This isn't about the complexity of the game or how much battery it drains while playing. This is about you setting your tablet down for half an hour with the game paused, then coming back to find it has drained half your battery unnecessarily. Or you switch out to check your email, get distracted, and find that the running game has drained half your battery unnecessarily.
Android has an Activity lifecycle for a reason, and these games do not respect that. Users should not be worrying themselves with managing resources. If your game gets shoved out of the foreground, it should have the good graces to save its state and allow the device to sleep, like every other app on the system.
> This isn't about the complexity of the game or how much battery it drains while playing. This is about you setting your tablet down for half an hour with the game paused, then coming back to find it has drained half your battery unnecessarily. Or you switch out to check your email, get distracted, and find that the running game has drained half your battery unnecessarily.
If that is the issue, there is no indication whatsoever of it in the list. What it says is "When running, this app keeps the device from going into sleep mode." Not "this application keeps running in the background". If these applications keep running in the background and you have evidence of that I'd be happy to note it and their misbehavior, but the page you linked is — as I noted — completely worthless. Because that's not what it says, whether it's due to terrible copywriting or because that's not the issue.
> If your game gets shoved out of the foreground, it should have the good graces to save its state and allow the device to sleep, like every other app on the system.
Sure, if that's what happens I'd be happy to concede the point, but that is not the way I read the page, considering the way these blurbs are written I interpret them as "we opened the application in the foreground and put down the device". Especially given they specifically note when applications misbehave in the background, in both cases of network misbehaviors.
Play GTA3 on a Nexus 7 sometime. Switch out to another task (or hit the Home button). Let it sit for half an hour, then check Settings -> Battery. You'll find that GTA3 is at the top of the list and is pegging the CPU.
Their workaround for not obeying the Activity lifecycle is to display a persistent notification that the game is running. This is is not a solution for their actual problem, which is that they have no way to serialize the game's running state, and thus will lose any unsaved game data if they do obey the lifecycle and let their app get culled. This is evidenced by the need to go to the ingame save points in order to save your game, like on a console.
Even if the game is open in the foreground, there is no reason why it can't give up its wakelock after a period of inactivity. Obviously this is a lesser issue as you have described, but it is still contrary to the UX of most Android apps.
Android has an Activity lifecycle for a reason, and these games do not respect that. Users should not be worrying themselves with managing resources. If your game gets shoved out of the foreground, it should have the good graces to save its state and allow the device to sleep, like every other app on the system.