Gone are the days of a game required hundreds of hours of your attention. And even if most games were designed to be played for hours at a time I’m not sure that most players would play them to the end. In traditional computer games, less than 50% of the players play them to the end so how can we expect mobile gamers to not get bored of less complex games. But why is that? Why do mobile games get boring so fast?
Your Answer Upfront:
Most mobile games lack gameplay depth and their content can be consumed much faster than intended. A lot of games re-use and copy assets and mechanics from each other while their retention mechanics remain the same. Players have no incentive to stick with a certain game while having thousands upon thousands of other game options to move to.
In this article we’ll take a look at the biggest reasons for why we quickly get bored of modern mobile games. Note that this article doesn’t delve into your personality as a player or your habits. Instead it has a more analytics approached based on the way modern games are designed and how all the little factors add up.
More casual approach to design for mass market appeal
Let’s get this one out of the gate fast. Games aren’t designed for a single type of player nowadays. They’re not for the explorers or the achievers, the killers or the socializers. You’re not going to get a mobile Thief III any time soon. Or if there is one, good luck discovering it (you might have a chance with the method of discovery for iOS games we talked about here).
Most games that launch on the mobile app stores are designed to appeal to the most common denominator, they are designed for the mass market. And, as such, they have to be distilled down. Their only variety comes from the theme and not from the interactions or challenges.
A game about archeology where you really have to dive deep in learning custom/invented languages would keep your interest but it won’t do the same for all the Sallys, and Timmys and Jacks and Jills out there.
A really hard game about surviving in an escape pod in which you have to navigate by using your oxygen tank to boost yourself in 6 dimensions of freedom? That might be interesting but only to a few.
How about a medieval fantasy RPG with a ton of lore and great character dialogues where you have to find who destroyed the golden idol? Egh, maybe on PC.
But, for most of the mobile games coming out you’re going to be using a blue or red humanoid-shaped characters because that’s what “works”.
Designed to played in bite sized chunks
Modern mobile games are designed to be played in bite sized chunks with levels designed to last for 3 to 5 minutes. The reason behind this is due to the need to display ads as often as possible (but not to often so as not to annoy the player too much).
Mobile game developers (and I’m guilty of this too) develop their games with the idea that mobile gamers play games in sessions of 5 minutes with up to 3 or 4 sessions on the same game per day. That’s what the data and a ton of websites tell us.
So if we design the games to be enjoyed and played like this, what can we do with players who rush through the content AT THEIR OWN PACE, not ours? How can you not get bored of a game that you like and not consume the content designed to last you for weeks in just a few hours? (Honestly, by following these “rules” and the “data” we’re shooting ourselves in the foot… I’ll be the first one to admit it).
Little to no engaging story elements
You know what producers and designers, that work with a data driven mindset, see when they look at a game?
- They see that players play it for 20 hours.
- They see that the “Sword Of GoldenRock – God of Recurrent Spending” is the most used item in the game.
- They see that 60% of the players completed the tutorial and 15% died on the first boss repeatedly.
- They see that most players play the game on a Sunday.
You know what they miss? What the data doesn’t show?
- The smile on your face when your favorite character starts cracking jokes in front of an unbeatable army of Dark Spawns.
- How much you cried at the end of Dragon Age Origins.
- That you’ve repeatedly played a quest not for the rewards but in order to listen to the NPC banter.
- That when you did, in fact, grind to get that one small token that a Witch of the Wild told you was stolen from her when she was a child. You acquired the item to bring a closure to that story line with no reward in mind except to see what the witch’s reaction is.
The great Jeff Vogel says that players will forgive you for having a good story. Words of wisdom. But, for players who really want a story? Your run of the mill “swipe to avoid enemies infinite-gameplay surfer clone” won’t last enough for your analytics to register the session.
Similar mechanics employed that lose appeal over time
We wrote an entire article on clones and low effort games titled “Why Are All Mobile Games The Same?” in which we cover this exact issue. The TL;DR is that a lot of games use the exact same mechanics, be it due to using the same code base or just because they cloned one another. And if they’re not exact replicas they follow the same pattern as most other releases.
They have the same daily login system with a modicum of rewards. They have a Tiered VIP system and they offer character unlocks as loot drops. Even the time gates are the same, be it that you have to wait 10 minutes for a card pack to unlock or for a character to come back from a mission.
It’s like driving a car with a different exterior. You can put whatever hood you want on a Camry, at the end of the day it’s going to be a Camry.
No upfront investment
We used to pay $60 for a game back in the day. I’m not saying we’re bored because games are cheap or free these days. I’m saying that we had to save up money and do research on what exactly we have to spend it on.
If our research was wrong and we’d end up with a bad game… we would do whatever we could to make the best out of the situation and that bad purchase would last us until we could get a new game.
If our research was right, we found a game we really wanted to play. With free mobile games nowadays, we don’t download and play a game because we really want to play it. We download and play it because it’s there and it MIGHT be interesting.
But there’s no investment in the game. We can quit it at any time and we can drop it and move to the next thing in a jiffy (remember that word?).
Why do mobile games get boring so fast
Most mobile games lack gameplay depth and their content can be consumed much faster than intended. A lot of games re-use and copy assets and mechanics from each other while their retention mechanics remain the same. Players have no incentive to stick with a certain game while having thousands upon thousands of other game options to move to.
Where To Next?
I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design, subjects which were brought up in this post.
I believe that you might be interested in more articles on game monetization. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “How Do Free Mobile Games Make money“, “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have In-App Purchases“.
There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!
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