Really too bad, but I’m not surprised. I know losing affiliate money many years ago hurt bad.
But the truth is I don’t care much anymore. I loved TA because they helped me find fun games. And while I’ve found a few from them in the last few years like Peglin most of their coverage is unsurprisingly what most of the industry makes: pay to win with smurfberries advertising laden crap.
I strongly believe the iOS gaming scene died the day IAPs came out.
There is the incredibly rare indie game that you can pay for now, and Apple Arcade. While I enjoy that most of the good games I’ve played before (a plus on the name = existed before). Those that I haven’t played or are new often were obviously designed for IAPs and aren’t that fun when they’re removed.
And I know devs seem to hate it, and I’m not surprised. But it’s the only option I’ve got left.
I’ll miss you, Touch Arcade. You long outlasted the era of greatness for the platform you covered. Thanks for making it as long as you did. One more sign we can’t have nice things because ruthless unnecessarily exploitive capitalism.
in some ways, this is on consumer choice as well. I'm sure people like you were more console oriented, but the MTX era meant they could appeal to a casual audience who would slowly drop money here and there, for games that are simpler to iterate on compared to something like Infinity Blade or Chaos Rings. Or watch ads in-between their 30-60 second level-based games.
Or in the opposite way, the ruthless Korean MMO model matched very well in mobile and you have that same hyper-hardcore audience dropping thousands for a new character in a gacha. You don't need 99% of that console audience paying $10 when that whale is spending $100k/month, consistently.
So it makes sense that the console players, no longer appealed to, left while the newer models found other audiences.
I understand having other business models. I personally hate ads, but I’m also happy to buy a game and then pay to remove the ads. And I’m willing to pay a lot more than the $1 that most people seem to think is overpriced.
I also understand having some in app purchases.
My gripe is a few games took a really exploitive route with in app purchases. Having extremely aggressive timers and tons of currencies. And they CLEANED UP. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it’s mostly people who pay nothing, children being tricked into paying, and a small number of people who spend an insane amount of money. The whales.
But whatever the mix it made money so every game publisher started racing to turn out identical skinner boxes.
This had two effects. First, that’s what the publishers were interested in so it’s probably a lot harder to get anything else through. Second, because those games are “free“ it changed pricing expectations that games and other apps should be “free“.
So if you wanted to make a good game and sell it at even a really low price, people screamed at you. How DARE you charge $1.99.
By driving down the expected price we ended up at a point where the only things that can make any money at all or either crammed with ads that get shown to you constantly or designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.
Games only have to be good enough to keep people looking at the ads or paying for another set of Smurfberries.
Worst of all even games that were already made and were absolute classics have been ruined. Because they either get updates to add those features (Flight Control) or sequels to change the game to be more like one of those that makes a lot of money (Plants be Zombies 2, Trism 2).
Yeah, I think we are in full agreement. I usually prefer to try and offset downer news like this with some attempt at a solution. But I know those solutions won't come from anything currently in the scene; not from Apple/Google, not from whales, not from the devs. We basically need a storefront focused on premium games so we at least forge a new audience. A "Steam" of mobile. We can't drill through the diamonds but we can drill an alternative path, in theory.
I'm very slowly working on a PC game but I always fancied the idea of also doing a mobile port. It'd be a fun challenge and I know a phone can be more accessible for many. Due to the factors you highlighted I know that's a fool errand in the current state of mobile. Even if I made it a truly free game I wouldn't get many views (let alone downloads), especially compared to all the dopamine inducing hyoercausla games or high budget services. The native stores are just hyper black holes for people like me. So this "mobile Steam" would really help motivate people like me.
But the truth is I don’t care much anymore. I loved TA because they helped me find fun games. And while I’ve found a few from them in the last few years like Peglin most of their coverage is unsurprisingly what most of the industry makes: pay to win with smurfberries advertising laden crap.
I strongly believe the iOS gaming scene died the day IAPs came out.
There is the incredibly rare indie game that you can pay for now, and Apple Arcade. While I enjoy that most of the good games I’ve played before (a plus on the name = existed before). Those that I haven’t played or are new often were obviously designed for IAPs and aren’t that fun when they’re removed.
And I know devs seem to hate it, and I’m not surprised. But it’s the only option I’ve got left.
I’ll miss you, Touch Arcade. You long outlasted the era of greatness for the platform you covered. Thanks for making it as long as you did. One more sign we can’t have nice things because ruthless unnecessarily exploitive capitalism.