The Sad State of Android Gaming in 2015
Finding a good game on Android these days is almost as difficult as finding a science show on the Discovery Channel. This article takes a look at why that is and how it can be fixed.
If you don’t want to read the article and just want a quick fix for finding ‘good’ Android games, then scroll to ‘The Solution’ (wait, isn’t instant gratification what got us to this sorry state of affairs in the first place?… well, as long as you’re instantly gratifying yourself on my content then no harm done, right?)
Anyway, let’s take a look at the current state of the Play Store. Here are a couple of screenshots of the top games this week:
3-out-of-5 of the ‘Top Grossing’ games are almost direct clones — two bejewelled games and three Clash of Clans games. Then we’re left with the ‘Top Games’ — one of which is barely even a freaking game!! I’m looking at you ‘laser pointer x2 simulator’ (at least capitalise it, for Christ’s sake).
We all know these games are popular because they’re essentially money factories, designed for addiction and marketed with huge budgets. They drown out games that require skill over a credit-card number, and pressure other studios to adopt a similar business strategy.
So if you saw the above screenshots and thought ‘The end is nigh! Abandon all hope, ye who play games on Android!’, you’d be justified. But don’t herald the apocalypse just yet. These games are just not meant for you…
These games are meant for the mass market — and if you’re reading this, that’s probably not you!
To draw a quick comparison, people are saying we’re in a ‘Golden Age of Television’, with shows like Games of Thrones, Mad Men, True Detective, House of Cards, etc. But if you turned on the television you would never know it… Pseudo-reality TV show junk interspersed with “science” shows about aliens — it’s just “chewing gum for the eyes”. Because these shows are for the mass market!
But then, where is all this great ‘Golden Age’ content? It’s on the TV of course! But the junk-to-not-junk ratio is so high that more often than not, we find it through different mediums, such as streaming services like Netflix or HBO GO. Content there is well categorised (by humans) and there are some great tools for getting at the stuff you’re interested in.
Now, back to the Play Store, where no such tools exist, the algorithms are optimised for the mass-market, and finding a game that’s satisfying (and doesn’t empty your wallet) can take hours of trawling through pay-to-win garbage.
So where’s our Netflix for Android….
The Solution
I’ve spent the past couple of months painstakingly playing and categorising hundreds of games on the Play Store, and I’ve collected the very best ones in a simple app: Curated.
The principle is that once the content is well-categorised, one can decide for themselves what they want to see e.g. in the screenshot given you can search for ‘Free 8-bit RPGs, sorted by rating’. This way you know exactly what you’re getting.
Compare that to the Play Store text search, where you’re completely at the mercy of the search algorithm to show you what you want based on a few keywords. For example, when I searched for ‘Free 8-bit RPG’, the third result was a Photography app that converts your photos into 8-bit colour. Definitely not what I was looking for (although I searched for the same query again 10 minutes later and the results didn’t include this app — Google works fast!).
The point is that if you don’t have control over deciding what content you want, then you’re trusting someone else to decide what you want for you. And more often than not, you’ll be given what the mass-market wants (because that, by definition, is correct for most people).
So if you’re interested in finding games that aren’t Cow Clickers, precision engineered to turn you into a mindless money-fountain, then perhaps Curated could be what you’re looking for.
You can get Curated on the Play Store here.
Right now the app is pretty simple — but I’m working on more personalisation features, such as notifications for when a game is added to a particular genre you’re interested in (explicitly defined by you). And if you know of any hidden gems in the Play Store, you can submit them for review directly from within the app.
TL;DR: The Play Store is for the mass-market. The mass-market doesn’t have a brain. You have a brain. So go find great games using Curated.
