It’s true!! The mobile game market is definitely a capitalist dystopia, like, “by mass”, I guess… It became infeasible to make money off of a mobile game by giving it a one-time non-free price tag. For whatever reason, I guess just because so many free games exist, people have largely decided that they can’t be asked to pay money for games on their phones.
Remember how furious people were when Super Mario Run, a full-length video game with plenty of levels and different characters and modes, cost a mere 10 dollars, with the first world or so acting as a free demo? They were mad because mobile games aren’t “supposed” to cost that much, even though it’s basically nothing!
Anyways that was a bit of a tangent, uuuhh, my point is that despite the “free but with ads or pay-to-win-if-not-pay-to-play” trend, the medium of mobile games isn’t inherently bad, and this is exemplified by games that either say “fuck it, I’m gonna be a Normal-Ass Game even if it doesn’t make much money, give me 2.99”, or employ other creative means to resist the trend.
My favorite example of the latter, and honestly the reason I’m even writing this, is the mobile port of everyone’s favorite(?) trendsetter, Vampire Survivors. I really like Vampire Survivors, and I really really like what it does in its mobile port. First of all, the game is free, and has some DLCs that each cost like… a dollar I think? They’re good DLCs but the game has plenty of content without them. Anyways, there’s also a system when you die where if you agree to watch an ad you can be revived. It’s totally optional and you can just not use it and never see a single ad in your entire Vampire-Surviving experience. Pretty good, right?
… Just kidding, it’s not done, it gets better. This feature, which is already completely optional… can be turned off in the settings. You can set the game to just never show you that button. This single fact alone speaks volumes about the developers’ attitude towards what they’re trying to do with their game. There is no reason to include this option that benefits the developers in any way. I guess, if you want to get absurdly cynical and paranoid about it, you could look at it like they’re wringing their hands and going “muahahaha we’ll pretend to be nice so people trust us”, but that’s, like, no, lmao. They genuinely just put it there, not to make money, but because it’s more convenient for players who don’t want to look at ads.
Anyways there’s other good mobile games, many of which are admittedly ports (don’t gotta follow shitty trends to make money if you also make money off of non-mobile markets, which is also something Vampire Survivors has going for it). Super Hexagon, Boson X, Mini Motorways… probably Slay the Spire but I haven’t played the mobile port yet (it just feels like it’d kinda have to work)… and then other hidden gems like Bean Dreams (oh my god play Bean Dreams)!
seconding the mini metro/mini motorways specifically (i play those the most of all), and super hexagon, and boson x, there was a cute cookie-clicker-like called spaceplan that i loved, hell, Poly Bridge and Project Highrise (kinda like simtower?) have mobile versions, as does stardew valley
These are pretty popular in handheld emulation circles, competing of course with Linux based handhelds, but I think a huge part of their draw is actually being able to play all the above android ports and games as well! I've spent a lot of bus rides playing Dicey Dungeons while listening to Spotify via the public wifi.
I have a Retroid Pocket 2+ and it runs great. I know the above is talking about playing on a phone specifically but I really enjoy the peace of mind I get from not running down my phone's battery just to kill a few hours. There's also the fact that it's just nice to have traditional non-screen input devices, though the devices also come with touch screens.
I'm really dieing for someone to put out a killer app for android. I'd love to do scannerz or something like that on my phone. Gimme a little RPG that I can use NFC to trade my little guys between phones in the checkout lanes. We're all lugging around a digivice these days but where's the games to reflect that?