1333: Passé

Considering how exciting the iPhone was when it first launched, I’m surprised how unmoved I am by the prospect of the new ones. At present, my 4S is still working just fine, and for the first time in many years of phone upgrades, I’m feeling no particular desire to have the latest and greatest piece of technology in my pocket.

I think part of the reason is what I’ve already said: my 4S is working fine, still — though it remains to be seen whether iOS 7 will kill its performance — and thus I certainly don’t need a new phone. The other part is the fact that smartphone upgrades each year have become so incremental that it’s just not particularly exciting any more — the new iPhone looks much like the old iPhone, and will probably work much like the old iPhone, except perhaps a bit faster, depending on what it is you’re doing.

One reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone, iPad, whatever would be if you’re a big game player on these devices. And I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I’m just not.

This may surprise you, given the amount of waffling on about games that I do on this here blog, but it’s true: I haven’t played an iOS game for probably months now, and every time I look at the App Store, I have very little desire to even try a lot of the stuff that churns its way through the front page and into the abyss beyond, never to be seen again.

There’s the odd exception; I still have something of a soft spot for the various excellent iOS versions of board and card games, but in most cases I’d rather play the real thing. For the most part, though, iOS gaming carries little to no interest for me; it’s not for me any more. It is, instead, for children, or people who aren’t particularly “game-literate”, or people who don’t mind increasingly obtrusive business models. There’s relatively little with any “meat”, though; nothing you can get stuck into for hours at a time, and in fact an awful lot of games are specifically designed to stop you from playing after a short while by causing you to run out of “energy” or “fuel”, or for your car to require “repairing” — and, of course, you can instantly get back into the game if you’d just hand over your credit card details… No, thank you.

I’m probably painting a somewhat unfair picture of the iOS landscape there, since I know there’s a lot of talented developers working on the platform — some out of necessity, some out of choice — but I’m sort of over the idea of mobile gaming, for now at least. There are too many exciting things going on on other platforms — including dedicated gaming handhelds — for me to muster up any enthusiasm for a platform prone to making really, really stupid collective decisions when it comes to the way games should be made.

Perhaps I’ll revisit mobile gaming if it ever emerges from the free-to-play rut it’s currently stuck in, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon.