Developed by Yotta Games, The Grand Mafia is just one of the roughly 10 billion crime strategy games cluttering up the Google Play Store. Most are cheaply-made freemium shovelware. And unfortunately, The Grand Mafia is not much different.
Mobile gaming is soaring, and isn't showing any signs of backing down.
Because everyone has a phone and they do have some half decent games and a lot of them are free, with MTs of course.
Basically came here to say this, convenience and free. Not really a sign of anything besides more people getting into gaming in general especially during the covid shutdowns
Barrier of entry. Everyone has a phone and most games are either very cheap or F2P.
Availability and psycologicaly manipulated addiction. There have been videos online for years from gaming monetization conferences giving out a road map to addicting people. It isn't like it's a big secret. Too bad Devs don't care to defend us like they defended themselves over Unity trying a microtransaction whammy.
Brain, you actually make a good point. We were all over that unity situation, but don't get shown the same love
I disagree. It might not have hit the mainstream news cycle as much as the recent controversy, but we already were on a rodeo with Unity last year when they aquired ironsource with the specific goal to push monitization on developers as a central design focus early on in production.
Many developers weren't interested in prioritizing a maximization of profit at the cost of their creative goals. Apparently John Riccitiello (Unity CEO) couldn't grasp why so many devs weren't willing to turn their games into glorified virtual casinos, calling them "fucking idiots" in the process.
Edit: If you've missed the whole ordeal this video by Bellular does a decent job at summarizing it: https://youtu.be/Rg6FbN_BqM...
Later on Riccitiello apologized and promised to do better, but we know how that turned out.
If you want to split hairs you could argue that those devs weren't defending gamers, but their self-interest for creative freedom, but in the same way you could probably argue that most gamers wouldn't have defended developers in the recent plans of Unity to change their business model, if they didn't think it would have an impact on the games they would be playing.
The point is, when the interest of gamers and developers are aligned, the distinction of self-interest vs. altruism becomes somewhat meaningless. If you want to draw a line, draw it between people who care about the medium as an artform and the suits who only care about it as a means of extracting money.
Granted there are developers on both sides of that line, but the reason many people even decided to become game developers is because they're passionate about video games and the last thing they'd want to see is the degeneration of that medium.
It's been known for years south park even made fun of the concept of f2p but no one has a solution.
I've always hated mobile games they all feel like they are designed to appeal to kids the predatory tactics are shocking to see just how extortionary they are.
Back in the 90s I'd never imagine buying a PS1 or N64 game and being told that's great but you have to pay 500 dollars to see how this season ends.
I think if kids saw the amount of content we actually had in full release games the addiction to mobile games would lessen because it's a real problem
DC: Dark Legion has been announced for 2024 by FunPlus and Warner Bros.Interactive. It looks to deliver an immersive multiplayer experience.
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