Games studios for simple, inexpensive no subscription apps?

January 6, 2024 1:30 PM

There are few games I would like to get offline apps for - mostly card games like Euchre and Spider Solitaire. I don't mind paying $5 or even $10 for these kinds of games but I am not willing to pay an ongoing subscription fee or look at advertising after every hand. It is impossible to sort through the zillions of options in Android so I am wondering if there are game studios that specifically make these kinds of inexpensive games that I could look for.
posted by jacquilynne to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Do you have a Netflix subscription? Have you looked at their mobile games? I like them because they don't have microtransactions because Netflix.
posted by fiercekitten at 5:52 PM on January 6

Response by poster: They don't have the games I am hoping to find, unfortunately.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:47 PM on January 6

I'm not sure if you'll find the specific games or the level of polish there that you're looking for, but if you're on Android I'd recommend downloading F-Droid, which is an app repository for free open source apps (which are generally made and shared by people who believe in open source rather than people trying to get rich off of apps). There are apparently 1093 apps currently on there, of which all of 30 have ads, and that's noted on the entry for each app.

It's generally a nice place to look for apps for basic things that aren't going to be tracking you and advertising to you in a million ways.
posted by trig at 2:59 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I've found that Dark Pattern Games is a decent place to look for games that don't do these sorts of subscription or advertising tricks.
posted by Aleyn at 5:04 PM on January 9

(I should clarify that Dark Pattern Games lists both good and bad games, but they provide crowdsourced info on whether the game includes dark/anti-patterns.)
posted by Aleyn at 5:09 PM on January 9