Why Does Everyone Hate Mobile Games?

“If you were my son, I’d recommend you don’t get into mobile”.

I got this advice from a senior exec at SEGA in 2009. Back then, mobile was considered the poo diving of the games industry: yes, it was well paid, but you were still swimming in shit. This unsolicited advisor never offered me a “real job”, so I ignored his warning and pencil-dived, mouth agape, into that golden effluvia.

Me making mobile games, circa 2009.

My career has since seen me write “the book” on F2P mobile game design. I lead Angry Birds 2, one the most iconic mobile tiles ever, topping 3 million players on the daily during my tenure. And hardly a moment has passed where I don’t think back on those words. Were they well meaning? Was it snobbery? Most importantly, were they correct?

For the last few years I’ve created some distance from mobile by making “proper games” for the PC Master Race. It’s given me the time to think, reflect and answer all sorts of questions and now I’m ready to take on the billion dollar biggie: why does everyone hate mobile games?

A Brief History of Shit

It’s worth giving some context to that opening quote. In 2009 mobile games were really just coming out of being absolutely horrible. To get a game on your regular rubber-keyed phone you had to lock in to an entertainment subscription you could only escape via a chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. 16 years later and I’m still paying £3.99 for a Crazy Frog ringtone. The games you did eventually get were, frankly, dog dirt. Awkward, sloppy ports of popular PC and console games squeezed down beyond the point of recognition.

Nokia’s N-Gage represented a pretty good attempt at improving matters. However, it looked like a taco, required you to remove the battery to change a game and you had to talk into it sideways (honestly). By 2009 it had been discontinued to a soundtrack of widespread ridicule. Mobile games were smothered in the thick stench of failure.

The only thing worse than mobile games in the early 2000s were memes. People thought this was funny. There still is a meticulous archive of N-Gage bants someone deems worthy of the annual hosting costs.

Fortunately, the first good iPhone (the 3G) and App Store had both launched in the summer of 2008 and that is when things began to change in terms of quality. This was the transition away from the smeary monochrome displays of so-called “feature phones” to large, full colour, responsive touch screens we subsequently dubbed “smartphones”. Loads of super innovative games rushed in and it all felt very exciting.

In late 2009 Apple announced in-app purchases, the enabler of F2P. This was a monumental moment in games history. Mobile became the wet market of the global F2P pandemic, inextricably linking the platform with the business model.

It’s hard to overstate how this seismic shift of mobile and F2P propelled games from a niche hobby to something that was for everyone, everywhere. People were playing in schools, on busses and even in actual fucking space. A million players stopped being cool. You know what became cool? A billion players. It felt like we were in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime cultural moment. We had created the farthest and widest reaching entertainment in the history of the world galaxy. Surely, I felt, now mobile games have gained the respect of the wider games industry?

Nope.

The wider games industry hated (or more often ignored) mobile games then, and still do now. Getting critical or peer recognition for a mobile game is like getting a Michelin star for a Happy Meal made of ricin. Regardless of how good a mobile game is, it’s still the tallest dwarf to “real games” people. All I want is to make games that are hugely popular, incredibly profitable and critically acclaimed. But the very platform, and its association with cheap, snacky and financially ensnaring design seems to hold it back, regardless of quality. I’m Vin Diesel begging the academy for a Best Picture Oscar.

But now that the game industry is in some sort of slow motion implosion, the latent disdain for mobile games seems to be once again boiling over. Some are claiming that mobile games, and what they represent, are the iceberg that breached our hull. That feeeeels nice. But are those people right?

The Identity Theory

I have a theory about why much of the industry is so resistant to mobile and anything that moves too far away from more traditional games, And I think it helps explain much of the ‘culture wars’ we’ve seen inside the industry over the last decade.

There are few people who work in games by accident. We’re all here because at some point we fell in love with what games were. As we reached maturity, and the crushing reality of late stage capitalism locked us into the notion of a career, making games became an out. “Perhaps one day I could be the guy who finally made Sonic kiss a real girl?” we collectively thought.

It’s like Sonic Team could read my mind. Or my shadowbanned Tumblr.

We are an army of middle class men. Men who grew up in Western traditional families where there was the disposable income and thus security, space and leisure time for traditional videogames to exist in. We were the minority who had the privilege to buy the expensive, near annual hardware required for games, and then shell out hundreds of dollars for monthly hot releases.

From my time in the industry, I know the chances are that the above paragraph roughly describes you. So, this next bit is going to feel like a character assassination (spoilers: it is and that will make me as popular as an Atari Jaguar port of Concord drenched in Prime). But stick with me, I promise I’m going to validate you entirely by hating on mobile games later.

Before mobile, the collective traditional games industry saw no problem with videogames — they paid their money and got to live their fantasies. We became Premier League soccer stars, drove F1 cars, reenacted wars and efficiently and brutally murdered sex workers. “Oh this is lovely, let’s do more of the same” everyone thought.

Then, seemingly overnight, these new fangled mobile games, about farming, shooting birds at pigs and matching candies for a monicaled ginger pin doll sprang up. These were games made by some Valley suits and were aimed at completely different players — like women, and poor people in foreign countries.

These “games” exploded so rapidly that they looked to subsume everything, everywhere. There were serious discussions about mobile phones replacing games consoles — and so began the great mobile F2P culture war. Sides built up for, but largely against, this wave. It was tiring and stupid and reactionary from everyone involved as people argued about the ethics and values of mobile and F2P games ad nauseum on Twitter, with little concern for fact or rationale or levity.

But it always puzzled me why anyone cared so much. For many game makers, mobile games seemed like an attack on their very identity. The thing that they loved and held so dear seemed on the precipice. Soon, these shit games might replace their good games. And worse still, they might even have to make the ghastly things.

Despite a collective tutting and fist-waving, mobile gaming was an unstoppable juggernaut. Very little evidence emerged that there was widespread harm from F2P and the biz model started to migrate over to PC and then console. Hits like Hearthstone and Fortnite borrowed much of the mobile F2P playbook, including liveops and data-driven design, but they sort of looked like old fashioned games on old fashioned platforms by old fashioned devs, so they got a pass. Those games grew and grew, and more joined.

Soon enough, the lines all started to blur between mobile and F2P with traditional videogames. Games travelled freely between platforms, new monetisation emerged that hybridised paid, F2P and subscription. All the shit-talking faded into the background and we (mostly) all got on with making games.

But underlying all the bullshit, the way mobile games were being made slowly seeped, like a toxic green ooze that would mutate pubescent turtles. It got into the water supply of the greater game making industry. And this poisoned us all with the twin fatal diseases of logic and rationality.

Yes, Mobile Games Suck

The thing that mobile games and F2P became synonymous with is a more scientific approach to making games. Data, user testing, pop psychology, management science, economic planning. If you hear mobile product managers talking about games, as an outsider, it feels like listening to a Furby on low battery. Arr-poo-poos and mauwhs. They seem to see games not as a human expression, but as a complex mechanism for financial extraction. Everything is a business case. To the bleeding heart game maker this is understandably irksome.

But it is logical to deconstruct games, rationalise out the bits that work and apply them in the game you’re working on. And you cannot argue with logic. Anyone sitting in any board room from here to Uranus would nod approvingly at such a thoughtful approach. Yes, yes, understand what has worked and do more of that, please. And indeed it did work. At least for a while.

The problem is that over the years the design patterns in mobile games have become so repetitive and aggressive, you can sniff them from the moment you step into a tutorial. Last week I was playing Supercell’s new joint mo.co, and was shown a weapons rollout inside five minutes. The scent of exponential gacha-fusion grind hit me like a fart in a lift.

What drew me to mobile was the intellectual excitement of this new frontier in game creation. Concepts like using time and location as a central conceit for a game design were entirely novel 15 years ago. Today, they’ve been so fully explored and patterned-out to serve monetisation that the very sight of a timer is an instant trigger. And, as Mr Mobile F2P, I hate that that is true.

In the race to optimisation we seem to have overlooked the importance of novelty and creativity in games. I once recall a game that was floating around in Rovio while I was there, called Travel Match Club. The concept was born from a survey of match 3 players, who had ranked travel and pets as their favourite things. So, the team built a game about a bunch of pets travelling around the world. I thought it was a smart approach, but the game was an abject failure. There was little you could point to that was wrong with the game, it was slick and competently made by a great team, but it lacked charm. It somehow felt cynical and soulless.

Look at his hat! This pug is in Paris! It’s in France. A city you might want to travel to. Do you love pets? Let us know in the comments! ❤ Bonjour ma vie! @Paris @France. #travel #pets #paris #france #jetaime

In the years I have spent consulting on mobile games at Department of Play, I have seen a common dilemma play out over and over. A team would come to us with an underperforming game. We’d jump on a call and some very smart people would tell me their problems. They knew their data impeccably, but nothing they were doing was moving the needle. What the data would never tell them is that their game had no sense of itself (we politely called this “lack of product vision”) and the team were feeding vitamins to a rotting corpse. To save the game they didn’t need economy tweaks or UX improvements, but to slash it up with a chainsaw and frankenstein it from the pieces.

This was rarely welcomed advice because these teams had been promised the panacea of data, logic and rationality. Change a button colour and, voilà, a billion dollars.

What this data-driven culture, honed in mobile gaming, indicates is that teams become so quick to optimise, they forget that their primary goal is to entertain. Only once a game delights at a fundamental human-level do they have the right to optimise it.

Nobody wants to admit that running a games business is ultimately betting at a roulette wheel. So, the allure of rational game making leached out from mobile into traditional platforms. Veteran designers, who relied on instinct they couldn’t really convey, got put under slick product managers with MBAs, PowerPoints and Patagonia gilets to speak beans to the counters.

The problem with a rational, logical approach to game making is that people aren’t rational or logical. As Rory Sutherland says, people are “psycho-logical”. Meaning that they often behave in ways which defy traditional, academic reasoning. For some reason, we like to eat Tide Pods and buy pictures of celebrity feet.

Our brains sit in a swirling maelstrom of ideas we call culture, it’s a constantly shifting and unpredictable place. What pleases some brains today will displease them tomorrow. Deconstructions are digging up inherently used ideas, like a game design scrap yard. Yes we may squeeze a few more miles out of a mechanic, but no single KPI is ever going to show how it bores someone into fucking off amd not coming back. Data is only a tiny window into performance of the players who stick — we can never see the rest. Unfortunately, the best we have for the rest is instinct and creativity and over the years those words have become increasingly unwanted inside game making.

A few months ago mobile gaming’s Thanos (and CEO of Supercell), Ilkka Paananen said:

“The industry needs to look itself in the mirror. Why haven’t we been able to create new innovative game experiences for players? It’s part of our responsibility to take more risk…”

This billionaire is right. The games which have ultimately endured are universally risky and weird. Italian plumbers turning into Japanese raccoon dogs and zipping around inside giant green pipes. Shooting nail guns into hell demons on mars. Children pit fighting indentured racist sci-fi animals for the validation of stadiums packed with adults jeering for cruelty. These games speak to us in ways that we cannot explain, at some instinctive level. They are novel and inventive. They broke molds and pushed boundaries. They would die under a modern, corporate validation-gated greenlight process because nobody could prove they were a good idea.

So it feels right, in this time of creative and commercial crisis, to behead the C3-POs and let the R2-D2s run riot with a flamethrower, just to see what will happen. But is it really that easy?

Balance and Bird Shit

So far I’ve outlined three reasons why people hate mobile gaming. Firstly, historically they were unspeakably shite. This one is valid, no notes. Secondly, for some people mobile games attack their beliefs of what games should be and it feels personal. It’s irrational and that’s what people are. If this is you, hate away. It’s the same way I feel about U2. Like, fuck Bono and all his incredible charity work. I don’t like his sunglasses.

This fucking guy.

The third is a biggie though: how mobile games are made, and how that has infected the wider industry. It has put us into a rut of repetition, killing off creativity and innovation, leaving games hollow and soulless.

…Or has it? The thing that is annoying in all of this is that there is a fine balance. Making successful games is hard and it is as much luck as it is skill — that is why very few game makers have multiple hits under their belts.

There are sparks of inspiration and then lots of figuring out how to make that work and changing and testing and abandoning and restarting. What the mobile-way for product managed game making promised was finding insight to turbocharge and laser focus that process.

We better know patterns of player behavior, we can benchmark what ‘good’ is between games, we balance and tune more accurately and quicker than ever before. Data does this. But the problems start when we use data to solve problems we can only intuit or, worse still, we get so caught up in the data that we miss the huge glaring problems. Like that the gamepay sucks.

This balance of the left and right brain is what makes great games. True wisdom in games is knowing when to do rational, empirical-based thinking, and when to dig into the reaches of our subconscious, mix stuff around and see what pops up and feels right. I believe we’ve shifted too far to the rational and the need to justify ourselves. And, yes, mobile is to blame.

Now, to finish, please indulge me in a self aggrandising story.

When founding Village Studio, I mocked up a logo. A roadsign with a humble white bird shit dapple. Me and the founders got hung up on this turd and what it said about us and how we should test it. After loads of hand wringing and discussion, I made the call — it stands.

It’s just a tiny turd.

As we pitched investors, sometimes we’d get “is that a bird shit?” Some chuckled, some went “oh”, some didn’t care or it didn’t register. There is no way we could ever reliably test the bird shit. But it was interesting. It made me happy, because my inner child finds poo funny.

So, “do the bird shit” became a company culture pillar. It represents doing things that are trivial, incidental and creatively brave, even when you can’t justify them. We had all come from mobile, so we needed that nudge to be less rational and feel confident to go off-piste. A simple reminder to entertain first and that for that there is no algorithm.

We need more bird shits. As AI looks set to eat more and more of the routine, rational parts of making games, what will stand us apart from slop is the uniquely human, irrational, weird and trivial-ness of us. Great games are built on mythical rare ideas that no machine or process could ever divine, followed by a bunch of logical, methodical work. We need that bravery to say “I don’t know, but let’s do it anyway.”