The frustrations of mobile gaming

Over the years mobile gaming has enjoyed a relatively good number of shares in the industry with the latest evidence in the US as it covers 38.4% of the gaming market (Burns, 2023) which is worth 41 billion dollars in terms of revenue. This valuation would push the industry to develop amazing games that can challenge the success of games like Call of Duty, Resident Evil or even Grand Theft Auto. It has however pushed for game developers to become borderline scam artists.

This is mainly due to the way it is being sold in the market and the tactics that are being employed as the majority of the top-grossing games in the Google Play Store at the moment are majority free to play games. This gives more opportunities to implement shady tactics of overpriced microtransactions and in-game advertisements to bring in profit that curtails the overall gameplay experience. Even worse is the rise of online gambling that targets children has led to the further downfall of mobile gaming as more developers are incentivized to create games that support these features as big gambling industries are entering into digital space thus funding these projects.

While some mobile games don't fall into these trappings it is mostly been demos with the full version of the game being under a price which the vast majority of the consumers are unwilling to pay even if it is under $5. This issue will be difficult to solve as this would require strong regulations to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of this market but also ensure the market remains profitable in some form and rebuild consumers' trust to get over the barrier of the payment wall 

Burns, J. (2023, September). Video Games in the US. Retrieved from IBIS World: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/video-games-industry/