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> Its not as bad as you would think and it's designed for those devices and the graphics are way better than you think.

Yes it is. It's far worse. Whales are < 2% of the customers, but make > 95% of the money for game developers.

https://venturebeat.com/2013/0...

5th Planet chief executive Robert Winkler revealed at the Game Developers Conference Online in 2012 that with its game Clash of the Dragons, 40 percent of revenue came from 2 percent of players who spent $1,000 or more. Ninety percent came from those who spent $100 or more, and the top whale had spent $6,700.

As an ex-professional game developer 95+% of mobile games are crap

* Hurry-up-and-wait gaming that constantly nag you
* Exploitative predatory tactics such as gambling (loot boxes), in-app-purchases, and ads.
* Mobile games tend not to respect your time, money, or space.

There ARE games that don't exploit the players:

* Hidden Folks
* Limbo
* Minecraft
* Terreria
* The Room (and all its sequels)
* The Witness
*etc.

You have to look, but they are there.

> No one wants to lug around a PC computer to play a multiplayer game.

Uh, that's what mobile gaming is -- by definition.

This is ignoring the fact that some games just DON'T work (well) on a mobile. i.e. Let me know when I can play:

* Starcraft 2
* World of Warcraft

on a phone.

Mouse + Keyboard is vastly superior for some games.

Mobile gaming is here to stay. That's NOT the problem. The problem is the exploitative behavior.

It is bullshit like this is driving the mobile games straight into the ground.

... I guess I only play games in the 5% then, like any other platform (THANKS Steam Greenlight).
Warhammer Quest, Neuroshima Hex, Settlers of Catan, Smash Up, Exploding Kittens, my favorites.

Whales, we care because? Some people buy tons of Steam games on sale and never play them. On $3000 computers, bitching about frame rates until rounds of performance patches and driver updates come out.

Who said phones need to run Starcraft or WoW, you just came out of nowhere with that.

So keep your keyboard and mouse??

This whole post is strangely combative.

Oh and I'm a Linux administrator, so that makes me an expert on stuff.

> I just don't "get" the appeal of gaming on a phone.

* Portability, and
* Addiction, aka hurry-up-and-wait gaming, loot boxes, and exploitation

To fully answer the question, you need to understand the:

Psychology of gaming whales

> Its not as bad as you would think and it's designed for those devices and the graphics are way better than you think.

Yes it is. It's far worse. Whales are < 2% of the customers, but make > 95% of the money for game developers.

https://venturebeat.com/2013/0...

5th Planet chief executive Robert Winkler revealed at the Game Developers Conference Online in 2012 that with its game Clash of the Dragons, 40 percent of revenue came from 2 percent of players who spent $1,000 or more. Ninety percent came from those who spent $100 or more, and the top whale had spent $6,700.

As an ex-professional game developer 95+% of mobile games are crap

* Hurry-up-and-wait gaming that constantly nag you
* Exploitative predatory tactics such as gambling (loot boxes), in-app-purchases, and ads.
* Mobile games tend not to respect your time, money, or space.

There ARE games that don't exploit the players:

* Hidden Folks
* Limbo
* Minecraft
* Terreria
* The Room (and all its sequels)
* The Witness
*etc.

You have to look, but they are there.

> No one wants to lug around a PC computer to play a multiplayer game.

Uh, that's what mobile gaming is -- by definition.

This is ignoring the fact that some games just DON'T work (well) on a mobile. i.e. Let me know when I can play:

* Starcraft 2
* World of Warcraft

on a phone.

Mouse + Keyboard is vastly superior for some games.

Mobile gaming is here to stay. That's NOT the problem. The problem is the exploitative behavior.

It is bullshit like this is driving the mobile games straight into the ground.

> So when they're referring to 'mobile gaming', do they mean these 'twitch games' people play on their phones?

Not just twitch games. Those and more.

* Hurry-up-and-wait games
* Social Games which are neither social, nor games
* Games that exploit players with loot boxes, and dual currencies.
* Games with IAP (In-App-Purchases) and RMT (Real-Money-Transactions) which the Desktop and Console industry sucked righted up.

Mobile Games = anything not on a desktop, laptop, or console; that is, Mobile games are anything playable on (smart) phones, tablets.

While 99% of the mobile space is crap that exploits the fuck out of people there are a few gem that respect the players' time, space, and money.

I've shipped numerous games on consoles and PC. I exited the direct industry a few years back; I now make significantly more, have way less stress, and work stays at work. I also get to work on my indie game the first thing I wake up for a few hours and then start my normal day job which involves WebGL and Javascript.

There are 4 major problems with games industry:

* This industry was started by _hobbyists_ before the "suits" came in and tried to run it like a business. AAA games have become linear, repetitive, and formulaic narrative. This FPS map design 1993 vs 2010 sums its up.
* I slept under my cubicle in 1995 when I worked for EA because of "crunch time." The fact that crunch time *still* exists is a symptom of managers _failing_ to take responsibility. Why do they treat game devs as a resource to be consumed. Why did it take a lawsuit "EA Spouse" to make a dent in this problem??
* Mobile has zero respect for gamer's time. They call people who spend the most on freemium "Whales." What's the problem with freemum? You keep using this word free, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. This image succinctly summarizes how they have hijacked the word free to mean Hurry-up-and-Wait.
* The cost of content creation is spiraling out of control. Each year the budget and man-hours keep increasing. Something has to give.

Indies have their own share of problems but what they bring to the table is innovation. Vote with your wallet and support indie games such as:

* Limbo
* Minecraft
* Path of Exile
* The Stanley Parable
* Trine
* The Vanshing of Ethan Carter
* World of Goo

If you continue to play grind fests that have zero respect for your time such as Defiance, Destiny, Warframe, World of Warcraft, then all you are is part of the problem.

The "race to zero" has done nothing but create a wasteland of crappy "freemium" games. Dungeon Keeper is the culmination of developers' efforts to move the pricing model away from initial purchase and into in-app purchases. The practice has absolutely decimated gaming. I don't necessarily see Steam's move as a good thing.

Speaking of Dungeon Keeper and the flood of "freemium" games I'd like to see less and less of, here's a much a more sane (as in opposite) take on the subject: How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The Industry

And now, I don't think that what's good good for Apple or Valve is going to be necessarily good for gamers and game developers.

RT.

Messed up with the link, here it is.

I'm really not sure where you're going here - and I've lost track of what the first point you're trying to make is. With the days of Wii-shovelware behind us, there aren't really any party game developers other than Nintendo in the business any more anyway. I know full well that Nintendo is a horrible company to work with; they are certainly no more virtuous than Sony and MS (and in some respects less so) - but they always benefit from a "sympathy for the underdog" factor.

And no, demo + purchase is not the same as what's happening in mobile gaming now - if you think it is, then I can only suspect you haven't followed what's been happening on the mobile platforms at all.

Demo + Purchase is an old and established way of selling games. You give the customer a bit of it free, if they like it, they make a one-time purchase and buy the rest. If they don't, they move on. It's not a perfect system (I can think of games whose first levels - the bit used in the demo - have been far better than the rest of the game), but it is reasonably honest.

The mobile "free to pay/pay-to-win" and "paywall" models are very different. You can, in principle, play the whole game for free. But you will be forced to "grind" sections of the game for hours, or simply wait with the game idle for hours or even days between taking actions. At any time, you can spend money to speed things up. But you can never pay a fixed sum and "own" the game. There's always another paywall along in a few minutes.

Worse, any semblance of game design goes out the window. These games aren't designed to reward skill - quite the opposite. The last thing the developers want is for a skilled player to encounter the paywall less frequently. Rather, they are designed to form a direct correlation between success in the game and the amount of money you spend. More information and analysis is here.

http://www.baekdal.com/insights/password-security-usability back in 2007. I don't deny that Randall Munroe has summarized the method very, very well however. I also wouldn't be surprised if he was familiar with Baekdal's article. So of course it's not just length alone, it's 3 or 4 common or uncommon words, with spaces acting as special characters. Please, read it. I think Baekdal understands this very well, both user-side and server-side. It may not be watered down enough for the non-tech layman to understand, but I think it's very well-written for anyone tech-savvy. And yes, he basically agrees server admins have a responsibility, too-- good password user policy, salt and hash on password databases, etc.

This article suggests using short phrases instead of cryptic passwords.

... allows potentially very long passwords, are easy to remember and you can always swap out vowels for digits or symbols. If the site doesn't permit spaces then swap them out for asterisks/underlines/a different character/omit the space

http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability?

Apparently

"It is 10 times more secure to use "this is fun" as your password, than "J4fS

This article spells it out:
http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability

Too bad most sites are too stupid to allow a long enough password. I'll take a 16-character pass-phrase with all lower case + whitespace over a hard to remember 8 character one anyday.

Webkit, which was adopted by Apple and Google for use in the Safari and Chrome browsers. I have been using Chrome on my work PC and find many of its features compelling, and wonder how soon we will see its best innovations in Firefox. Why is Gecko worth keeping if it is outdated and bloated?

It's like one of those stories where a sane traveller finds himself in a bizarre realm where everyone is crazy. Like something from the Twilight Zone.

Chrome's rendering engine is so ridiculously slow that I stopped using it after a few minutes. Hasn't anyone else noticed? Or is everyone too polite to point out that Google did a poor job? A quick google search shows that at least this guy agrees with me. What about the rest of you? Did you notice that Chrome takes like 3 times as long as Mozilla to render a page? Do you think maybe that's why Mozilla shouldn't adopt Chrome's rendering engine? Is Rod Serling going to suddenly appear in my living room and do a monologue?

Seems like Apple's iPhone latest speed claims might be rather off as well.

Before everybody says "good riddance," note that the upcoming IE update will simply mean you have to click first to enable interaction with the embedded object. This means that things like Flash ads and streaming video will still run automatically -- a user would need to click on them to be able to interact with them, i.e. find the tiny little "mute" or "close" button to make them go away. This page previews the update and shows exactly how it will change things.

this a pretty neat article about some things to keep in mind when designing a UI with AJAX

It seems that user interaction activities like "saving", can run counter to the way people have been trained to use web sites. People don't believe an action took hold if it happened to quickly. The author of the article linked above actually had to slow down and give lots of visual response to indicate the user's data actually saved (or the user would repeatedly click "save" thinking nothing had happened).

It's not a bad thing, it's just an example of some of the new user design challenges AJAX presents at the same time it gives us a new approach to getting near synchronous web-UI response.

And just for giggles get your AJAX pixel fight on

e.