But they don’t get attention-public-funding enough to be profitable because of the garbage. The garbage is burying them in search results but also literally.

Well if you wanted a whole deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZCzhoeQMg&t=828s

But I can distill it down to

1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend).

2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper.

3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it)

4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1).

5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter?

The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant).

It is still fun, but some services are severely degraded. A lot of sites require accounts, Google search quality is extremely bad, chatting and communities are behind shitty corporate platforms and I include GitHub and Discord here. Open social networks are often full of crazies, so that more people remain in private groups...

Can you name some? I know they exist, but in my experience 99% of them are small personal blogs maintained as a hobby. In 2024, it is practically impossible to focus on solid journalism and turn a profit, and every site I've seen try has either gone under or been forced to sell out to bottom-feeders and adopt listicles, etc.

I’ve subscribed to news sites in the past, but these days I would probably only pay for local news.

Currently there isn’t any site I pay for.

I understand having other business models. I personally hate ads, but I’m also happy to buy a game and then pay to remove the ads. And I’m willing to pay a lot more than the $1 that most people seem to think is overpriced.

I also understand having some in app purchases.

My gripe is a few games took a really exploitive route with in app purchases. Having extremely aggressive timers and tons of currencies. And they CLEANED UP. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it’s mostly people who pay nothing, children being tricked into paying, and a small number of people who spend an insane amount of money. The whales.

But whatever the mix it made money so every game publisher started racing to turn out identical skinner boxes.

This had two effects. First, that’s what the publishers were interested in so it’s probably a lot harder to get anything else through. Second, because those games are “free“ it changed pricing expectations that games and other apps should be “free“.

So if you wanted to make a good game and sell it at even a really low price, people screamed at you. How DARE you charge $1.99.

By driving down the expected price we ended up at a point where the only things that can make any money at all or either crammed with ads that get shown to you constantly or designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.

Games only have to be good enough to keep people looking at the ads or paying for another set of Smurfberries.

Worst of all even games that were already made and were absolute classics have been ruined. Because they either get updates to add those features (Flight Control) or sequels to change the game to be more like one of those that makes a lot of money (Plants be Zombies 2, Trism 2).

On Android, Civ VI has pretty horrible reviews, largely around stability; I think the devices are fine, but I'm not sure I'd cite Civ VI as support for it.

1. Switch gamers own phones, so with the right marketing could also be phone gamers.

3. I doubt this has a big impact given empirically my friends who own Switches buy everything though the digital store.

4. Apple has the billions to buy ports of every AAA game on release (not years after like Resident Evil) for years, and IMO they should (and combine it with a big marketing push).

5. That’s true, you won’t beat those features with a phone right now (though they’re within reach for a determined platform owner)

I recall reading several years ago that Apple dropping affiliate links (? Not sure if that’s the correct name) was a major financial blow. I had no interest in the podcast or the reviews of games on other platforms, or the increased coverage of anime games, but I continued to support them financially in a modest way just so that I could read the roundup of new games released every week. A few years ago, there would be several games I would check out each week, but more recently I would just scroll through the list and find nothing of interest.

sites specialized around gacha are probably not just western. I imagine sustaining a few korean or japanese site managers is cheaper than in the US.

There's a few english-first sites talking about gacha, but they are much smaller endeavors. Not much different from a blog managed by 1-2 people that just need a few hundred dollars (if that) to pay for servers.

>innovative gameplay just doesn't convert that well

Mobile gaming might be casual but the touch UI is huge innovation by itself. Touch gaming controls is the real thing that makes the difference in mobile gaming compared to other types of gaming.

> Marketing doesn't lead people. It just enhances the signal about what people choose.

Marketing is also the process of surveying the market and deciding what to make in the first place.

> the mobile crowd (which is basically most of humanity at this point) really prefer spending their money in a very specific genres, and innovative gameplay

Yeah although what percentage of mobile users actually play on their phones regularly these days?

It's anecdotal but I haven't played a mobile game in almost a decade now. I played a lot on my iPad 1 and 3.

The app fever of 2010 has passed. Again anecdotal, but I avoid installing apps on my phone as much as I can.

My wife still plays candy crush on her iPad almost every night but has zero interest in any other game.

I haven’t bought a new game for myself for years. Most of what I play is retro emulation, and what PC titles I do play are ones I already own and have a lot of replay value. Indie titles are far cooler than AAA, but even they don’t speak out to me as often. Why spend $60 on a flop like Hyenas, or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? Especially on mobile, where most games are idle timewasters looking to lock me into a microtransaction loop. I‘d rather boot up a GBA game and spend my time on that.

I do this with DCS.

Flightsims fascinate me, and I used to play the old Microprose sims, but nowadays it's too expensive and time-consuming a niche. DCS is expensive, both the hardware and the modules, and it also requires way too much time.

So I watch a couple of YouTube channels dedicated to DCS, and get to "live" the experience through them.

> And they complained about the total switch over to micro-transactions. Those complaints were ignored.

There is a good reason for this. “Premium” mobile games never reliably made that much money, even during the early iOS boom. If you were a publisher it took having quite a few hits to compensate, and Android was more trouble than it was worth for a long time.

A successful MTX game made several orders of magnitude more. (Instead of getting low millions you would be getting hundreds of millions). The process was perfectly satirized in South Park by the “Canadian Department of Mobile Gaming” which like all the best South Park jokes wasn’t nearly as fictional as might be assumed.

Such games are “cheap trash” in the same sense as a vegas casino. Similarly the actual operating of them at scale becomes very sophisticated. Team Fortress 2 is an example of Valve indulging in exactly this on Steam, so it is far from isolated to mobile.

> which, for whatever reason, do a much better job of not just promoting stuff that will be profitable

it's simply the law of large numbers. The early Switch was a goldmine for indies. If you could get a game on in the first 12-18 months, you were nearly guaranteed decent sales. That mine ended about 2 years in, though. Still a big market, but you will probably be buried more often.

Now Go to Steam. Decent storefront based on recommendations, but due to user tagging and the sheer volume of releases you're bound to get some random $2 hentai game everynow and then, no matter how fine tuned your filters on. This is partially because again, steam leaves it to the community to tag, but those weid recommendations are a peek into the surface of how much slop there truly is on Steam. And we don't even talk about how 99% of indies fare on Steam.

Google/Apple's stores are just Steam x 1000. There's millions of apps released per year, nearly impossible to curate manually. And due to the f2p nature, it'd take a lot longer to build a proper recommendation engine. because games optimized towards playtime, not getting $5 out of you ASAP.

But on top of all that: mobile games aren't on that power curve where they peak sales for the firs month then trickle along. Roblox was a highest earner for years and probably makes more revenue over time, not less. So the top selling board doesn't change. And google/apple have negative incentive to change that, because they will keep selling and they will get their cut. Who cares about new titles when the old ones are making hundreds of millions years later?

>And so I think the market generally treats mobile games like garbage. Which they by-and-large seem to be.

well, money talks, and Whales can disproportionately talk louder than some complaints online about mobile games. That's all that matters to the company. The best compromise would seem to be to support those games offering console experiences (more and more these days also on console/PC as well) but using a f2p monetization system if that's desirable. it won't change the candy crushes and robloxes, but it does show you can still grab console-oriented players on mobile.

>I've been predicting a "Steam of mobile" for a while now, a place to curate for those console ports or 2008-2012 style premium mobile games. I'm baffled that it looks like Epic might beat Valve to such an endeavor.

I thought somebody would make "Xfire of mobile" in the early days of smartphones but is too late now I suppose. Epic won't beat Steam at anything: not at Store, not at live service games(Valve makes better games(Counter-Strike, Dota 2, TF2, new MOBA game - Deadlock)), Epic only has Fortnite and Epic can't beat Valve at revenue, Valve overall makes more money than Epic.

The one thing I like about new Twitter is how those deceptive ads can get community notes that say "gameplay depicted is not in the game".

Yeah they've run shitty ads for years now.

And it seems like the one time they did face consequences for their fake ads four years ago clearly wasn't enough [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761349

a/b testing to the (local) max