I was just browsing the Google Play Store and I am getting frustrated seeing games being tagged with the genre, but aren't actually simulating anything. E.g. Idle Miner/Mining Tycoon (can't remember name). Nothing in the game is accurate or even tries to represent real life. It even has cartoon graphics. Now I'm not getting mad about the games themselves, just the fact that they are being labelled as sims. Anyone else annoyed by this?
Play store is a shitshow. It's so hard to spot the few actual gems in the absolute avalanche of ad-ridden asset flip time wasters that have the only goal of harvesting your data or running a monero miner in the background. The chances are better with paid games, but even then it's hit-or-miss.
I gave up on mobile gaming long ago.
I haven't played a decent mobile game in ages. How else am I supposed to get my dopamine fix 🙄😂. I am currently enjoying the small open source games on F-Droid however.
Goat Simulator suffers from the same issue. It's not a SIMULATOR. Sure, they put in the effort to make it seem like one, but in the background they just attach a camera to a real goat that you control remotely via wires into it's brain.
At the danger of being whooshed here - with Goat simulator specifically, I think it's pretty obvious that the game is overall not meant to be taken seriously, including the title.
I HATE idle games with all my heart and soul. I love management games and those shitty excuse for a game are everywhere.
If you like management and friendly strategy games look for Kairosoft they are the only ones I know are not Idle shit. Also they are mainly pay once so most of them (except dream house story) don't have in game stores.
FYI: Reddit has a good Kairosoft community if anyone is interested in going there
I think that, in theory, idle games wouldn't be TOO bad on their own. However, they happen to encourage/allow developers to add tons of microtransactions and because of the simple gameplay: many devs make clones of existing games or games with the same game loop. This leads to a shit show of shitty games in the genre. So I believe the concept is meh, but in practice they are all terrible.
Like others have said already: it sells. It's the same reason why seemingly every single fantasy/adventure game is called an "RPG" regardless of whether or not it contains actual RPG elements, like creating your own character.