The mobile stores are very good at surfacing games with large marketing budgets and much worse at surfacing games you will still be enjoying in a fortnight. These are not the same set, and the gap between them is where most people's disappointment comes from.
You cannot fix the charts. You can get much better at reading a listing.
Read the purchase list before the description
Both stores publish the in-app purchases a game offers. It is usually below the fold and it is the most informative part of the page, because a description is marketing and a price list is structural.
- A single unlock price and nothing else means the game is finished and you are buying it. This is increasingly rare and usually a good sign.
- Cosmetic items and a season pass means the game is funded by people who want to look different, not by people who want to win. Generally benign.
- A currency ladder — small, medium, large, and one considerably larger — means the game is designed around converting money into progress. Not automatically bad, but you should expect the pace to be tuned around it.
- Timer skips and energy refills near the top of the list tell you the game will stop you from playing and offer to sell you the fix.
What the first twenty minutes tell you
Give a new game one focused session and pay attention to interruptions rather than to whether you are enjoying it. Enjoyment in the first twenty minutes is nearly guaranteed — that part is heavily designed. The interruptions are the signal.
Count how many times it stopped you
Full-screen offers, forced tutorials that will not let you skip, unskippable ads, a bar that emptied. Each one is a decision someone made about your session.
Check whether you can play again immediately
If the answer is no, the game has a schedule and you are on it. Decide whether you want that before you invest.
Look for the first purchase prompt
A game confident in itself waits. A prompt in the first ten minutes, especially a discounted one with a countdown, tells you where the design effort went.
Ask what happens when you are bored
The good outcome is that you stop and come back when you want to. The bad one is that you feel obliged to open it tomorrow to avoid losing something.
Categories worth looking in
Some kinds of mobile game are structurally more likely to respect your time, simply because of how they are funded.
- Paid games and premium ports
- You buy it, you own it, nobody needs you to come back. Often the best value on a phone despite the up-front price.
- Subscription catalogues
- Both platforms have them. The games in them are funded without in-app purchases, which changes their design incentives entirely.
- Puzzle and strategy games with a fixed amount of content
- A finite game can be finished, which is a feature. Live-service design exists specifically to avoid that.
- Cosmetic-only competitive games
- The good end of free-to-play: the money is real but it does not buy an advantage over you.
One habit worth keeping
When you uninstall something, take ten seconds to note why. Too many ads, too slow without paying, ran badly, simply not for you. After a handful of these you will recognise the pattern in a store listing before you install — which is the whole skill.
