There are many wishes I have that are more important, but one of them is to get everybody who has run Google Play into a room so I can give them a powerpoint presentation about how they are all morons.
Google Play and Android represent by far the largest gaming platform on earth it is infeasible, unconscionable, and irredeemable that such a platform has failed so catastrophically to curate high quality games, curate a cottage industry of game reviewers and make prospective buyers feel confident that the games they are looking at in the store aren’t scams or just crap.
Before MiniReview it was like walking blindfolded through a grocery store trying to find the item you wanted by randomly grabbing things and trying them.
How do these people call themselves business people? Google has left SO MUCH MONEY ON THE TABLE HERE it is hard for me to actually comprehend. I know mobile gaming IS massive as it is but the industry could be so much bigger and the games could be so much less predatory.
Why, when I want to spend money on a premium game will the Google Play store funnel free ad-ridden crapware games at me instead of letting me browse more premium games? It feels like trying to buy expensive frontrow seats at a concert and having the ticketperson downsell you crappier seats that blare advertisements at you in the hope that you might be the 1 in a 100 person that will become hopelessly addicted to a system of microtransactions that make the experience marginally better by muting the ads slightly and making the musical performance go faster.
Google owns Youtube, the largest video game and board game review platform on the internet, why has it not managed to nurture and encourage a whole range of content creators who bring value to Youtube AND Google Play by reviewing games?
It is because Google thinks it can do everything with AI, with automation, it is that the execs at companies like Google have a terminal case of the brainworms where they just CANNOT see human beings as valuable without placing them in an exploitive context.
In reality what Google has done is train people not to think things in their store are valuable enough to buy, and it is pathetic. I realize I throw this word around a lot but in this case there is no other word for it. I will spend 5$, 10$ on a good quality premium video game, I don’t care if it is on my phone or on my steam deck or whatever. Google play won’t ever even show those premium games to me, it just clogs the search results with shit free-to-play adware microtransaction traps.
You answered your own question in your last paragraph.
The market is simply to concentrated and institutions are too corrupt for any real competition.
as my first experience with this website, the biggest complaint is already the review selection. Games I play on the daily that I would add a review or comment on don’t seem to be listed on the platform, and the UI is unclear if its even possible to request a game or add a game. I assume it’s because the site is based off a “curators” type of system but, they don’t make it very clear. My second complaint was how obscure it seems finding game tags are. Like I had to search the tag instead of having a bunch of tags that I could pick through like most other content platforms(eventually I did find the “tags” area but it’s hidden from the main page).
Honestly I like it, and it seems promising though. I have downloaded it myself and if the game exists I’ll review it but, yea… it doesn’t seem like they provide a decent way of contributing to the platform which makes it hard to really integrate into like how the play store is
