Buying a license? which is exactly the same as with disks...

A lot of ink and sweat has been poured due to this topic. I remember reading Jeff Vogel's takes on it, and very recently I bookmarked the SteamSpy guy's take on the Indiepocalypse or whatever it's being called.

The situation seems quite paradoxical, more and more money spent on entertainment, yet the suppliers are crying about low or negative margins and desperately want to raise prices, yet can't as they'll become uncompetitive.

I think others have put the finger right on in the market drivers of this - low cost of entry into game development, lack of business and marketing savvy, and misunderstanding the audiences.

Notice the first sentence on the article.

"You see, we have a problem in the mobile gaming sector, thanks to you. You would rather buy a pumpkin spice latte a few times a week and enjoy it for a few minutes than buy a game that you can play as long as you would like. In order for creative games to be made, there needs to be a major culture shift. We need to be willing to spend a few dollars on a quality app, rather than for a few extra lives or other in-game purchases."

See all the times he says You? Anyone reading Polygon is not very likely to be in their market audience anyway - that being the more casual mobile markets (iOS strategy niche excepted). Hence the You being addressed is already a huge misunderstanding and indication of the root cause problem. I think another part of this is conflating the US market, where high cost smartphones are much more common, or iOS is relatively as common as Android, with the rest of the world - where things are different.

Sure there are gamers on mobile everyone around the world, but another of the reasons for the low prices is that the proportion of gamers on mobile that buy a pumpkin spice latte a few times a week outside of the US (and a handful of other countries) is basically non existent I think... talk about being out of synch...

Bottom line, these guys live in a reality where their purchasing power (to buy spice pumpkin lattes - what an illustrative example that choice of example is all in itself) and therefore their production / labor costs are huge. They will be, are being, submerged by a tsunami of lower cost competitors, which might be lower quality now, but are due to improve with time.

Tough luck. The niche of hardcore gamers would be ready to embrace them, if the products would be adequate - but I suspect they want nothing to do culturally with that market demographic. Might be me being cynical, but that's certainly a factor with a lot of the more artistically inclined Indies which turn their nose up at more gamer oriented preferences.

Watched the trailer. Looked at my Moto X phone. Tried to figure out how I would play the game on that tiny form factor. Came up empty.

Dunno about the rest of you, but any game time on my phone (I don't play games on it any more) would be limited to about 5-20 minutes at a time. (Not coincidentally, this is the amount of time one would spend drinking that offending Pumpkin Spice Latte.) The gameplay video makes it look like you would play it chunks larger than 5-20 minutes.

Maybe some folks do use their phones for more-involved gaming, but clearly many do not. It's not really the consumer's fault that they don't want to mix that amount of time investment on such a small device.


To their credit, the KS page says the PC version will be DRM-free and that they hope to get it on gOg. So that's good.

If they want to target core gamers (and from the opinion piece it seems pretty clear they do) they need to go where the core gamers are. Instead they chose mobile platforms.

In other words, they are trying to sell luxury yachts in the desert and are now insulting yacht enthusiasts for not coming to the desert for some luxury yachting...

And I heavily support the Tea.

You right-wing bastard!

I stopped playing mobile games for the most part because of how limited they are.

Television?

I've bought mobile games, and enjoyed some and hated some. The problem, at least on Android is that the platform is too fragmented. While there's a lot of devices, the device base is too varied in hardware and OS version, so most games work only on a handfull of them, usually on better models, while most Android devices are actually low end devices, so that's an automatic hit on potential user base, especially IF your game is fairly big in size or needs an above average GPU.

Pure economical speaking the whole gaming community must be shifting to mobile. Some ppl see the big amount of $ Clash of Candy & co are rolling in and so it must be THE ultimate gaming platform. Thats where they collide with reality. Its a "don't care much just killing time in a train/lunchbreak" gaming platform. Its not the "serious" gamers that all of the sudden went mobile and forget about their PCs & Consoles. Sure, some do too besides their regular gaming; even I mobilephobe did that.

But thats a completely different audience. From the gargantuan amount of mobile games only about a fistful went to my tab & those I consider best are pretty close to some PC games & probably boring to the core mobile gaming audience. At the end of the day when I want to play a game I turn my PC on & most stuff I check out on the tablet are forums for PC gaming stuff.

I'm currently enjoying a few freemium games on my tablet. As much if not moreso than PC games. My only complaint is that a lot of the AWESOME games are online only, and that's a non-starter for me in most cases. Especially when the online component is not that essential to playing the game.

I actually could imagine that adventures work well on tablets (not smartphones).

- They are not too demanding regarding hardware.
- They usually are click and point anyway which is even more comfortable with a touchscreen.
- While you need some time and cannot play them easily anywhere it might still be more comfortable on the couch than at the desk.

I think people already know this and for example Broken Sword sells well on mobiles.

Other relatively easy to adapt genres might be strategy or simulation while action or role playing might still be too computationally demanding and may have problems with the user input.

On the other hand I only see a good future for demanding, complex games on tablets. They have a big enough screen. Most smartphones will have a size around 4-5 inch and I think it's unlikely they get much larger soon, after all you have to carry them in your trousers or somewhere else.

So the biggest challenge is screensize (and computational power probably too) and tablets are much better suited for gaming, especially when adding a pen or a double camera (kinect like) or when becoming more powerful.

I guess somewhere in the future complex, grown up adventures, strategy or simulation games followed by other genres will make the jump from PC only to PC and tablets.

Tablet computers are the new PCs.

You'd like to think so - it seems the most obvious candidate for touchscreen gaming - but sadly that's not really the case.

The biggest problem with most P&C adventures is that most interfaces are designed with a two-button mouse in mind. Because you can basically only apply a single action to any given on-screen object, this means that interfaces need to be designed so that everything can be done essentially with a single mouse button.

Similarly, many P&C adventures rely on the player being able to mouseover objects to identify them at ease, which you can't do on a touchscreen. ScummVM found a way around this by basically treating the screen as a touchpad for the mouse cursor, but that was fraught with its own problems and really was only a workaround solution.

I tried playing Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword 2: Remastered, and in both cases I ended up going back to the PC version out of sheer frustration.

I've played a lot of adventures on tablet, even on scummvm, and generally speaking I think even games with older, Sierra or Lucas style UI's work fairly well. If there's a genre meant for touch, it's that.

I think the controls in Broken Sword 1 is okay on Android, and mind you, this is on a phone. Why is that though that you ended up going back to the PC versions?