If you have used the internet at any point of time in the last decade, chances are that you’ve already been introduced to the concept of “video games”. Video games are games that a person can play through a computer, like a PC, game console, or even some calculators. These games have huge player bases that share gaming experiences and ideas on platforms like Reddit, effectively creating a massive online community that has everything from streamers and YouTubers to tournaments and huge across-the-globe battles hosted by bored game devs.

While most video games are on PCs or consoles that can sustain long periods of gameplay, there are a group of games that take a completely different approach. Instead of huge, complex games that take years to master, these games focus on casual players, people that sneak in a few minutes of gaming every day during a lunch break or a bus ride, simple enough to be run on a small hand-held device that can fit into your pocket.

In the beginning, mobile games were introduced to the world in the form of simple arcade games like Tetris, Snake, and Space Invaders and marketed as handheld arcades, but after the launch and huge success of Angry Birds in 2009, people began seeing the potential that mobile games had. These mobile games were of a completely new branch of gaming, one that would grow and develop into something very different from its console and PC cousins. These games have come a long way to become what we know as video games now.

In the decade that followed, many well known mobile games, like Plants vs. Zombies, Candy Crush, and Pokemon Go would be released and met with great success. However, just a decade after the very successful launch of Angry Birds, mobile games have become something horrible, something that serious gamers would scorn and laugh at, and it all began because of how easy it is to market and gain profit from mobile games.

Bad games overrunning the app stores

Originally, when the App Store and Play Store were released, most games took lots of time to develop and focused on player enjoyment, but after a few years, the App Store and Play store was overrun by bad games and crappy rip-offs.

Why are they bad?

With an app-making program like App Inventor, a middle school student with some technical knowledge could make a game similar to Angry Birds and publish it in less than a week.

Now that making an app takes about two days of work for a professional app developer, struggling game companies like VOODOO have started to take a new approach to game-making. Instead of focusing lots of time on one project, they roll out dozens of apps at once, slap their ads on apps like Instagram, where bored teenagers are known to frequent, and hope that one or two might get a short burst of fame, then they bombard the player with dozens of in-game ads (usually of their other games) for two minutes of gameplay and before they force players to buy a premium mode, which removes the ads.

This approach to game-making earns a company a lot more money in a short amount of time, more money than a well-thought-out and structured game. The problem is, this system creates dozens of garbage games every month, flooding the app stores and making it hard for people to find good games.

Mobile game ads

There has also been a considerable amount of deceptive ads that don’t show real gameplay. One infamous developer that does this is Playrix with the Homescape and Gardenscape ads. Thankfully, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned these misleading ads in a ruling. However, these are not the only type of misleading ad being used by lazy game developers, and other more subtle ways of deception are yet to be taken down by officials.

While all this publicity might not be bad for the game developers, they give people trying out mobile games a bad taste in their mouth and frustrate players. These ads also scare off old players because they get laughed at from playing a game that employs these deceptive tactics.

There are good games, they are just hard to find

While most games you see on the app store are most likely bad, there are still a few good ones in the mix, and with a little bit of effort, you can easily tell the good from the bad.

One of the tricks I have found useful in looking for good video games is to check if it was published by a well-known game developer or in collaboration with one, like Tencent. Game developers that also have counterparts on other platforms, like Blizzard, Nintendo, and EA tend to be more reliable.

Another way to find good games is through going online and searching for the genre you want. For example, searching “best RPG fantasy games mobile” would lead me to hundreds of articles and lists written by people that have played millions of games, sparing you from having to find what you like by trial and error. Websites like IGN, Gamespot, and IGDB offer helpful advice and articles about video games, though not necessary about mobile games.

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Mobile games are a branch of gaming that has always been slightly different from other games, but this genre has taken a bad turn recently. More and more bad games are flooding the market, made by video game companies focused on profit instead of player enjoyment. That combined with the deceptive ads used to get more publicity for their games, has caused fans to lose respect for mobile games.

There are obviously still some good games out there, and if enough people made it clear that they don’t like bad games, we can get the mobile game market back on track and back to its former glory.