So as someone who had a torrid two week love affair with Clash Royale, and as someone who generally respects that GOTY lists are personal choices, I really have a problem with putting it on a GOTY list.
The thing I'm always skeptical about with F2P titles is how they manipulate people's psychology to drive monetization. Most games do this through Skinner box stuff (and Clash is no exception), but Clash Royale also works off negativity. Your advancement and ability to get more cards is tied to your ability to win repeatedly. Your ability to win is tied to your skill, but also to the level of your cards. You always know when your opponent has better stuff than you do. If you lose your way out of a ranking tier, you can't open more units of that level from chests. You need to win to get chests, but every time you lose to someone who has invested more than you, you can see all of their overleveled cards as they spam laughing king emoticons at your face. It's a game that can feel very, very unfair.
But losing is meant to suck, because if you're mad you're more likely to feel the need to invest in the game. Supercell is so committed to this that they originally made it impossible to mute communication from your opponents, because they want to
"evoke strong emotions". Apparently they
changed their mind about this recently, which I didn't know until just now because I quit the game and uninstalled it from my phone months ago.
The battles are designed really well. They're both simple to play and surprisingly deep. But I bailed on it because I realized I was structuring my life around when my chests could open, just so I could have a little fun sometimes and get really pissed off the rest of the time. If the price I have to pay for a game being free is a design structured around introducing negativity into my life, that's a shitty tradeoff. Especially for a list built "with an eye toward the cathartic, the purifying, and even, at times, the edifying."
