The same can’t be said of the iOS App Store. Still has garbage on it, but I’d bet that games are far more successful on the iOS platform for a multitude of reasons.
It's also a saturated market because of the low barrier of entry, without an advertising budget you are taking a gamble no matter how good the gameplay is.
A whale is someone that spends a tremendous amount of money on mobile games. These are the people most games pander to or otherwise design themselves around
Low barrier to entry if you're not counting visibility. Yeah you can publish to the stores, but nobody will see it unless you are ordained by the gods at Apple and Google, or you buy eyeballs (and have the capital to do so.)
N64 and earlier consoles emulate really well on smartphones. In terms of storage, those games are tiny, so you could probably fit Nintendo's entire library from the first Gameboy through the N64 on your phone if you wanted to.
Way higher quality than pretty much every mobile game, free, no micro transactions, no ads (assuming your emulator isn't shit).
If you want to game on your phone, this is the way.
Every console and handheld from N64 backwards is about 62.67 gigabytes. So definitely. If we add PlayStation 1, it jumps to 643 GB. So still possible, just more expensive.
They absolutely play better with a controller, but you'd be surprised how not-terrible the touch screen interface is after just a bit of getting used to it.
I break out Mario 64 or the two Zelda 64's occasionally and outside of just a few wonky parts (aiming the bow... ugh...) the play quality is alright on touch screen alone (+ binding one of the volume keys to Z).
Obviously. They rarely make quality games for mobile and when they do, they quickly change gears to make it live service or subscription based and it's all downhill from there
I'm still heartbroken that Matchland was killed off. It was a really cool turn based match 3 strategy game that involved powering up warriors by connecting tiles for 15 to 30 seconds.
The cool bit was that you could go diagonally too and all the shapes you drew would fire off at once once the timer to draw them was up, so you could get all these huge combos on the board at once if you planned your turn right.
They even killed the cartoon network clone they released of the game too. I really miss them both, it was a really fun well designed game with cute art and music.
I miss zenonzard personally, a card game that wasn't a straight mtg clone (or worse) or stupidly simple (fuck hearthstone, all my homies hate hearthstone). All the good games die while fucking candy crush lives on.
If anyone wants a recommendation, Line Chef is super addicting. It’s one of those cooking games if that’s what you’re into. Tons of features and amazing graphics and doesn’t get boring. Also essentially free but they of course have a store where you can buy boosters and lives, but honestly you don’t need to spend a dime.