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I'm Winn Liu. As we continue to advance in technology and complexity in our games, I am starting to notice more and more of the exploitative methods in mobile gaming transfer to other mediums.

This has gotten me very worried as in my opinion gaming is a form of interactive art that allows people to immerse themselves in a world of infinite possibilities and freedom. These exploitative systems if allowed to grow, will cause games to become mindless money machines.

With that said, let's delve into why I think the mobile gaming model is flawed.

While the systems in mobile games are bad, I think the main issue is that these games are targeting children, the elderly and people who just want to kill time. They are specifically targeting these people to waste more of their time and money. This causes the developers who are actually trying to make good games to suffer as the general public will think of all games as greedy companies who only want money.

I think it is safe to say that over the years, the goal of mobile games has turned more and more into making money. Nowadays when I scroll through the top 100 on the app store, more than half of the selections are cheap exploitative knock-offs based on trends. When you think about the top 100 of anything, you expect the best of the best, not marketing knock-offs. And that is just the icons, we have yet to discuss about the games itself.

Once I try to play one of these games, I’m bombarded with pop-up ads that are either advertising for microtransactions or another knock-off game.

As if the pop-up ads weren’t enough, these games tend to add mechanics like energy systems and timer-based upgrades. On one hand, I can see the uses of such mechanics, they are usually used to prolong the game experience when there isn’t too much content available. But, when they use these mechanics like these, there are often hundreds or thousands of levels and upgrades that have yet to be done. This caused me to realise that these systems are there for a different reason. It is there to make the games into a daily habit, something that you will check once a day even when there is no more enjoyment from said game.

And after all that, we still have one more thing, Paywalls. This is probably the thing that people think of the most when we talk about mobile games. Content is locked unless you pay a certain amount of money, oftentimes the stuff behind said paywalls are just reskins of existing items or mechanics.

Pay-to-Win (P2W), paying for benefits is probably the most common in games like this. I really dislike this system as it splits the community into two, people who can pay and people who can’t. Most of the time, these games only entertain the P2W players at the expense of the Free-to-Play (F2P) players.

The most dangerous part about this system is that it targets kids who barely understand the value of money and end up spending hundreds of dollars on their parent's credit cards, or they target those who have low self-esteem and think that because their friends have these perks, they also need to have it or they won’t be cool.

With the amount of these exploitative games coming out each year, each of the methods we covered has been getting more and more exploitative. It has caused the reputation of mobile games to become a cesspool of shitty and money-grabbing games.

This bad reputation has caused a lot of good game companies to either fail or they’re forced to use such tactics to stay afloat. I believe that unless we do something about it, the future of the games we love will turn into money-grabbing machines purely to squeeze every last dollar out of us.

The way we can prevent such marketing practices from growing is to stop playing such games. People only use such mechanics because they show results.

I know a lot of friends who say they don't buy anything from the game, so they’re not supporting them. Unfortunately, just playing the game can cause others to join in thus keeping the game alive and with the amount of pop-up ads in games increasing, the money from these ads can also help to keep these games afloat.

Here are some games I find fun and that I didn’t notice any bad or malicious practices.

It is an amazing 2d interaction puzzle game that requires a lot of creative thinking and problem-solving skills. It has a very stunning art style, the game is set in an apocalyptic mechanical world.

Arcaea is a rhythm game that adds a unique mechanic by having two layers of grids to press. I found the music they offered to be very extensive and unique.

This game is extremely fast-paced. It is a 2d platformer-type game that requires you to be extremely precise with your button inputs as the inputs need to follow the rhythm of the song on that level. The game also has a level editor that allows players to create and share their own creations. I’ll be honest, I suck at this game, but it is very fun.

Mobile games have been using more and more malicious money making tactics instead of creating games that are fun. They target the general population who don't play games and have not yet tried good games, this causes those people to think of games as bad and money milking.

With the rise in popularity of such games, these practices are starting to seep into other platforms. We can prevent these bad tactics by not playing such games, and being aware of such practices.

Thank you so much for reading this blog. If you are interested in more of such things, feel free to contact me!