Reponse to Tadhg Kellys article: What Games Are: The Culture Gap In Mobile Games
I totally agree with Tadhg on lack of following and culture around mobile games. It is true that any noise related to mobile gaming is industry oriented, talking about monetization, metrics, retention, business model, case studies, marketing and pay walls. It is rare that we see any one reviewing a game for what it is; a software for entertainment.
 I feel that his post lacked a possible explanation for the phenomenon and here are some of my thoughts on this:
Casual Players VS Hard Core players:
The first difference lies in the target market of these games, casual vs. hard core gamers. Hard core gamers are "... players who spend both time and money on their game or games. In addition to time spent playing, they also spent a lot of time preparing or anticipating... these were the players who prepared the dungeons, painted up the figures, gathered the players, ran the sessions and even provided snacks... read up on the levels, the multi-player maps, delve into The Forge, author mods, know all the stats for all the weapons, run the guilds... they bought the game and usually buy the downloadable content as well as evangelize and get their friends to play. They become the center of a community that they built, and as a result, often wind up feeling they own the game as much as the publisher or designers. Naturally, they are more dedicated to a small(er) set of games."
Hand held devices target "casual player" market, people who play games to fill in their free time slots. They are not loyal to a specific game, they are not fans and their life does not get affected by their casual gaming. They might be proud of their level 70 farm, but they will not prefer Farmville over HayDay, or JungleHeat over Clash of Clans [in contrast you should see Call of duty and Counter Strike player argue]
These differences in dedication to a game are a primary reason that the web lacks user generated content for hand held devices games.
Games on Hand Held VS Games on PC/Console:
Current numbers of paid apps in the android market are 153921 vs 649656 free apps. I could not find recent stats for iOS store but we can assume at least a safe 50% to be free. Now looking at number of free games on both these store one should assume that players would be happy to have such a large collection to choose from, and there should be substantial buzz about such a large set of games. But there some major factors to be considered here;
·        Quality of games: Due to low production costs and rare but strongly highlighted success stories a huge number of low quality games are produced, these games fail to generate any fan base among players. Naturally no media is eager to cover these games.
·        Innovation in games: In my observation nearly all of the hand held device games are tuned down version of a similar pc/console games. Game critics and journalists primarily review innovation, creativity, ingenuity with passion. And the few snippets that do exist about games for handheld devices are industry focused.
·        Free to play: Free to play is a great model from an economic and business point of view: you the consumer a product free to explore and enjoy and he pays what he can afford and wants to. The consumer does not have to think twice about trying out your product and you get thousands of installs in no time. But the sad thing is that nearly all of free to play models monetize on the cost of game play, users who wouldn't like to pay are forced to grind mindlessly ("the holy click" when it comes to social games) to compete against paying users. And the truth of the matter is that studios don't care about these "non paying users" as well. Dungeon Hunter 4, a game with amazing graphics, nice controls, an interesting story line and deep game play but why do I need to clear a dungeon 5-6 times so that I can level up to clear the next one, and then grind through it again 5-6 times? Ian Bogost summed up the utter stupidity of such games by his infamous Cow Clicker. This player manipulation not only generates enmity in players but the feeling is shared by those reviewing these games too, thus the lack of positive user generated media for these platforms.
On the other hand innovative games, such as Super Hexagon, The Room, Ridiculous Fishing, Vector, Year Walk, Badlands, Bastion, Sworcery etc, made with the intent of entertaining players and not purely making money do receive notable media coverage.
