All mobile games garbage?

It's Sturgeon's Law at its finest. I stopped gaming on the smartphone because aside from Hearthstone i simply wasn't satisfied with nothing available on the Play Store.

More or less the last sentence. We like to complain about Steam being a cesspool of cheap no-effort cash-grab junk fake games, but in reality, the magnitude of the issues with this on Steam is a drop in the ocean compared to the mobile gaming market, where even larger and known companies release some of the worst garbage ever. Games that make zero effort to hide their constant incessant money begging that only satisfy the studio for a mere second before it begs for even more, like the infamous Dungeon Keeper mobile, are dime a dozen. Currently probably the best formula in mobile gaming is the return of the shareware/demo system, where you can play the first x% of the game freely, then it presents a "buy me" screen.

When the game is free or sold for a few bucks, it's natural the game will have some form of micro-transaction to monetize it. And the fact that different people can clone your game means that the market is flooded with similar apps, which doesn't help either.

I don't agree with that entirely. While it's true that most of the popular games seem to be ridiculous cashgrabs and often carbon copies of others, there's a few pretty sweet gems in there. Most of them ports of amazing PC games where you might've thought "Hey, this would make a pretty great app!" like Enchanted Dungeon 2, AQ3D, Runestone Keeper... And there's a few where I feel the developers poured their heart into the game to make it unique and fun, like Gumballs & Dungeons or Soul Knight.

i loved ridiculous fishing, and i also like Alto's Adventure

Not all of them, but the good ones are just really difficult to find due to the huge number of games available. Not to mention Google Play has awful search engine making it harder to find things you're interested in.

Then again it depends on what kind of games you're looking for. If you're only interested in games with outstanding and complicated mechanics and huge amount of depth then you're unlikely to find those on mobile. If you're looking for simple and fun action or puzzle games then there are some.

Here are some of my favorites, some are free and some are paid:

Free: Soul Knight, Blades of Brim, Jetpack Joyride, ENYO, Cardinal Quest, Once Upon a Tower, Tower Fortress
Paid: Siralim 2, Sproggiwood, Hoplite (can try for free, have to pay to unlock full game)

I do agree as well, with the exception of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Been playing that for almost 2 years and I STILL haven't completed it. Then again, it's still ongoing so.....

You definitely won't find the best games amongst the top ranked one. They all advertise between each other where downloading and playing the other app will give you rewards in the game you were already playing. Many free games do that, hoping to get players paying to be profitable.

The only thing that can really work well on mobile is strategy, puzzle and casual. It really depends on what you're looking for in a game.
Personally I have a few games I really love. Mahjong, slither.io, Candy Crush and Star Link would all fall into the casual "one round" category. But I also have two storydriven ones where you get to further the story everyday a little bit and be entertained by another medium.

You will find the most treasure out of ports though, no matter whether they came from mobile or PC. I often see indie games I know from Steam in my Playstore recommendations and the only reason I don't get them on my phone is because I already own them. But they are really good and especially slow-paced puzzle games translate really well in my opinion.

Every once in a while I manage to find a nice litle indie game that's decent on the play store, but indeed you need to look through multiple store pages to find a game that looks to be worth a try and even then it's 50/50 bet.
If you want a safer aproach you can go with whatever shows up in a humble bundle, I haven't bought a mobile bundle in like... over a year maybe? But I've yet to find any game in my humble library that's complete trash like what you can find on the play store.
If you want games from big publishers you might be screwed tho, it looks like those companies gave up and just push micro transaction infested shovelware nowadays.

Honestly, there's a lot of hot garbage on the Play store. only games I found and I've been having fun with are Clash of Clans and Idle Heroes. Also my phone just wanted to autocorrect heroes to herpes. Glad I caught that one before I posted lol

It's mostly what nhahtdh said, but there are exceptions.
The thing is, the nature of the platform promotes F2P and P2W trash - how much are you willing to pay upfront for a mobile game?

Personally, I can recommend Reigns (which you could argue is a PC port, but it's design says otherwise), Monument Valley, Hocus and Lara Croft/Hitman/Deus Ex GO.

Linia, Klocki, Hocus and Zenge are also quite fine, but they're for specific taste (all are minimalistic logical games)

I've also heard good things about Million Onion Hotel and Bury Me, My Love

There is a huge quality gap between free to play and 2-3$ games on android. And play store is useless, just google for some lists or forums for what they consider best games, and check them out. For every at least good game there are like 20 hot garbage in the store, sadly.
Games like Guild of Dungeoneering; Cook, Serve, Delicious ; Zenge, Klocki, Hook and such that I found the best so far. Keep in mind the limits of the platform, games that plan around it are the best - that don't require precision, and can utilize touch controls nicely. For this reason turn based games are basically fully realized games, that lose nothing compared to PC.

I never played a good mobile game.

These are all good games:

The Quell series
Reigns and Her Majesty
The GO games: Lara Croft, Hitman, Deus Ex
Monument Valley
Elder Signs: Omen
80 Days
Prune
2048

And then there's the Steve Jackson games: Sorcery! and the Wizard of Magic Mountain or whatever it's called. Not sure if those are ports from the PC, but they are better suited to the phone

Of course, none of the games above are all that complex. But, Quell are good puzzles with a well-paced escalation of dificulty. The Reigns games are delightful! The GO series are good puzzles. Monument Valley is beautiful. Elder Signs is a good mobile version of a board game. 80 days is kind of a repetitive choose your own adventure. Nice atmosphere though. Pruce is cute. 2048 is a nice puzzle. The Sorcery! and Wizard games are the most complicated, but even they are simple as rpg adventure fantasy things go. But they are well made and quality for what they are.

But... but... Cytus D:

I'd also say Neko Atsume as a half-joke, but damn, I love cats.

Do you buy them? If so, then I'm sorry you've found such trash.
The problem with the current mobile gaming industry is that people expect shit to be free. Rockstar releases quality ports for mobile for only 5-10€ and people have the gall to say "too expensive" or "why isn't it free". To those people I'd say that they're choosing beggars. The lowest of the low when it comes to consumers. Having a full PC title in the palm of your hand to play while you're in a nightclub getting beaten up by bouncers is nothing short of a miracle. And now instead of just supporting this type of cool development, people just bitch and moan. We have goddamn PS2 games on phones now. Even some older computers are having troubles running PS2 emulated games.

And now because of the demand for "free" titles, developers are going for new streams of revenue, meaning that they need to force people to buy microtransactions. So instead of a flat purchase price, you now have a system that is designed to exploit you psychologically so you'd stay addicted and break off any relationships that would stop you from playing your game. And because of that, it's now started to seep into paid games too. What came in the way wasn't greed from the developers, it was the greed of dumb Facebook moms and children who shouldn't be playing on their phones 24/7 anyways.

The mobile market is a mess and I hate the greedy morons that made it so.

Yeah, it's hard to find a good mobile game.

I played a few that I liked a lot, if you'd like some inspiration:
Card Thief
Thief Lupin
Thief Lupin 2 (the first one is better, in my opinion)
Obslashin
Brave Hand
Hitman GO & Deus Ex GO
Summoners War (p2w, but is very generous with handing out premium currency. Had mild to moderate issues with cheaters)

Seems like a good thread for some shameless self-promotion. Our studio has recently released Shadowgun Legends, despite some shortcomings I consider it fun FPS looter shooter (with Destiny vibe). No energy, no pay walls, IAPs primarily for cosmetics. I ran a thread here with updates and GAs but as we had to delay the release time after time I kinda dropped it. :F

There are good games but they are a few and far between. My personal favoruite:

Battle Gems
Crystal Story 2(though its on PC now too)
Dungeon Delver
Dungeon Quest
Dungeon Village(most Kairosoft games are good)
Old Man's journey(I think its on PC too)
Rule with an Iron Fish

But whenever I go through the play store to find a good game, you will most often find trash with MTX going up to 100 euros or same trash but hidden behind paywal but now, for limtied time, offered for free.

The only 3 games I ever seriously played on Android were Temple Run, Ski Safari and Deadly Dungeons. All the other ones I tried I hated.
If I want to play on the go, I'd rather use my DS and have real buttons and d-pad. And real games.

Top charts is often filled with games from publishers who have money for large promo campaigns. You can be sure those game are filled with micro-transactions.

As with anything, you often get what you pay for. Outside of a few exceptions, don't expect too many quality games for free unless they can be monetized either with in-app purchases or ads.

Here are a few of my personal favorites. Some of them might be to your liking.

• Battleheart
• Riptide GP
• Riptide GP2
• Starlink
• Arkanoid vs Space Invaders

stop searching here is a free game (without p2w stuff)

I don't play many mobile games, most of them are at least bad, but still I like Marvel Future Fight pretty much. As f2p player you can do almost everything, but progress will take much more time than being vip. It has some subscriptions for aquirering premium characters that are mostly better than other characters in game, but they are not required to be efficient. Also I starter playing new game DC Unchained (region-locked atm, but you can use vpn to install it) and it also looks good for me.

Pirating is bad... that being said, let all BlackLists commence:
I got myself DraStic DS Emulator and it was the best purchase ever ^^ Why bother playing shitty games from mobile market, when you can play actually genuine and good games from another handheld? That being said it won't work great for everything ofc - emulated touch controls will suck in fast action-oriented games, precise platformers etc so these are out of question, unless you hase controller supporting smartphone, but DS library has lots of great turn based jRPGs, tactical games, strategies, adventure games, visual novels and so on and on, which all works great this way. There is also limited number of games that got designed with DS touch controls in mind instead of controller buttons, and these also work great on SmartPhone (I am playing one such game myself atm on phone, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, I disabled controller in DraStic and playing it on touchscreen only, and it's a great fun ^^)