Old gamers often misunderstand the quality of mobile games.
I realized this a couple of weeks ago when I asked my 12-year-old daughter whether she wanted to bring her Nintendo Switch or her Android tablet on our two-week vacation. She chose the tablet.
Why? Because her Android has Genshin Impact, Fortnite, Roblox, Candy Crush, Wuthering Waves, and Sky: Children of Light. She simply prefers those over her Switch library — which is decent but doesn’t compare to what she’s got on the tablet.
Adults tend to dismiss mobile gaming by saying things like, “There’s no 1:1 equivalent to Super Mario Odyssey, Tears of the Kingdom, or Cyberpunk 2077 on mobile.”
Fine. My daughter has access to all those games. Our family owns over 8,000 games across PC and consoles. She can play Super Mario Odyssey any time she wants, but she doesn’t. She’d rather play Genshin Impact.
And she’s not alone. Most of her friends are on their tablets or phones. It makes sense — gaming is as much about socializing as playing, and iOS and Android dominate for a reason.
Sure, we can scoff and say, “Kids these days don’t recognize a good game when it hits them in the face.”
But I remember feeling that way about Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. They’re still thriving today, with now-grown adults still playing.
I also think back to my own childhood. My mom hated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yet, I snuck a TMNT Game Boy game into the house and played it behind her back. TMNT never disappeared — it’s still around.
With the original Switch’s price rising (at least here in Canada), it just makes sense to consider Android tablets — especially for kids. Sure, you can’t play Black Myth: Wukong on Android, but that’s why I have PCs ready for that. Kids? They just want to have fun and connect with friends.
Games as a service is a scam and goes hand in hand with gambling and addictive mechanics used to keep people hooked. It’s absolutely toxic.
Nintendo is a corporate shithole but at least they make some sort of semblance of non abusive games.
“Portable gaming” is always welcome but the business model of phone games is fucking disgusting.
Then don’t play games-as-a-service on mobile. Plenty of great mobile games you can buy outright, no strings attached.
Worried about ownership? Back up the APK files—problem solved.
You don’t have to swallow every business model you hate. Choice is still on your side.
I don’t. You are exposing children to those exact mechanics and normalizing that behaviour. Without further thought in the future they will go for increasingly scammy shit tactics.
My kid knows full well what is allowable and what is not. She has never spent money on micro-transactions.
Seriously, you played behind your mom’s back. As did I and everyone else. Be careful, talk to her about the shitty tactics. She has to be aware of them, spot them, and know how they work to be able to avoid them. The hardest part will be for her to actually believe it. Those life service shit uses the most disgusting psychological tricks.
Or she will spent all her money behind your back someday.
We all had our tricks, and children will always be cleverer than their parents.
We all know that decent games exist, somewhere. But the amount of effort it would take to wade through all the shovelware and gacha to try to find an even halfway passable game on Google Play simply isn’t worth my time.
And with the mobile market being what it is, it arguably isn’t worth it for developers to try and sell any serious game as mobile-first, because it’s so difficult for those types of games to succeed when mobile gamers want gacha and those that don’t simply aren’t playing on mobile. If it’s truly worth my time, it should be ported to other platforms.
Honest question: how do you find “decent” games elsewhere?
Because all storefronts on PC and console suck when it comes to discoverability.
Do you just accept what marketers and “gamers” tell you about value?
Word of mouth is certainly a large part of it, yes. People talk about successful games. One way or another, the games I like make it onto my radar when I see buzz about them.
But what are the most successful games on mobile? What are the games mobile gamers talk about? Gacha. It’s all gacha. Whatever else is out there, nobody’s talking about it and I’m never going to see it. Nor do I have any reason to go searching through a toxic cesspit in the hopes that maybe I’ll eventually find something, when it is far easier to look elsewhere, on platforms that haven’t been thoroughly corrupted by the race to the bottom.
But again, the real takeaway I want to stress is that the market has been this way for long enough that both gamers and developers know the well is poisoned, and it will never be unpoisoned. The fact that mobile has become dominated by gacha has reinforced itself - everyone not interested in gacha has left the platform, and mobile developers will keep selling more gacha because that’s what the remaining audience wants. They even know that the average mobile gamer won’t spend money on a more ethical business model.
I know that developers know that I know that this is what mobile is. The way I see it, mobile itself has become a red flag. If a game is trying to be more than gacha trash, well why don’t the developers have the sense to put it on other platforms where non-gacha gamers are? If not, they’re shooting themselves in the foot and I have no pity.
Here’s where you and I differ: I don’t trust word of mouth. I don’t trust canons. I don’t trust marketing. And frankly, I don’t trust the so-called “gamers” who repeat the same tired narratives.
Instead, I dive deep—into the bowels of app stores, into archive.org, anywhere I can find games no one else has played or talked about. Then I judge for myself whether they’re worth a damn.
That’s how I’ve uncovered hidden gems, and why I know most of what passes for “good taste” is just groupthink dressed up as expertise.
The only people with real taste? The ones willing to seek things out and form their own opinions. Everything else is just noise.
So what, you just buy games at random and hope maybe you landed on something good? Without anything that would make for an informed purchase? Sounds like a horribly inefficient way of running headfirst into Sturgeon’s Law.
Sometimes I do buy games on a whim.
But usually, I’m a deal hunter—I scour for discounts, read descriptions carefully, study screenshots, and watch gameplay footage. If it grabs my interest, I pull the trigger.
Surprisingly, most of the games that catch my eye turn out to be pretty good.
You should give it a shot. Ignore the hype, forget word of mouth and influencers. Dive into something completely new and different—you might just be pleasantly surprised.
I do. But to me, step one of filtering out Sturgeon’s Law is looking in the right place - platforms that are not overflowing with so much poison that I already know I’m unlikely to ever find what I want.