You've almost certainly heard of a little mobile phone game called Flappy Bird. It isn't much special, really. Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen threw the basic game together, not thinking much of it at all. He was probably pretty stunned when the clone of the old helicopter avoidance genre soared to the top of download rankings on both iOS and Android. The game was a runaway success. Everybody was addicted, and Nguyen was earning literal thousands of dollars each day from the ad revenue the game produced.

He has since removed the game, saying that he “cannot take this anymore.” A lot of people were stunned. iPhones and Android phones with the game installed are selling for thousands on ebay and similar sites. Looking at the Google Play store, there are at least 4 complete clones of the game if you search “Flappy Bird Dong Nguyen.” Clearly the game isn’t very technically complicated if such clones can pop up in such short order.

Dong has admitted. The game is crap.

And really, I agree with him. The graphics are nothing special, the mechanics are as basic as it gets. You tap to fly up. That’s it. Also, the hit box and responsiveness are annoying as hell from time to time, and seem to make you crash when you don’t think you should.

It hooks you in pretty well though. It has that “one more run” allure that a lot of people look for in a phone game. Hell, I’m going to keep it on my phone if only because it does nicely fill 15-30 second bursts of pseudo-entertainment. Any other game I own takes a bit more of a time commitment to enjoy at all. This is barely even for enjoyment though, I rarely feel that playing Flappy Bird. It’s usually annoyance or frustration, and not in the good way a game like Dark Souls or Touhou will give you. It is literally a way to kill a minute or so of time that I would otherwise be staring off into space.

This brings up an interesting question though; is this what the future of phone gaming is going to look like?

I understand there are a lot of people that look for very little in a phone game, but if something that can be made within the span of a week or so by people with bare minimum coding and artistic ability (see: the clones), and be such an unbelievable success, it begs a worrisome question. Will phone game developers even keep trying if something like this does so well?

It makes me worry, at least. Phone development is a very open system. With few barriers to entry, we can see how easily clones of games pop up. And games with literally zero originality can be the most popular things around. Maybe developers will stop trying with their games. This could lead to App Stores being overloaded with the most brainless “games”

I can definitely see the appeal of throwing up a simple game and potentially making a small fortune off it. But that feels sort of exploitative, to an extent. I personally feel that developers should not only make games they want, but make games that try to push the medium forward in some way. Sure, you could make a pretty Tetris clone and put it on Google Play, and then make money off it, but to me that doesn’t seem right. You didn’t make Tetris, you just copied someone else’s work and are making money off it.

I’ll give Dong Nguyen credit for one thing, though. He avoided the other approach to mobile gaming that is becoming alarmingly commonplace.

Let’s step back a little.

Recently, old school gaming fans were thrilled to hear of a remake of a classic game, Dungeon Master. The game was then released for phones and was filled with what I find to be the most abhorrent practice in video gaming today.

Microtransactions.

Paying real money to speed up gameplay.

A lot of games do this now, but Dungeon Master was a particularly nasty culprit, with certain blocks requiring a day or more of real time to mine out unless you pay real money.

Developers say that adding these in to a game doesn't affect its design or pacing, but I call BS. In almost every example I’ve seen, it stretches the games out to annoying lengths, where to get more than a few minutes of play at a time, you have to pay. This is especially bad after you pass the usual “tutorial section” of the game, where you are given a little premium currency to speed things up so they can teach you all the basics quickly. After this section, the games usually hit a brick wall and you have to step away for a few hours.

Dungeon Master took this to an extreme, selling packs of its premium currency for about $70. Nobody in their right mind would spend that on a game like that. You can buy the two original games multiple times over from GOG.com for that. Instead of playing an exploitative mobile remake that charges you to do anything in any amount of time, you could spend hours and hours playing the original games in their full glory on your computer.

“But those aren't on a phone!”

But they respect you, your time, and your money. And that’s more than I can say for the mobile game.

That said, not all free-to-play games with microtransactions are evil. In fact, I’ve played a few very good ones, with incredibly fair business models. League of Legends is one of the best, with the only content you can’t access freely is a bunch of costumes that just change how your character looks. That and a few boosters so you earn in-game currency and experience faster. And with the free champion rotation every week, you always have a good selection of characters to play.

Blacklight: Retribution is another good one. You can earn enough points in a single game to rent a part or two for some time to test it out, or gradually save up to get them permanently. While a few things are level locked, this is still incredibly fair. Loadout also lets you pretty easily access most of the weapon parts in the game. In fact, you can only access these freely. Again, skins and boosters cost real money, but the weapon parts cannot be bought with real money. Only more slots for them, and the afforementioned boosts and skins.

Free-to-play with microtransactions does not inherently ruin a game, but only a few developers have shown competence in balancing this well. Many times, it turns out to be that people who pay real money are at an advantage. It’s a tricky balance to strike, and it has a different sweet spot for every genre. When it comes to Dungeon Keeper, though, EA seems to have barely even tried to make it balanced.

These seem to be the two potential paths for mobile phone gaming to progress down. Either free and mind-numbing, unoriginal games, or exploitative pay-to-advance games.

I find this incredibly worrisome, as many people use their phones as a gateway into gaming. They’ll grow to expect these sorts of games. They start to think that it’s okay to release games like this, and I think that’s incredibly dangerous. Think about how that might turn out if this sort of development approach eeks into other platforms. That’s what concerns me the most.

What do you think about these games? Or the points I brought up? Do you think I’m wrong?

Please, I encourage discussion and debate, that’s my exact intent with this. Thank you for your time!