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[dropcap style=”style1″]A[/dropcap]s you may know, for the recent years, the mobile gaming market has gone over the rooftop. If we only count on the number of titles, mobile platform could be deemed the one who has the fastest growth rate. And the reason for this miracle is: smartphone.

Since the first time that Apple has redefined the term of “smartphone” by releasing the iPhone series, the world is getting used to the presence of those omnipotent devices. Beside from basic tasks such as calling, texting, mailing… now people also have one more major task to do with smartphones: playing real videogames.

Taking this chance, a wave of manufacturers arose with developing mobile games, and so this market went rocketting. But every coin has two sides, and so does the mobile gaming market – good side and bad side.

Let’s poke into the shady side of mobile gaming platform and see what are its flaws.[space space_height=”40″]

There is a fact that no one could deny: it’s easy to profit by developing mobile games. You just need to make a decent product with decent graphics, adding some tweaks here and there, and ta-da, it’s ready to sell.

Because most of the mobile gamers aren’t really picky – as long as the game isn’t too bad, they would easily give it a “ok”.

Knowing all too well about this, big and small companies all rush to develope mobile games with frightening speed. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the result: quantity over quality.In the mass of nearly identical titles, the players have a hard time to pick something really stand out – because during the mass production, copying each other is inevitable. So it would hurt each other rather than being profitable, since the consuming rate would be distributed equally – hurting some while also helping the rest. What makes the mobile device having more diversity over other platforms, is due to the touchscreen control, it could play a wide variety of genres. But it also makes mobile platform the jack-of-all-trade, master at none. You could play many genres on mobile, but the joice of having physical sensation with the games is brutally striped by touchscreen control.

On PC, players of FPS and RTS always need their personal gears to play at the best form – to the point that they would carry a whole Razer set to cybercafes just to have the familiar sensation. The same goes for ones who play racing game, they need steering devices and pedals to play effectively.On the other hand, console players with J-RPG or action games would find themselves more comfortable with a physical gamepad. Touchscreen can simulate all of those control methods, but it can never reproduce the real sensation and feelings from this heartless screen.

It’s undeniable that mobile platform has the upper hand in term of puzzle and tower defense genres, thanks to touchscreen control. But the small size of the screen, in tandem with the fingers of the players taking place – the vision is dramatically narrowed down.

Nowadays, it’s as common sense to notice the hardware of a new smartphone first, especially the ones running Android system. At the first glance, many would think that even a smartphone could have higher operative standard than a PC.

It’s normal for an Android device to have 8-cores processor and 2GBs of RAM. But in the eye of specialists, these numbers are merely parlor tricks to fool ignorant users: it couldn’t hold the candle against the laptop, not to mention about a real desktop PC.Actually, it isn’t entirely wrong to say that mobile games have way better graphics than those from 2010. In additional, high-quality screens could compliment the graphics better – but those are merely eye-candies to fool the eyes. Most of the good looking games are 2D with brightful colors to enhance the quality.

About 3D games, with good hardwares of course most of the games could be rendered into high quality. But that’s only about the models and textures, not the animations and SFXs.

The reason for mobile games outbreak, entirely came from the easy profit it could make. With low cost and easy process, developing a mobile game is way easier than other platforms. You don’t need more than 5 people to make a decent mobile game – and the profit earned later is astronomic.

But in mobile gaming business, the trading methods aren’t that simple. Most of the publishers delude players by the term “Free To Play” – and is there anyone who doesn’t love free stuffs? But the trap will start to esnare you the moment you download the game, indeed.

To earn money, those publishers don’t hesistate to rely on dirty tactics: they take money from other companies who want to place advertisements in the game, and also sell the premium accounts for the players, so that they don’t ever see those advertisement again. Either ways, the publishers gain profit!

Another trick is called “In-App Purchase”. This one is much more dedicate, since it takes advantage on the subconsciousity of the players to hypnotize them. Just make some real challenges in the game that couldn’t be passed without buying something – and sell the “key” to solve that. Ta-da!