Why I've Said Goodbye to Mobile in Favor of PC

> Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.

EXACTLY.

Couldn't disagree more.

I was a serious gamer. These days I only play some Warsow frag fest every now and then. And yet I am willing to pay for outdated graphics, or mobile graphics level, if the game is story-driven with solid characters.

I am thinking of The Dig, Gemini Rue and Super Sword and Sworcery or even Knytt.

I am not thinking of David Cage egomaniac pile of manure that was Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy or the disappointment I felt playing Dreamfall (let just make a short and enjoyable novel of your ideas instead of a painful game to play)[0].

[0] And I'll put Grey matter in the footnote because it's where it belongs.

Eh, is it? The author was sure that mobile was where it was at in 2010, observing that no one was playing consoles (consoles were and are as hot as ever), with nary a mention of PC gaming. They made a, sorry to say, easily replicated game for a niche market, among what already was 100s of thousands of app.

In these sorts of stories it's always a little more complex, and of course someone will be looking out and making broad conclusions about externals, when some of their own decisions were questionable.

I'm not trying to be a critic of the author, but given the number of "see?" type posts, people need to be somewhat more skeptical.

and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.

This is almost too much. Steam greenlight is just overwhelmed with hundreds of entrants, and they're opening the floodgates even wider. And while I'm very likely to try out random little games on mobile (particularly if they're free to play -- not that I like the model when abused smurfberry style, but it is turning into a "try before you buy" tactic that is reasonable), then pay a dollar or so and get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, it's extremely unlikely that I'm going to install anything from a small studio on my PC -- everything is from megastudios where teams of hundreds worked for years, because that's the competition.

On the topic of large teams, the baseline on the PC is incredibly high now. Not only the triple-As, of course, but every amateur has a very high baseline of Unity/Unreal/etc. This seems like a godsend ("Yay I have Unity and all of these cool shaders and techniques and seemingly endless power"), but it means that the artistic and technical demands are enormously high and resource intensive.

More than 152 games are released for the PC per day.

And here's the kicker: they ALSO have to compete with the 150+ new iOS and the 150+ new Android games for the users interest too.

Of course it remains to be seen whether even that is the way to go. He might enjoy the work more, but that won't matter much if this business turns out to be unsustainable, too.

Of course he recognises that talking to his family isn't about deciding whether he will hit the financial jackpot with his new gaming idea. It's not a business strategy meeting.

He is meeting his family to tell them that he is about to embark on another "Jackson Pollock" journey in his career where he'll likely lock himself in for days at end, throwing paint on the floor. This, without having anything to show on the proverbial "bacon front".

He is firstly preparing his family for this interpersonal and social change ... but most importantly he is asking them permission to fail. Yep, fail - not succeed.

Full respect for him. And for his family for understanding him. Wish him all the best!

1. There are very low barriers to entry to coding a mobile game.

2. Game mechanics on mobile are limited due to the small screen and lack of hardware buttons.

3. Customers have become conditioned to expect prices that are too low to sustain the market.

The three items above have led to an end state where large publishers who can afford the marketing spend hire armies of low-skilled developers to develop hundreds of games in hopes that one or two of them are wildly popular. If the game isn't popular, you can just swap out the pixel art for new assets and release the game as a new product.

Free-to-play is the new hotness in gaming, but a successful F2P game is basically a marketing platform in disguise. It's not something a game developer should try to build without experienced marketing/product people driving the overall strategy. But given #3 above, F2P is the only realistic way to grow revenue per user.

In other words, #1 can be deceptive to people who think development == coding. Programming mobile games is easy, but building a mobile game development company has significant barriers to entry that most US-based developers simply can't overcome. A software developer in the US is easily $100,000 per year -- a guy living in India with the same skillset makes closer to $20,000 per year. Hence why most successful mobile development companies are NOT coming out of the US or western Europe, but rather out of Eastern Europe, South America or South Asia.

do casual gamers shop on steam? no. people who are "real gamers" do. so, if you're looking for "real" games on mobile, you probably shouldn't browse the top 10 list in itunes.

so, as a guy who likes to help folks out, here's a big list of pretty awesome games on mobile: http://www.grabitmagazine.com/blog/post/the-top-50-best-indi...

as to the inevitable question of "how do they make money if you have to special-search for them?", you can take the number of ratings and ballpark some rule-of-thumb average numbers.[0]

downloads = number of ratings * 50

for freemium titles, revenue = number of downloads * .015 (1.5% of people pay on average) * $15 (freemium paying users average out to $15 per month) * 3 (lifetime in months, most folks say 6 month for the lifetime of paying users, but i don't feel that's a very reliable number)

for paid titles, revenue = number of downloads * price.

i'm sure you'll find them not being billionaires, but doing just fine. far better than earning out $7k.

[0] please note these are wild, ballpark numbers based on industry average data from places like swrve industry whitepapers. really only useful for "magnitude-only" calculations.

Eventually to keep up they went F2P and things went down the proverbial drain.

No one was willing to pay for good games, so good games are no longer available.

We are victims of the world we have created.

People are learning to reject IAP-everywhere monetization models, but they've also retained the notion that nothing should cost more than $1.

Even if we eliminate the discoverability problems, the shitty copycats, all that noise, will the economics of mobile game dev still even work out without stooping to EA's Dungeon Keeper-esque shenanigans?

Startups face the same problem and almost exclusively fail for the same reason. And businesses in general. And authors. Musicians. Actors. Artists. Singers. The list goes on and on. You have to be good at what you do to make it your occupation.

Seriously, sucess is how well you promote what you do. Being a good programmer will have as much to do with your sucess as being a virtuoso guitar player has to do with the likelihood of making a living as a musician.

That was the death of his dream as much as the authors, but it died due to someone elses mistakes, not his own. I think his art assets look great, since I imagine they are to the authors vision and spec in the first place.

> quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.

So you mean the entire job of a publisher? It's not so easy to just write a good game and release it: you need a marketing plan, and that's where publishers come in. The reviewer from indiegamemag.com should probably have heard of your game through word of mouth before he even plays it -- but word of mouth advertising is almost never accidental. Even then though, a good writeup on one site might have taken his total revenue from $7k to $70k. He still would have lost money. Marketing is the end-all, be-all of the app store, and he didn't have it. Though in all fairness, most of his strategy was a "me too" attempt to cash-in on mobile gaming, which doesn't work when your competition is paying developers $5-10k/yr in India or China.

Catch the Monkey game. Playable alpha 6 weeks; 11 more months to complete. Reasons given:

   the publisher wanted so many different versions of the game.  It’s a 2D 
   sprite-based game with thousands of frames of animation.  When we were 
   required to create a Blackberry Playbook version (if you actually remember 
   what it was!) we didn't have to deal only with a different screen size, it 
   was a totally different aspect ratio.  And Video RAM is handled differently 
   on the various operating systems.  Then there was Kindle Fire, then Nook, 
   then Android phone with its 14 different kinds of resolutions.  Then there 
   was Android’s new requirement that a game package can’t exceed 50 Mb, and 
   ours was 70 Mb.  Marmalade’s framework didn’t support the Google OBB file 
   streaming, neither did Nook because they had their own store.  So I had to 
   write my own http file streaming processor that would work on all these 
   various platforms.  The one thing iOS has going for it is a very tightly 
   controlled OS/Hardware environment.  Once you leave that, it’s a total gong 
   show!  But all of the non-iOS builds is where Marmalade really shines, and 
   so their motivation was to get Catch the Monkey on as many different devices 
   as they could. 

I mean, I don't know what to say. Thomas claims to have run a consulting shop, and I really would have assumed that experience would grind project scoping and bounding into you. But he let the scope of two different projects just wildly explode, from alpha in 1.5 mos -> shipped in 1.05 years, and done in 2 mos -> shipped in 9 mos.

It seems like building 2 projects in 4 months and then either quitting while they were behind or banging out a bunch more tightly scoped projects would be the optimal way to go.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, but you just have to control project scope. He's going to have the same problem on mac/pc: do you want to be a single person indie? Then you have to figure out how to make a game in 1-2 years, scoped to a single engineer + contract art. Do you want to be mid-tier? Then you have to figure out how to make an awesome game with 3 engineers and maybe an artist in 2 years. And so on. But you must pick which tier you are in then design and scope accordingly.

> if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.

Even if your game is legit, nobody will buy it if they don't know it exists. IMO, marketing is just as important.

BTW, are you speaking from personal experience? Have you made a financially successful indie game?