Female character? Pay up.ġ2-year-old Madeline Messer was shocked to discover that only 46 percent of the top 50 endless runners on the iTunes app store contained female characters (compared to 98 percent for male characters) - and that only 15 percent of these apps allowed you to play female characters from the outset, without needing to unlock them with some sort of currency - either in-game or via in-app purchase.
More recently, I've been playing the otherwise excellent Spirit Lords, an adventure RPG that can be played either multiplayer or solo - yet there's no offline mode. Midnight Castle is a perfect example - a single-player hidden object game that can't be played offline, at all. This makes it rather vexing when a game, particularly a single-player game, simply won't load unless the device is connected to the internet - rendering the game's "mobile" status completely useless.
And, of course, some users don't want to use up all their data on games.
Additionally, there are times when the connectivity will need to be turned off - flight mode exists for a reason. Not every mobile device has internet connectivity - iPods and some tablets, for example. If you're designing a game for a mobile device, it makes sense that the game is, in fact, mobile.