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Showing posts from April, 2018

Reading 08: A Casino in Your Pocket

Mobile games are weird. Think of when you got your first smartphone or tablet (or an iPod Touch if you were like me and had parents who hated fun). I remember eagerly loading up my account with iTunes gift cards and gleefully buying whatever piqued my interest. I was curious so I looked up my download history on the App Store. Back then, games were short and my attention span even shorter. I filled page after page of my iPod's home screen with flash game clones and prototypical free to play titles. It was a simpler time. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird...the list of 'classics' goes on and on. Absolute classics I tell you It's a little hard to trace, but I'd say around 2013-14, the App Store reached peak game saturation. As other parts of the device competed more for our storage space (read: phone cameras stopped sucking) it became much harder to get people into the App Store to download games. Obviously this di