Edward McMillen from Team Meat has used a recent blog post about the mobile version of Super Meat Boy (officially titled Super Meat Boy: The Game) to attack freemium titles on mobile, which he believes ‘view their audience as dumb cattle’ and offer very little beyond demanding money from the player.

‘There is an ongoing theme these days to use a very basic video game shell and hang a “power up carrot” in front of the player’, McMillen writes, ‘but then the catch… instead of achieving these “goals” by running on the treadmill, you can instead just pay a single dollar and you instantly get to your goal!’

‘Words cannot express how [fudging - Ed] wrong and horrible this is, for games, for gamers and for the platform as a whole… this business tactic is a slap in the face to actual game design and embodies everything that is wrong with the mobile/casual video game scene.’

Thin Slices

Naturally, McMillen is not keen on seeing Team Meat’s debut mobile title conforming to this way of designing a game, saying that the developer was ‘approaching development to SMB:TG with very open eyes’

‘We want to make a game that WE would love to see on the platform, a feature length reflex driven platformer with solid controls that doesn’t manipulate you with business bullsh** in order to cash in’.