Ramble - Problems with old mobile games!

I don't know about you, but I find it hard to discover great mobile games.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons we've been going back to old mobile games like 'Where's my Water?' (2011), and more recently 'Plants vs. Zombies' (2009).  I don't know if there's a way app stores can be improved to make discoverability better.  To be honest the PS Store is not great, either...  Anyway, since we've been introducing Seb to 'old' mobile games, this set me thinking.

There was an article in April's Edge Magazine (issue 317) about the topic of old iOS games.  These days we don't play iOS games.  We used to have an iPod Touch; these days we're all Samsung Galaxies.  But Android games have the same issues, and indeed different ones (there are so many different spec phones/tablets you could be using, for instance, even before you take into account the version of Android it has).

The article says that in the year 2010 Edge published a list of the top 50 mobile games on iPhone and iPod Touch.  Of those 50, only 10 can still be bought or downloaded today.  Considering that this is the 50 best games available then, you might think that those would be more likely to survive.  If they're that good, there's no reason people wouldn't still be downloading them today.  A lot of people have never played them; a lot of people have grown up in those 8 years!  The disappeared games involve big hitters like Bejeweled 2 (released 2004).  If giant companies are unable to 'fix' their games there's little hope for the Indie people.

According to Edge, another issue with iOS is not only the OS changing, but the increased number of iOS devices that need to be supported (still less than the Android problem, but not good if you went into iOS because it was simpler).  And big technology jumps like the move to 64-bit can be a massive problem.

Obviously games being incompatible with things is not a new thing.  I remember loving my Amiga because things always worked, the same with my PlayStations.  With PCs you had all sorts of daft issues like games being incompatible with graphics/sound cards.  (A veritable minefield!)  But now with Steam and modern Windows games do seem to work better and survive longer.  I look back at games like  Blade Runner (released 1997), now lost to the mists of time, with sadness.  Boy, I loved that game.  And thankfully many of the old classics are coming back.  (Though I hate rebuying things for the millionth time - and I have issues with PlayStations not being backwards compatible.  I guess I'll get over it one day.)

We'll keep playing the old mobile games, as long as they're available.  The only one  that Seb has been sad about is Sandra Boynton's 'Blue Hat, Green Hat'.  We bought a bunch of those Boynton books and this is the only one that has stopped working, after the Android Lollipop update c.2015.  I e-mailed the company, but no reply.  And they're still selling it, years after it stopped working.  There are loads of sad people reviewing it on Google Play.  I don't know why it's still on the store.  Investigation reveals the app's maker 'Loud Crow' last tweeted 3 years ago, so I suspect they're no longer around to support their apps.  The money must be going somewhere though, presumably!

In conclusion, this is the issue - either people leave stuff on the app store and it stops working and makes people grumpy, or they wholesale remove stuff that might not work any more.  And that makes people grumpy too.  Perhaps some way to flag which devices/version of Android apps will work on, generated by users, would be good.  It would be horribly complicated, though.  The current compatibility flag appears to be configured by the app maker.  Which isn't so useful if they've disappeared.

I don't know what the answer is.  But the situation doesn't make me very happy.