I’m not following the hate train on mobile games. I don’t get it: with games like Honky Star Rail and Pokemon GO, which people obviously love and spend money playing, it doesn’t make sense. If the objective measure is financial success or just popularity, phone games win; if you disagree that these are the measures of a good game, tell that to the industry because they don’t care about your subjectivity.
Is this just a case of old gamers being jealous and gate keeping their time-waster hobbies?
For the same reason people shun gambling: They are designed to be addictive and rob you of something. Usually money via microtransactions, lately by being very cheap, regurgitated copies of other shitty games developing attention-deficit time waste black holes via a ton of ubiquitous daily rewards. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of games can have these aspects but these types of games look like they are completely designed to abuse these aspects all the way while offering almost nothing else.
Success in entertainment can be considered from a lot of angles: Financial success, being acclaimed by critics, being able to form a niche but tightly-knit community, being a rare supplier of a niche genre, gaining world-wide renown, etc. Being hated and considered a shitty game usually comes in the form of how badly they are written, how much they abuse addictive mechanisms, how much of a copy they are, and if they mainly target vulnerable children or teenagers with these abusive mechanics.
Think of having your spouse/family member forming a real gambling addiction or a football obsession that they will spend a whole bunch of money on these or spend a lot of hours a day only talking about these.
People don’t shun gambling. It’s a widely celebrated human pastime that exists in every land, every country, every little burrow and bungalow; hell, even when states try to ban gambling, someone comes along with a cruise ship, packs it with gambling machines and spinning tables, and takes it right off the coast into international waters so that they can continue to gamble.
And all video games are designed to be addictive, and they all rob you of something: your time, specifically. And time is more valuable than money, in fact, money is largely a unit of time measurement.
Regarding gacha, they are designed to be as addicting as possible with a direct line to your wallet, but to me this seems just an aspect of their specific genre; a widely popular genre that many seem to enjoy. Instead of paying $60 bucks and maybe losing hundreds of hours of your life, or maybe not playing the game much at all because you didn’t like it; you pay nothing up front ans can choose to invest more money if you enjoy the game. I don’t see it as worse, only different from the classic-gaming model.
These are each offshoots of popularity; and your list goes from most popular to less popular respectively.
I don’t see it as being much different than a gaming “addiction,” which seems to be rampant in our society – gacha or not.
Gambling is a widespread activity, sure. But mostly when gambling and addiction is mentioned together, people don’t go for most types. A little wager among friends is gambling? Sure. Playing numbers from time to time? Alright a little charm. Organizing or attending a poker night among friends? Have fun, but don’t overdo it. A holiday trip to Vegas? Limit yourself to a budget and don’t go over it. You wanna be a regular member in a gambling den? Get your shit together. You are going on a cruise with gambling included so you don’t wanna let the government get a wind of your activities? What a naughty rich boy.
Going by all video games to be addictive, I’m going to assume you never played a proper story game without a grind element. By that logic of something simply having you spend time being an addictive activity, you can even call walking an addictive activity. A lot of games offer something novel, fresh or progressive value to them that makes them worth spending time on. Play a story game like Bioshock? You are in a world of treat with a book-like story telling that is also mixed together with engagement-enchancer elements like fps mechanics and abilities that will only take about 15-20 hours. Go with an RPG that is not just a dress-up or level-up, Disco Elysium for example? Your existential faculties are stretched to the edge for 50 hours. Hell, even go with Factorio. You will be playing a glorified lego game that helped you develop creativity and object grouping in your childhood, only with the adult version of that called engineering. These will not ask of you a specifically and horribly lengthened grind just to see purple sparks instead of yellow sparks. Especially in that these don’t have facsimiles like the most mobile gacha, moba, “rpg”, card, or similar other Korean or Chinese games pour out of a conveyor belt. You can enjoy playing these games, but don’t ask for praise or acceptance as they are as repetitive and ubiquitous as breathing or watching Windows XP screen savers.
Also, if we are going to count critical acclaim, community, genre differences, financial success simply as popularity, we would have facial mask producers as the most popular industry in the previous years, have some film received badly by critics be never heard of or vica versa, have only superhero films and no art film festivals, and only invest in gambling ever in all work efforts. These are all different aspects a game development company will consider, at least if they are not focused on solely financial success as shown in regurgitated gacha games.
As for gaming addiction, yes it is not different from playing gacha games or shiny copy paste games, really. These years, there are thousands of games that a gamer will hear or see of per year and be piqued about a hundred of them probably. Gacha games are alike in this regard: They will pour out tens of daily activities that will keep a gamer hooked all day long, same as those hundred games a year will keep another gamer on the hook all year long. This is only on the time aspect, tho. With gacha games, you get regurgitated daily missions one after the other; with 100 different games, you get at least 10 novel ones out of them and probably will play about 75 with a somewhat fresh aspect to them, and the game development industry is not a monolith on what games to release and profit from every year, unlike the gacha game maker being solely responsible for what daily activities to regurgitate and profit from.