I love games, board games, card games, even video games.
I've been thinking a lot about mobile games recently, mostly because I made one, and it’s hard to describe how normal the corruption and evil in this entire genre has become.
Here's how most “free” mobile games work: you download the game, and for the first hour or two, you're drowning in rewards. Coins! Gems! Power-ups!
You reach a new level every thirty seconds. It feels great. Your brain is getting hit with dopamine bursts constantly, and you're left thinking "wow, this is awesome."
Then, things slow down. The rewards get smaller. The levels take longer. The “coins” you were earning have disappeared (but you can buy more to keep playing! $99.99 for 10,000 is the best value!).
You're already invested. What’s a few dollars when you’ve been having so much fun?
Your brain remembers how good those early hits felt, and you want that feeling back.
None of this is accidental. It's a psychological technique that almost every developer is using. They get you hooked when the cost is low, then everything slows to a crawl until paying money seems reasonable to get that feeling back.
It’s the same mechanism that makes almost every vice so enticing. You are chasing the Merge Dragons.
Watch a 30-second ad for 50 gems. Watch another for an extra life. Watch one more to double your rewards. Now it’s time for your mandatory ad break (only $9.99 to remove!)
The ads themselves are just pitches for other mobile games tempting you with another fix. It's a whole ecosystem of deception feeding into itself.
The mobile gaming industry raked in around $90 billion dollars last year, and the vast majority of that came from a small percentage of players.
These are people spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on virtual currency. What’s sick about it is that these games are designed to identify, target and prey upon those people specifically.
Limited time offers that create artificial urgency. Bundle pricing designed to obscure real costs. Premium “currencies” that obfuscate how much you're actually spending. It's all engineered to separate you from your money while making the transaction feel painless.
On top of all this, these “free” games aren’t really the product at all. You are. Your play patterns, your purchase behavior, your location, your browsing habits, all get packaged up and sold to advertisers and data brokers.
The privacy policies are there, buried in thousands of words of fine print that no one reads.
Just take a look at the permissions required to play. Why does a puzzle game need access to your contacts? Your microphone? Your location? Data harvesting is the business model, and your life is the data.
There are developers out there making games with straightforward pricing. Pay once and own the game. They exist, but they're increasingly rare because the exploitative model is so much more profitable (and effective!)
When I built Scripture Cipher, I made a deliberate choice not to include any of this stuff. No ads. No manipulative reward schedules. No data harvesting. Just a puzzle game you can play.
That means I'll never make much from it. I’m not really bothered by that. I’m especially wary of using the Word of God for profit but I also wanted to show that mobile games don’t need to be so bad.
There’s no call to action here. I just thought you should know.