On the endless repeating of mobile games

After three years, my first generation Moto G phone was dying. I needed to upgrade, and now I have this awesome Honor 5C. Great phone, comes with the most features for its £125 price tag and it means I can finally run some new apps on my phone, with its 8gb onboard memory and up to 128gb SD Card slot, if I need it. Of course, my first stop was looking at games, something I hadn’t had on my phone for a looong time.

But as I looked though the Play Store, because I’m an Android fangirl, I realised something. There is so much… repeating going on. Repeating, copying, duplicating… Basically, most games out there are copies or duplicates or whatever of other games.

For example, I was looking at a flying sim game. This one was a plane one, but the company had also made a bunch of other flying simulator games – a flying motorbike, a flying car, a dragon, a hang glider, a helicopter, and so on. I checked out the normal one and the dragon one and they were basically identical apart from models and cosmetic changes. Worse, the stupid apps had adverts everywhere. I had been playing the dragon one for less than thirty seconds and already two adverts popped up for their other, identical games. Let’s just say, that one got uninstalled fast. And thanks to my new Honor 5C, uninstalling apps is REAL easy. It’s also a piece of piss to leave negative reviews with my lovely 2gb of ram.

I then decided to look at Pokemon GO. My old phone simply wasn’t compatible, but this was an app I always kinda wanted. I have it installed but I haven’t actually found anything yet apart from my starter Charmander. Mostly because I live in the middle of nowhere. But again, as I installed Pokemon GO, I saw a ton of copies and similar games, all doing the same thing and clearly trying to cash in on Pokemon Go’s success. There were all sorts – puppies, dinosaurs, dragons (clearly influenced by previous searches), kittens, pixel pokemon, Minecraft pokemon, everything. All of which functioned the same way Pokemon GO does, using your GPS, your camera, some sort of pokeball mechanic and random number generators.

Afterwards I went and installed Worms 2: Armageddon, which I had purchased years ago, and is still my only Play Store purchase. The exact same thing. Hundreds of recommendations of games that all played similarly. All somewhat copying the Team 17 official games. The screenshots all looked similar, the playstyle was similar, it was people just cashing in on the success of a popular game.

Afterwards, I did a search just using the term ‘dragon’. I noticed two things – firstly, there are so many variants of the “collect pet animals and build your village” theme. Not just for dragons, but anything vaguely alive and collectible. All with similar cartoony art styles.

The second thing I noticed was just how many copy and paste games there were by the SAME companies. For example, there is one game I found called Dragon Sim. It’s pretty mediocre, but the adverts aren’t too bad (one every 3-5 mins plus optional ones to earn in-game currencies) and it’s better than Dragon the Game. But this game was just one of many X Sim games made by the same company. The pause menu says it best, with links to their three top games – two which look identical and one that probably plays exactly like Dragon Sim but with fiery birds rather than flying reptiles. This company wasn’t even the worst offender, this stuff is everywhere!

After all that, I don’t really know what to think. If anything, I’m almost kinda scared to go looking too deeply.

I mean, I get it, people make apps to make money. I totally get that. You see it in other places as well, of course people will try cash in on popular things. But… it’s insanity out there. How do any of these companies make any money with such a flooded market?

Either way, I suppose they win in the end, considering the number of ads I’ve sat through in the course of writing this article…