Mobile Gaming and the Race to Rock Bottom

 

There once was a time that mobile gaming was a nascent, exciting and fresh market for the gaming industry. We were leaving behind the days of Snake and horrible ports of games like Doom, and starting to see titles like Temple Run, Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies and Kingdom Rush. People were already amazed at their newish, highly sophisticated smart phones and all they could do; then suddenly fun games also appeared on these devices. The games were simple, yet many of them showed a refined sophistication that indicated that the studios behind these myriad titles weren't trying to nickel and dime the players with constant microtransactions or ceaseless updates, that try to keep you attached to their games for thousands of hours. It felt like there was some sort of mutual respect between mobile game developers and the players.

 

 High quality, premium and paid games began to appear as well, many of which were genuinely excellent titles. Adventure Time: Card Wars comes to mind. It felt like an actual video game that they could've sold on the Nintendo 3DS or the PlayStation Vita or something. Epic Games' Infinity Blade series was an enormously popular franchise of games that felt surprisingly "triple A" in its production quality. N.O.V.A. was a title that felt like a lost Halo game, both in its gameplay and production. We were starting to see what was possible on this burgeoning platform. We were so naive.

 

Image Credit: Google Play Store

 Mobile gaming in 2025 is an eldritch wasteland absolutely awash in slop of every genre. Commercials and trailers showcase games that don't remotely match what you actually end up downloading. AI generated "art" fills the image galleries for thousands of games, making it difficult to tell what the games even look like. Chinese studios rip off assets and designs from Pokémon, Digimon, Marvel, DC, Disney and countless other well known brands, but seem to face literally zero legal repercussions. The games that aren't chock full of stolen art or characters, are almost always soulless, repetitive, bland garbage heaps of swill. My mind immediately conjures the mind-numbing ads with horrible acting that I see on YouTube for the mobile game Last War (screenshot above.) Think Temple Run, but somehow even dumber and utterly nonsensical; swiping left and right to build a giant running army to shoot at enemies approaching from the other direction. Just awful.

 

Image Credit: Alex Kam's ArtStation Page

 

We have licensed trash on the mobile game platform too. The most common occurrences come in the forms of simplistic RPGs and 4x strategy games. There are multiple generic Marvel-themed RPGs available right now. There's a DC-themed "Match 3" puzzle game, and a brand new, atrocious strategy title/base building game, also DC-themed. Avatar: Realms Collide, based on the beloved Nickelodeon series, is a terrible 4x strategy game that feels like a major missed opportunity for what could've been a neat Avatar title. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Legends is yet another generic RPG, in the exact same vein as some of the Marvel dreck. It's a bummer that these RPGs aren't proper video games too, because most of these IPs don't have turn-based role-playing games with massive rosters of recruitable characters and deep fan service. But, the huge selection of characters and seeming appreciation for the fans belies the more sinister, ugly nature of how many of these games actually work.

 

Image Credit: LDPlayer

 

Many, and I mean the vast majority, of mobile games nowadays are not premium games that you can pay for and remove all of the microtransactions or ads. They are total minefields of obtrusive advertisements, garish pop-ups and opportunities to spend real money on in-game resources and currency. Take games like Marvel Strike Force or War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (what a crazy name); these games look great and can be fun, but the actual process of navigating the main menu and finding activities in the game is interrupted constantly with microtransaction pop-ups and daily mission login rewards flying across the screen. I was trying to claim some Final Fantasy Tactics characters in War of the Visions a few months back, and every time I opened the game, ten different pop-ups would take up the screen, telling me to claim x or y reward or close out of a window to actually reach the main menu so that I can play the game. Then when you do finally reach the main menu, there are a dozen different options and sub-menus to click on and it feels like a cluttered mess that is nigh impossible to parse what exactly you're supposed to be doing. On top of all of that, the vast majority of mobile games have something like a "stamina meter" that you deplete by doing missions and it recharges when you're not playing. So you're essentially punished for actually playing the game, but of course you can pay real world money to recharge the stamina meter so that you don't get blocked from being able to progress. And many of these RPG titles require grinding a stage hundreds or thousands of times to get materials and level up your characters, and each and every one of those re-attempts at a stage eats into your stamina meter as well. It's such a bizarre, horrible experience playing almost every mobile game now, because of these design decisions. It clearly is the "best practices" approach to design, because of the sheer ubiquity and prevalence of these mechanics.

 

Image Credit: Interface In Game

There are a few diamonds in the rough though, that I'd be remiss not to mention; a few games that do deserve your attention. Though the game is a decade old at this point, Hearthstone is still a wonderful, premium quality feeling collectible card game set in the Warcraft universe. There are microtransactions, but they don't feel nearly as distracting or invasive, in my opinion, and there's no stamina meter nonsense. Marvel Snap is another excellent digital card game, interestingly by the same development team that created Hearthstone. Supercell is a massively successful mobile-focused studio that has put out hit after next: Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, etc. All of these titles are fun, strategically deep games that are worth checking out. Many console and PC games have been ported to mobile platforms as well and most of those versions are completely fine. League of Legends has multiple great spin-offs on mobile, including their core title, simplified and adapted into League of Legends: Wild Rift. Not every game on the mobile platform is terrible, but I need to stress that it is probably 90% of all games on mobile are those horrible microtransaction-riddled, mindless, cluttered messes with misleading AI art and trailers, stolen assets and awful gameplay.

 

I dream of a world where our phones are just not as ubiquitous in our lives. A world where we're less connected to the digital and more connected to the physical world. But, I do love video games, and I know millions of others love video games too. I just wish mobile gamers were more intentional with the time and money that they spend. Find a game that really speaks to you, clicks with your interests and tastes and you want to support it. Don't settle for these endless, expensive black holes of your time and money that want to keep you engaged with their game for untold thousands of hours. Disengage and spend time in the real world, or play one of the few great games that I listed here. Don't feed the mindless beast. It's the only way to fight back against this stuff. Starve them of money and time and they'll have to actually try to make something inspired again.