Everyone knows them: mobile game genres.

Genres like your Candy Crush-like Bejeweled clones, Flappy Birds, Clash of Clans, Tiny Towers and many more practically only exist in the mobile game space. There are even game genres that don’t exist in practice at all, and only serve for fake gameplay ads.

Interestingly enough, virtually all of these are exclusive to predatory, microtransaction- and tracker-ridden mobile schemes for casual vulnerable players: non-tech-savvy and/or young people.

There is almost no competition in those genres for non-predatory games.

The question is: are these genres inherently predatory and money focused, or can they be saved and libre-fied? It would maybe be an effective way of bringing people who are being exploited right now to the libre side by supplying an obviously better product. Only requirement is presenting them in a similar way, not with the typical FOSS clunkiness like Minetest.

  • aks@lemmy.ml
    8·
    3 years ago

    Unfortunately, app stores tend to promote only apps/games that make bank. So free stuff usually gets trampled over.

    One way to break this would be having appstore like f-droid, but only for games. Not necessarily libre, but non-predatory mobile games. I dont mind paying 2e for proprietary game if it doesnt try to continue eating my wallet, ive bought games like that in past.

    To actually make the appstore pop off, we need a publisher that cares about this sort of stuff and can share that store around. Usually marketing is where these plans fall… since without marketing, nobody will know.

    I would rather avoid google/apple appstores because theyre already oversaturated and basically uncurated, and if your game is libre, someone will clone it and make it worse, but it will show up better because of the money algos.

    • plu@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      3 years ago

      I think pushing them to F-Droid is a good idea regardless.

      I’d be interested in developing very presentation-first casual games similar to Candy Crush.

      • aks@lemmy.ml
        2·
        3 years ago

        I like F-Droid a lot, but not everyone wants to make full libre game, well not every title at least. Gamedevs need to eat too, despite what the treatment of AAA industry says… :D

      • americanwaste@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        I think the only issue is this will need to be in-app payments, I don’t think f-droid supports paying for an app outright at the moment. Some developers might not want to make their own payment or software key infrastructure, something the app store solves

        • plu@lemmy.mlOP
          1·
          3 years ago

          Or they could just redirect to already widely used services like Patreon, ko-fi, Monero, or a PayPal address. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than other apps. :)

  • PP44@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    I think many of the specificity we know and don’t love from mobile game is more about the economic/political environment they grew up in. Mobile itself is just a platform, with some specificit yes, but that in no way make it more difficult to make great games. The example that come to my mind is Pokemon. I love playing it on an emulator on my phone, even if it was not designed for it. Imagine a classic JRPG that was conceived with the same philosophy than any console, but with an interface build for a small touchscreen. That would be awesome !

  • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
    0·
    3 years ago

    Huniepop is pretty good, albeit lewd. I’d love them to do a version without big anime tiddies so I can play on my work laptop in my lunch break.