Well, I would venture that 90% of all iOS games are pure crap, regardless of my style of game. Someone hit the nail on the head..... So many awesome old PC games are just wasting away, when we could be enjoying them, and people could be making money on them.
I'd wager that 90% of the games on most systems are pretty crappy. At least most of the ios ones only cost a couple bucks...
The difference is people buy a bunch of crap BECAUSE it is a couple of bucks; people spending significant $$$$ tend to be more selective, I think. I read reviews, watch videos, and take recomendations from folks I trust. I can't even think of a bad PC or console game that I bought in the last 5 years. Btw, I just bought Avernum and thanks for giving me a heads up on that to whoever told me.
The whole pricing argument is bull (in the nicest possible way), you can get some damn good games from Steam or PSN very cheaply or free. If you buy a deep game on iOS then it's typically comparable on PC/console. As for this debate while I feel similar to the OP I don't see it ever happening on the platform in a big way due to the nature of it. It's a casual platform primarily, sure you have some hardcore gamers here but they/we are very much the minority and I don't see that changing in a hurry even if specs permit it. Having said that, now both consoles make use of mobile devices as a secondary screen and some PC games are trying to integrate its usefulness, you could see the desire for a larger amount of more in depth games increase. But I guess time will tell.
I often read reviews/watch youtube videos etc but yeah its true, because of the price i often take a gamble and go for some games which if they were dearer i wouldnt 'risk' if it was a PC game etc. I waste a bit of money on games i may only play once or so but overall i dont get many 'turkeys'. I get your point but the more success iOS has with the likes of Baldurs Gate/ST KOTOR is great for all of us, people sitting on old IP's of classic games might think 'this could be worth doing....'. Look at X-Com as well , huge hits which sell well Also many of these old classics obviously have a big retro following, the people playing those games when they first came out years ago now have jobs or are in their 30's getting paid well. They dont bat an eyelid if an old favourites 10 dollars and they can have that game with them wherever they go etc. But i still think iOS is an amazing platform, yeah there are issues like freemium , the worst culprit are timers. I cant get my head around those, why would you want to stop people playing your games ? Specially on iOS when they can then play many 100's of games instead. But its great that XCom/Baldurs/KOTOR have done so well
It's not that easy as you might think to obtain all licenses for older game.For them, licenses are spread trough multiple companies and even worse if they have some famous actor cameo / voiceover or famous songs.Even worse, reverse engineering them to fit touch screen controls will not work for every game. We've already seen dozen of ports from nearly every older game system avaliable.Most of them don't utilize touch controls well and some of them are just plain bad optimized ports .However, turn- based ,point and click ( adventure games ) and even some of RPGs games are much more enjoyable and feel more natural to play on touch screens.
I don't really worry a whole lot about the amount of free/crappy games on the platform. Like I said before, whatever else is released in a given week, there's pretty much always one or two really good, deep games released. Its not hard at all to figure out which those games are just by following the forum threads here. Five or ten deep, "non-casual" games a month is pretty damned good afaic - especially when those will hardly set you back as much as one game on the PS3/4 or whatever. Personally, I like a good, fun old school arcade game too (which are often lumped in with the so-called "casual" games even though some of them are anything but easy) and there's pretty much always one or two of them released every week as well. There's lots and lots of quality gaming on the ios store. Hell, I think this is an absolute golden age of mobile gaming right now. There hasn't ever before been such a wealth of gaming goodness available for portable devices...and the past few years has seen some of the most inventive/creative games I've played in many years.
I agree its a nightmare for people trying to find out who owns what as over the years companies get bought up or merged with others over and over. Like i say Ultimate/Rare is now part of Microsoft, cant see their games coming to iOS now ! I'm not too sure how DotEmu do it, once they get the rights to an old arcade classic its like they have their own type of locked down emulator to run the game as it should look/run etc ? But i've got plenty of old retro games, i dont mind the old 'ported' Sega games (Golden Axe etc) but i must admit the improvements to Sonic work so well. I think most retro games would work well as they're often just a joystick and a few fire buttons. The issue is who does the conversion, just like in the 80's it depends on who the development team is. In the 80's i saw amazing arcade conversions of Commando/Bomb Jack on 8 bit computers, in the wrong hands you got some awful conversions like Jackal/Jailbreak. But yep great point about the licensing, they dont just get the license for the game but its also the voiceover/music etc. Must be a nightmare. I know for Pinball Arcade to make an update they have to sometimes go through the whole process again and contact the pinball IP owner/music/voice artist etc etc. As we say its so frustrating as i would love to play a 'legal' version of say Bomb Jack on my iphone but the only option is MAME
Also just remembered, didnt that company get the rights to lots of old Commodore Amiga games ? I'm sure they said it would be appearing late this year ? Unsure how that works but apparently theyve got the rights to a lot of games which could be great news. The Vectrex app was great (They had to buy the rights to own that i believe) and i would have loved to have seen their Colecovision but 250k wanted on kickstarter ? Seems a ridiculous amount (didnt obviously meet that target!)
This is often used but usually not quite as true as it would seem, this last month I spent more on iOS and got less than I did on my PS3. On PC I didn't get as much but I could show a similar trend there. If you would like real world examples please feel free to ask.
I think it's true for the people who are able and willing to dedicate the time needed for some of the 'deeper' ios games. I know a friend has plunged days worth of hours into infinity blade, and my cousin equally with Football Manager for ios. I rarely spend on ios games now as I know I'm likely to lose interest relatively quickly.
:idk: Buy better ios games I guess. Of course there will be exceptions often depending on what your favorite types of games are. For instance, If you are only really into Call of Duty type FPS games, ios probably isn't going to be much fun for you. All I'm saying is that there are lots of good games, some of which have pretty respectable "depth" (which I guess is based on some sort of measure of the number of hours it takes to "finish" or beat the game) and that they usually cost a lot less than the average console counterpart.
Games I buy are fine, I'm not really entering the debate on depth with my reply to you, merely the cost statement you made which is one of those things that's quite often stated but not always entirely true. If it is a true feature legit title and not just something that shares the brand name the prices are typically pretty close and can be bought for less on either platform on any given day. Give me an example of an IOS game that's a full port of a PS3 or PC title and we'll do a price comparison if you like.
Oh I'm not talking about ports specifically. I'm talking about games in general. To be honest, I'm barely interested in ports ftmp. They usually aren't great. Still, I'm pretty sure the price for a port of a PC or Console version of a game is usually considerably less on the ios than the original game was. On top of that, if you wait a few weeks you can often get them for half off when they go on sale. Not many ios games are priced higher than $9.99 at release. Just over the past couple of days, X-Com has gone on sale, World of Goo went free... What I'm saying is that for the $50-$60 you might spend on a new console game, you can get yourself 5 or 10 ios games (or 20, 30? lol)and if you do a bit of research, those will likely be some pretty good games that will easily give you at least as many hours of enjoyment as the one console game - probably more.
Okay we'll go with those titles you mentioned, XCOM is free on PSN+ With various other games that cover PS3, PS4 and PS VITA which costs less than $5 USD a month, it was also free with 4 other games with Bioshock Infinite at $30 USD new on release and is often on sale for $9.99 USD. World of Goo has been in the Humble Bundle sale with at least 5 other titles as a pay what you want and goes on sale regularly.
