GYGO Mobile: Same as It Ever Was

Long time, no see, fellow mobile gamers! I have been so busy and overwhelmed with Life Stuff that I haven’t had a chance to dip my toes into the wild world of mobile gaming news in ages. Let’s go on this journey to find out what’s been going on together.

A lot has happened since you last heard from me, but the attacks on Palestinians continue. Consider donating to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, one of the families or organizations in need at Gaza Funds, or finding more actions to take through Zainabb Hull’s newsletter Crips for Palestine.

Apple Goes to Court Again

I may have been absent for a minute, but the Apple App Store wars continue. Sean Ennis, a competition policy professor from the UK, will lead a class-action lawsuit from app developers seeking repayment of up to £785 million ($995 million USD) for the company’s allegedly anti-competitive 30% commission. Currently, Apple receives a 30% commission from sales made through its proprietary App Store, something that has been under investigation and lawsuits for what feels like ages now.

You might have experienced this yourself with Patreon’s recent switch to a new form of billing to mitigate the 30% fees, or Roblox‘s new system of rewarding players with up to 25% more Robux for purchasing online. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and the App Store’s most vocal critic, praised the move from Roblox.

Can Roblox Fix Its Child Safety Problem?

Speaking of Roblox, LEGO and UNICEF teamed up to produce a series of guidelines for developers to promote well-being among children who play video games. The guidelines include eight key pillars—safety and security, autonomy, competence, emotions, relationships, creativity, identities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion—as well as a number of tools and resources for designing around those principles. In addition, UNICEF and LEGO include business reasons why developers should use the framework, encouraging them to take these frameworks on for a strong return on investment. That UNICEF and LEGO should have to appeal to a strong ROI to encourage game developers to design child-friendly games is… troubling….

But hey, this is the Roblox section! Why am I pointing the finger at them? Why talk about LEGO and UNICEF’s attempts to make games for children safer? Well, buddy, I don’t know where you’ve been, but things have been decidedly not great for children over in Roblox-land, with 13,000+ incidents of child exploitation reported by the company itself in 2023 alone. Hindenburg Research, an investment firm, referred to the game as a “pedophile hellscape.”

Hopefully these new suggestions from UNICEF and LEGO make a difference, though Roblox itself has been implementing some new safety tools of their own. These new tools include remotely accessible parental controls that go beyond spending limits, DM restrictions for children under 13, and a new rating system. Roblox‘s new tools were developed alongside the Family Online Safety Institute and the National Association for Media Literacy Education, and will hopefully make a difference in protecting children on the platform. Roblox experienced user growth of 27% year-over-year in the third quarter of this year.

Roblox is also launching their own chat platform within the game, which is called Party. This will keep players within the platform, but not restricted to chatting in a specific game session, making it easier to plan to play together. Party will launch with text-based messaging and voice will come later. The service will not be available to accounts marked as being younger than 13, in line with the game’s new safety features.

Some New Games I Might Actually Play (if They’re Available for Android)

A Little to the Left, an organizing puzzle game, is out now for Android! It has a free demo! This is a blessing for me, a little neat freak!

Did you love Tamagotchis back in the day? Do you still love Tamagotchis? Great news: Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago—a truly wonderful pun name—is out now! Blending pet-raising games like Tamagotchi and Neopets with RPG mechanics, the game looks like a fun expansion on the mechanics I grew up playing on those annoying little egg-shaped devices.

Meadowfell, an exploration sim game with no combat and a procedurally generated fantasy world to explore, is out now… on iOS only.

Monument Valley 3 is out this week, and features a passionate message about the real-world risks of rising sea levels and flooding. Unfortunately, its partnership with Netflix means it’s only available if you have a subscription.

In other news…

Infinity Nikki, the cross-platform expansion of the longtime mobile franchise, is out now! I haven’t played Love Nikki in ages due to what I can only describe as laziness (no, really—the game feels like a weird amount of work to me?) but I have to say, I’m intrigued by the open world and puzzles—oh, wait, now I see that the description includes “3D platforming,” so perhaps I won’t be playing it after all. Anyway, if you have more patience than I do, it’s out for Android, iOS, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC. An exciting extra: the game’s website was hacked last week (along with the website for Love and Deepsace), replacing the site content with a message about joining a private Genshin Impact Discord server.

Demi Lovato is partnering with PlanetPlay for their Make Green Tuesday Moves campaign. The pop star (I’ve always been a sucker for the pure corniness of their song “La La Land”) will be available as an avatar in games like Subway Surfers and Peridot, with proceeds going to support a number of conservation-focused charities and projects.

A mobile version of Final Fantasy XIV is coming! I honestly cannot fathom what that would be like—it seems both impossible and unpleasant. (I liked my time with FFXIV, for the record, I just don’t have space in my life for big ol’ MMOs anymore.)

Pokémon GO developer Niantic announced a new “Large Geospatial Model (LGM)” of the world. What for? Helping computers understand physical spaces and enabling AR glasses. Oh, and maybe military use and war use. Where’d they get all that data? Your Pokémon GO game data, naturally.

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket made $100 million after just 17 days after its release.

Clash of Clans developer Supercell is releasing a “true crime” podcast following a in-game mystery about a stolen hammer. There’s a lot about this that makes me go, “Huh?” but my favorite bit from the announcement writeup at PocketGamer is this: “The podcast will also feature a special guest appearance from Dr. Leslie Dobson, an expert forensic psychologist who will analyse motives and suspects to help solve the case in time.” Dr. Dobson appears to be a real forensic psychologist who will weigh in on the theft of a fictional hammer. What a world.