shareware model.10 Pay nothing up front, but if the game is good or you want to unlock additional features, pay some money. There's a fine line between this and a microtransaction model, but it basically boils down to knowing in advance. Instead of getting something "free" and only progressively discovering how much it might cost to get a "full" experience, this model is clear with users how much it takes to get everything, and it's usually a single, flat fee. Distribution platforms generally make collecting the actual money relatively straightforward (minus the platform's hefty fee) but they're focused on a microtransaction flow, and implementing a shareware pay-once model is a bit more work. If the platform cut is too steep, it might be tempting to lean on a site like Patreon, but this is more complicated because (at least for mobile platforms) there are discouragements from using any external payment platform.

3. Battle Pass Model

The biggest problem for any game that has ongoing costs wanting to use pay-up-front or shareware models is that they don't provide recurring revenue. For any kind of game that relies on a multi-player experience, gamers expect that service to be up and running.11 Without recurring revenue from the same players, the only way to fund such an effort is to obtain new players, which is an infinite-growth strategy doomed to fail on a finite-sized pool of available gamers.

The battle pass model asks those who play to pay. Most of these systems offer distinctive, otherwise-unobtainable rewards for those who obtain a time-limited pass. For games that require players to "grind" for progress, they may also offer large quantities of in-game items or resources used for that progress, so that a player who pays can spend less time on the grind and (in theory) more time doing the more fun parts of the game. This latter pattern can turn sour, though; it can be used to make meaningful progress very difficult without paying—which is fair, but not obvious up front.

A battle pass model is also a commitment to actually playing. Since it's a limited-time purchase, any of the extra benefits expire when the battle pass expires. Even for gamers with deep pockets, there is only so much time available for gaming, so purchasing a battle pass is a bit of a mental "lock in" applied to players to deter them from spending time in other games. That's not any psychological manipulation, no sir.

The Apocalypse is Nigh

As I write this, the entire game industry is flopping around like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. I have been around long enough to remember the video game market imploding in the 1980s. This feels... much worse. While certainly today nobody is going to be burying game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill12 thanks to digital distribution, there are a lot of people with money who thought games were a money-printing machine who are pulling their investments to avoid losing everything.

And that might not even be a bad thing, from the perspective of games being focused on fun. If your focus is on "can I make a living doing this?" then yes, be worried. Not only is the industry struggling with over-investment but now AI threatens to displace game developers and artists. Anyone can spend money getting Claude to write their game for them, and it might or might not be good code, but the return on investment for an AI slop game is going to be very attractive. But even without that, game developers and artists and producers are struggling to find work.

But gaming itself will survive, likely because games are a very human thing overall, and video games tap into that. We might not see the same kinds of big-budget investment, or the big-brand licensing deals, that are common today. I would expect, though, that the games we do have will be more fun, and that those might more organically rise to the top of popularity rather than whoever is doing the biggest advertising spend.

One can hope.