Written by Jacob Butler

Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

When most people think about video games, they tend to forget about mobile games despite how insanely popular they've become. Games like Candy Crush and Subway Surfers boast hundreds of millions of players, and they're just a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of mobile games that have been downloaded in the past couple of years.

Now, this on its own isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's nice that the market for video games has continued to grow at a healthy rate, allowing certain great games, like Minecraft and Slay the Spire, to garner a significantly larger player base thanks to their mobile versions.

Unfortunately, not every mobile game is like Minecraft. For every well-designed and carefully crafted mobile game, there are hundreds of cheap, manipulative, and unfairly designed cash-grab games meant to exploit players for every last cent they can. What's worse, they're extremely good at it. One State of Mobile 2024 report shows that $171 billion was spent on mobile games last year alone, and it's important to understand how these games make that kind of money in order to help people protect themselves and their wallets from the many parasitic and manipulative mobile games.

The first way these games manipulate players is through their advertising. Almost all of them make their money through in-app purchases, so they need to draw in as many players as possible to guarantee they find a few who are more susceptible to spending money on the game. These games cast as wide a net as possible through extensive ad campaigns that spread to all corners of the internet. Ads for Raid: Shadow Legends, Homescapes, Top Heroes, and Hero Wars: Alliance are all over YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and more often than not, these ads are deliberately deceptive. In fact, in 2020, the company behind Homescapes and Gardenskapes had to take their ads down for misleading ads that failed to properly represent their gameplay. These companies release ads with fake gameplay or gameplay that only appears in certain small sections of the game in order to make their games look far more appealing than they would otherwise.

This deceptive marketing is bad on its own, but it begs the question, why do they have to misrepresent gameplay to make players interested? The answer is simple: these games have terrible gameplay. Almost all of these successful mobile games have several awful mechanics that cause the game to be more annoying to play than anything. One popular style of mobile game, for example, is a horde-battle where the player has to fight waves upon waves of enemies until they either beat the level or die and restart. Most games of this genre have to carefully balance how difficult they make any individual wave, as they want to challenge players while keeping the game from being impossible to beat, but in a lot of these mobile games, they completely disregard any sense of balance, sending in so many enemies that it is impossible to beat the game the first few times you play it. Why? In these games, there is a shop where you can purchase armour, weapons, and characters, which allows you the chance to play a fair game. Games like these make spending money an important part of engaging with the game, locking most of the fun that the game can offer behind a paywall.

That's not the only way one of these games can make money. The far more common option is to keep the game behind an energy system. These systems work by having players spend energy to engage in certain in-game actions, usually to attempt to play through one of the game's levels. Then, when the energy is spent, players will have to wait a set amount of time before it recovers or pay a set amount of money to regenerate their energy early. This system works by making people more and more addicted to the game itself while constantly providing added pressure to spend money. Having an energy system means developers can artificially shorten the amount of time a player may play their game each day, which can both turn the game into a daily routine for players, making it far more addictive, while also making sure that when a player stops playing, it's not because they're bored or tired of the game, but because the game made them stop. This means players will never become bored as long as the game is mildly engaging. Instead of moving on to any other games, players are kept wanting more and will become increasingly annoyed with running low on energy until they eventually start spending money to alleviate that problem.

These deceptive behaviours are prevalent in many top mobile games and are far from the only tactics used. Many games have a loot box reward system, which turns in-game rewards into a glorified gambling simulator. This can be highly effective at convincing children, people with obsessive personalities, or people with gambling addictions to spend hundreds of dollars on these rewards.

From manipulative marketing to horrible gameplay and reward systems–these games are heavily invested in finding ways to exploit players into spending money rather than making a good game. While some mobile games can be fun, it's important to understand when and how these games can try to manipulate players, in order to avoid falling for their tricks and keep yourself and your wallet safe.

The Parasitic Nature of Mobile Games

FOLLOW US