What happened to good mobile games?

Picture this: It's 2024. You've just gotten a new smart phone. You want to install some games, something to just play when you're bored. You go onto your app store and look for something quick in the "new" section, only to find apps that seem like poorly made carbon copies of each other. Games with titles that seem so basic a five-year-old could come up with them. I'm talking about new-age mobile games, the kind you see on the side of TikTok videos, such as "Slice it All!", "High Heels!", and we can't forget "Good or Bad Mom Games". All of which are on a platform in an empty void with the worst graphics imaginable. And of course, an absurd amount of ads. There are countless games like these on the app store, almost with the same mechanics and dry humor (a lot of these games contain toilet humor - not even the funny kind). Buy why? Why have we resorted to cookie cutter mobile games with terrible graphics, limitless ads, and goals that seem to almost rot your brain when you attempt to achieve them? The thing safest to assume would be money, of course. Easy to make games that companies can pump out almost daily, with ads that give them profit? Who wouldn't want to get a kick of that. And if you click on some of the creators of these games, you'll see just that; endless pages of the same kind of game, all including some kind of popular figure such as Billie Eilish, Pokemon, or Skibidi Toilet. Anything that's popular at the time they'll shove into the thumbnail of their games and BAM! Mindless six-year-olds can have a new game for iPad time. 

Despite knowing the reasons, I still think it's quite disappointing how mobile games fell. A few months ago, I found an old Samsung phone from 2012 (I think). On it were a few apps, one of them being a game called "Shark Dash". Honestly one of the best games I've ever played, I had so much fun. And it was simply a game where you had to drag your finger across the screen to aim a shark and eat the fish. But because of the graphics, the physics, the strategy, the problems that arose as your levels increased, and the sounds (the sound was echoey because it was in a bathtub??), it was astounding. If companies today put their time and effort into making something like that instead of coming out with the same regurgitated games, I strongly believe they would have more committed players. If that game was still on the app store today, I WOULD have boughten the in-app purchases, because that's how fun the game was. 

Another thing I want to mention is half of these new games lie about being online? Like it will say "finding opponent" and then pair me up with some AI's. And when I have my internet off it will be like, "Oh hey you can't play cuz this is online!!! :P" (looking at you Draw It). Some of them will even go as far as saying you can't play an OFFLINE GAME while OFFLINE because "you haven't paid for no ads!! oopsies! >.<" like stfu i wanna play the offline game I downloaded for the car ride. 

Anyways that's my opinion on that matter.