Popular Mobile Games and Their Effects
Gameplay of Flappy Bird.
One of the most consistent pieces of technology that everybody uses in our daily lives is our cell phones. And something that comes with our phones is the opportunity to download and play games. As the school year is coming to an end and people are getting tired of class, more and more people have been playing mobile games. It may just depend on what class you’re stuck in, but what is it that makes mobile games so addicting?
Over the years, there have been many mobile games that have come and gone with a large boost of popularity. One game in particular that comes to mind is Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird was a very simple game where the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between columns of green pipes without hitting them. The app was a huge hit and it got everyone from kids to adults were playing it. It got more and more addictive every time you played it trying to beat your previous record.
When bringing Flappy Bird up to Moeller student Danny Dunlop he said, “Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that game. My best memory was playing this game in my grade school cafeteria with all of my buddies and seeing who could get the highest score.” However, the app was removed from every online app store, after only being launched for a little over a year. The creator, Dong Nguyen, reportedly felt guilty of how addictive the game had become. Thought Flappy Bird was removed, it paved the way from many other mobile games that had a similar play style. According to Business of Apps, in Flappy Bird’s prime, advertising revenue equivalent to $18 million per year on annualized basis with 50 million downloads by January 2014.
Graph about the revenue earned from Among Us. Found on SensorTower
Another more recent mobile game that had a large spark was Among Us. Among Us is an online multiplayer game that you can wither play with your friends or with random people. The point of the game is that there are two roles assigned to everyone at the beginning of the game, “crewmate” and “imposter”. The objective of the crewmates is to either complete the various tasks given to you or to find the hidden identity of the imposters and convince other crewmates to vote for the real imposter. The objective of imposter is to kill off all of the crewmates before they discover you or complete their tasks.
Among Us is a game that you could play with a large group of friends that would let you have fun, and it allowed you to get to know someone better by the way they played the game. The only downfall of Among Us is that is got quite repetitive, and the more experience you had playing the game it got easier for one of the two teams. According to SensorTower, downloads of the game in August 2020 reached 18.4 million and then downloads in September 2020 were more than 42 million. From august 2020 to Member 2020, Among Us made around $50 million in just those months.
On the other hand, there have been many mobile games that have been a huge it and have stayed for the long haul. One of these games is Clash of Clans. Clash of Clans is an online game where the player builds up their own village with having the option to team of with other people in a clan to compete and raid other people’s villages allowing them the steal resources and build up their own base faster. Clash of Clans came out in August 2, 2012 and over the years it continuously is being updated. To this day adding new content and making it more fun for the player.
A part of Clash of Clans that makes it so addicting is that it has a time limit on pretty much everything. From upgrading a building, to training an army, the part that makes it addicting is that you can’t wait for the timer to complete and have that upgrade immediately.
When discussing with fellow classmates, the prevailing sentiment is that Clash of Clans is a game that you can only play for a certain amount of time before getting sick of it. Many admitted that it’s possible to come back months later to pick up where you left off. Moeller student Preston Kells said, “I just recently started playing Clash of Clans again and I am having a lot of fun playing with all of my friends at school.” According to BusinessofApps since its launch, clash of Clans has brought in over $6.4 billion worldwide.
Infographic about the addictiveness of games. Found on Superdevresources
In addition to being fun to play, the most popular mobile games have one thing in common: they are made to become addicting. There are many tactics that the game creators and programmers install into the game to make the player desire it even more. One of these tactics is a time limit, you have to wait to continue playing. Its like being put in timeout, and the longer you have to wait to continue the more that crave builds up.
Another addictive aspect of mobile games is the positive reinforcement. A lot of games have cool animations or voices come on when you accomplish something. This tactic targets the brain’s reward system and floods it with dopamine making us feel happy. Another tactic is that the game never ends. The game developers are always creating new updates and you can always come back for more. So in effect, the game is designed to be an endlessly repeating dose of happy put into our brains. The more we play, the more we want to play.
Though these games being addictive is good for the creators, it is not so good for the player. Many of these games are free to download. One way for the developers to make an even bigger profit off of these “free” games is microtransactions. They make it easier to progress and play the mobile game buy the in game add-ons and they make it easily accessible by having popups and advertisements show up on your screen. An example of a game where microtransactions are big is Clash of Clans. They have an in came currency that speeds up the upgrading time of the game and speeds up the process of the game, but they only way of getting this currency is to buy it with real money.
Another example of in game purchases is ad removals. This is more targeted to the high score type games like flappy bird, where there isn’t any way you can boost your game play, they spam you with advertisements. for some people they get fed up with all of the ads and they pay whatever amount of money it is to remove the advertisements.