Editorial - Mobile Fishing
It may have been said before, and it will more than likely be said even more in the future, but a significant amount of mobile games tend to rely on a pay-to-win strategy: the more (hopefully disposable) income you shell out, the more likely you are to be a top-tier player. You may have heard the term whale before: a term used by mobile game executives in reference to those with high levels of disposable income, meant to be taken as a target for a game’s higher-prices purchasing options that range up to $100. I guarantee you that any game with a leaderboard that has in-game purchases has players that spent money on the game in the top ten. That isn’t to say that in many cases you can’t find high-tier players that don’t spend a dime, they certainly exist. But many games encourage players to spend money, and far too frequently.
From a personal standpoint, one such game for me was King of Thieves. The game itself has incredibly gameplay, very responsive one-touch controls, and a unique mechanic. As the name implies, you’re a thief, and your goal is to sneak into other players’ dungeons and steal gems from their totems to take them for yourself. You tap to jump, and you can jump off of walls to run in the opposite direction as you were running previously. Here’s the catch, from point A to point B: Gems are worth certain amounts of points, and your total points equal your overall score. You have a severely limited space for Gems, so you need to free up space to steal more gems. This leads to the purpose of your totem: by placing Gems into the totem, you can combine them together after a “ritual” that takes about about 12 hours... so long as nobody steals from your totem. Fortunately, you have the ability to rearrange your dungeon and its traps in any way you see fit, so long as you can complete it yourself, two times in a row. At this point, everything is balanced, fair, and skill-based.
Then you get to the Jewels, the premium currency. By spending Jewels, you can get better traps for your dungeon, and even spend an instant $2 to end a ritual right away. There are also special sets you can get, including items to assist you, more Jewels, a subscription service that gets you a small amount of Jewels a day, and more. Finally, each totem has a limited number of times you can use it for a ritual, so you’re eventually forced to “move out” and go to another dungeon, spending currencies to get traps for that one. I stopped playing a couple years ago, so I can’t say if there were improvements made to balance out things, but I honestly doubt it, sadly. If I’m wrong, I will be more than willing to eat crow by updating this article at a later date, but for now, I’m going to steer clear of that game.
I’m bringing this up, because I’m getting the feeling that I’m falling for the same tactics in another game, called Cookie Run: OvenBreak. This game is a unique runner in the sense that you can have a group of up to 20 cookies and their respective pets run across different prearranged levels. You can spend in-game currency of Coins to level up each cookie when you get multiple “cookie pieces” to increase their stamina, or the points they earn from collecting Jellies while running. You can also collect materials to make a Magic Candy for some, giving them an additional ability to take into effect during a run, such as additional items appearing on the field that are worth many more points.
Once again, there are special bundles allowing you to get limited cookies for a small price, subscriptions for daily Premium Currency, and higher-priced bundles allow you to get incredibly rare Legendary cookies as well. As an experiment, I purchased a bundle to see what would happen, and I saw instant improvement in terms of my high score.
Before I continue, I would like to state that in terms of either Cookie Run, or King of Thieves, it’s not the gameplay I’m complaining about, both games are incredibly fun as is, without the purchasing nonsense. The issue I have is how they advertise their bundles and specials at a very frequent basis, moreso than I personally prefer. And at this point, I think I may need to play Devil’s Advocate and note a significant difference between King of Thieves and Cookie Run: Since I’ve started playing Cookie Run, I’ve had a near-constant positive feedback loop for the game: I felt like that, regardless of purchasing anything, I would still improve as long as I kept playing and practicing. The tone overall was light-hearted, and save for the advertising of the current special after you move past the title screen each time you load the game, it is essentially pressure free.
However, for King of Thieves, since the introduction of the PvP options after you progress through the game’s story mode, I’ve been under the impression constantly that unless I spend money, I won’t get a better score than at least one other player in each ranked group of players I competed with, simply because they spent money on the game. I don’t get that feeling in Cookie Run, thankfully. That said, I’ve only played Cookie Run for about ten days now, and regarding the previous purchase, I felt comfortable contributing to a game I think is fun. I didn’t think King of Thieves was fun anymore because I kept feeling like I was being shaken down for lunch money by a high school bully, so I stopped buying and stopped playing. Once again, the gameplay for both games is phenomenal, and well worth an in-game purchase or two. But if the game keeps on encouraging purchases to that kind of extent, I’m worried about the priorities of the developers shifting to sharply toward profit over entertainment.
Fortunately, Cookie Run has a very unique way of addressing this: there are special bundles designed to reward you as you progress: the more you progress in the game, the more you earn, whether it’s playing through the unique levels in Memories Mode, or achieving a certain player level overall. That sort of thing I can see being a fair reflection of time and money: I’ve spent long enough playing this game to get this far, so by purchasing this bundle, I can get bonus items and premium currency as an additional reward, as well as helping to fund the game I spent so much time playing.
I”m not entirely sure if I really have a point to this editorial, I’ve just had this on my mind recently, so I wanted to get it out there. I suppose you can consider it a cautionary tale of sorts to be careful what you spend your money on in regards to mobile games: they’re practically the modern equivalent of arcades, except without as much of a guarantee of game quality. With any hope, I’ll be able to write better reviews of mobile games in the future to better inform you of the choices available.
