Maybe this has been beaten to death before already, but what the heck is up with the game categories on mobile gaming. The ones we have now on both ios is android are throwbacks to platforms we've long moved away from. Why for the love of all that is holy isn't there a 'Match 3' category, or a 'One-touch Reaction' category. It's bad enough that you can't search the app store by the rating score (yay appshopper!), but you can't even depend on being able to browse the outdated categories that we DO have. The categories we have now are flooded with games that barely fit into them, if they fit at all, which makes them next to useless. With ios8, the new suggested search thing across the top that shows up doesn't even help with this. For example try "Candy Crush" as a search and you'd think it would suggest 'match 3' to you, but no. How has apple not addressed this already? It seems so obvious. Am I alone in this?
Both of the categories you suggested sound far too specific for me, personally. Match 3 specifically refers to one game's gameplay, not a genre - not sure there is enough diversity there to deserve its own category.
Its not anymore specific than "racing" or "word", I think. And what's so bad about specific categories? Quite helpful if you are looking for a specific game type, like "this game is good but could be better, I wonder how I can find games similar to this that might be better??" Related games used to do that but is kinda broken nowadays too.
The problem is that it takes enough scrolling as it is to make your way through the categories. If every type of gameplay got it's own category, where do we draw the line? Bird-flinging fort destroyers? Pachinko clones with cartoon animals? Tessel-based fort building sandboxes? The list could go on forever if we segregated games that finely. Racing games have the potential for a lot of variety in gameplay. Downhill racers like Angry Birds Go are far different than simulation racers like Real Racing which is far different from combat racers like Wipeout - it's a genre with variety. Match 3s are all basically match 3s. They haven't changed much since Bejeweled. Not sure there's enough to warrant a category. Now, Apple's curated "If you like Minecraft" type things are a different story. I love the idea of those, and I'd like to see Apple do more of that type of thing. And a better way to sort them. But I think that's as far as it should go, personally.
It would be nice to see that fleshed out. We don't need to call it categories, genre if you prefer...but obviously it would be nice to be able to look up ONLY endless runners, if you are hankering for a good endless runner. I mean, theres no arguing against the idea that some mobile game genres that have emerged that could definitely use to be called out. There's even a lot of diversity in the matching genre.
Well not that I would argue against better organization. I just had a frustrating time "hiding" my purchases and "unhiding" some. It seem so off-putting that I can't make one list for games that I want and another list for games for my son on the same account. Navigating AppStore and iTunes can often be a pain. HOWEVER! I would much rather Apple spend time engineering the best hardware and OS combination for the next device as well as first party integration apps than worrying about how to sort apps in iTunes. Big picture wise, there are sites such as Toucharcade, Appshopper and other 3rd party web presences capable of handling your app sorting need. Why not let them handle it and having Apple working on making the next best iPad or Apple Pay security, etc etc? Apple is a software company, let them develop the next big thing. I would not want them to be bogged down by relatively minor annoyances like the sorting and categories in iTunes.
The App Store IS software. UX design is a huge part of software design. And they can afford to hire a few hundred people to dedicate to anything they want, I don't think you need to worry about them running out of R&D resources of any kind. Lol. Ios8 adds that whole family itunes account plan thing. Not sure how that will impact your personal issue there. I guess it just worked more like shopping on Amazon, where you can drill down to very specific types of stuff, if you choose to.
But you can search for specific genres in the app store by just typing the genre you're searching for into the search bar? I always search for genres this way like "mmorpg, dungeon crawler, etc." and the results are spot on imo. I'm not sure about that but I guess developers can add tags to their games? At least it seems like this way to me. Or did I miss something here?
Nekku, I don't know how well that works, or how it works. I wouldn't thnk to search like that when there's categories to browse through. To know that the categories are completely broken is just a matter of looking at them. If you go into Categories>Games>RPG, there's barely a REAL rpg in the lot. Soooo much flotsam to sift through to find an actual RPG game. I dunno. I give up. I understand why it hasn't been fixed when I have to argue so vehemently for even the NEED to fix it, on a mobile game forum of all places. LOL.
