Old gamers often misunderstand the quality of mobile games.
I realized this a couple of weeks ago when I asked my 12-year-old daughter whether she wanted to bring her Nintendo Switch or her Android tablet on our two-week vacation. She chose the tablet.
Why? Because her Android has Genshin Impact, Fortnite, Roblox, Candy Crush, Wuthering Waves, and Sky: Children of Light. She simply prefers those over her Switch library — which is decent but doesn’t compare to what she’s got on the tablet.
Adults tend to dismiss mobile gaming by saying things like, “There’s no 1:1 equivalent to Super Mario Odyssey, Tears of the Kingdom, or Cyberpunk 2077 on mobile.”
Fine. My daughter has access to all those games. Our family owns over 8,000 games across PC and consoles. She can play Super Mario Odyssey any time she wants, but she doesn’t. She’d rather play Genshin Impact.
And she’s not alone. Most of her friends are on their tablets or phones. It makes sense — gaming is as much about socializing as playing, and iOS and Android dominate for a reason.
Sure, we can scoff and say, “Kids these days don’t recognize a good game when it hits them in the face.”
But I remember feeling that way about Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. They’re still thriving today, with now-grown adults still playing.
I also think back to my own childhood. My mom hated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yet, I snuck a TMNT Game Boy game into the house and played it behind her back. TMNT never disappeared — it’s still around.
With the original Switch’s price rising (at least here in Canada), it just makes sense to consider Android tablets — especially for kids. Sure, you can’t play Black Myth: Wukong on Android, but that’s why I have PCs ready for that. Kids? They just want to have fun and connect with friends.
Lemmy isn't a big place. People who populate gaming threads are an even smaller fraction of the userbase. So to see the same handful of opinions, repeated again and again, upvoted ad infinitum -- that's a pretty good sample size.
I deliberately posted this thread as a contrarian take. And what do you know, it proved to be contrarian.
I didn't say anything outrageous or mean-spirited. Everything has been quite reasonable. But judging by the responses -- you all think every mobile game is a gacha game -- I can safely say few of you have nearly as much experience with games as you believe you do.
By the way, this is why I generally put little stock into self-declared "gamers" opinions. Most of you are obsessed with playing things in a prescribed manner, in a particular way, regarding a specific canon. And you generally adhere to the same bland culture with little appreciation for diversity.
The hypocrisy of claiming that you can't judge any game without physically playing it yourself, then turning around and judging thousands of people you've never interacted with based on a couple interactions, is absolutely staggering.
Consider giving human beings the same benefit of the doubt that you give to software.
Ha! A “few” interactions…
And yet you jumped all over people claiming to have played enough games to be able to recognize crap when they see it. Again, you're dismissing real people while standing up for what exactly? Defending corporate garbage?
I enjoy the occasional mobile game too, I don't have an issue with your general opinion. But you certainly aren't convincing anyone with the childish attitude and ridiculous reasoning.
Dismissing? No.
Recognizing groupthink with the same tired talking points -- with zero research or citations to back it up? Yeah, I call it out when I see it.
The funny thing is I've never defended "corporate garbage". I've said there's hundreds of thousands of games on mobile, many which you can buy outright -- no microtransactions. There's more premium, fully paid mobile titles than on NES, SNES, N64, and GC combined.
I repeat, you don't have to play a gacha game. You can enjoy the many premium titles on iOS and Android if you so like.
But everyone here ignores that very real fact in favour of jumping on the groupthink bandwagon.
And yes, I know I'm convincing few people here because they're all too busy socially signalling they are in the Lemmy in-group to actually consider anything diverging. Which is fine. I'm saying it out loud anyway to disrupt the echo chamber.
Well, there are literally people here who insist all mobile games are gacha. When I provide statistics that show otherwise, rather than changing your views, the reactions here are that I'm a secret shill peddling for a statistics company.
That's the calibre of conversation I'm dealing with in this thread. And you're no different.