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Why won't you buy his games, you entitled gamers.

The archive below leads to the whole opinion piece.

archive.is/h3me2
Title: The mobile games market is an absolute mess, thanks to you

Interesting quotes I found:

"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."
archive.is/h3me2#selection-1603.0-1603.430

"Even apps that find success in their marketing campaigns cannot make up the money spent on development because people would rather spend $5 on a latte every other day than on the app. Why? Because the most popular games are free-to-play, with a monetization model that lets most players play for free while milking some customers for thousands of dollars."
archive.is/h3me2#selection-1641.0-1641.355

"[]...Users see a $5 price tag for more content and they quit the game and go back to sipping their lattes."
archive.is/h3me2#selection-1649.334-1649.435

"There needs to be a twofold culture shift. The first step is one I already mentioned: Gamers need to learn to vote with their money. This will allow developers to build the great games that everyone wants to see on the expanding mobile platform."
archive.is/h3me2#selection-1709.0-1709.245
Post edited October 20, 2015 by homaretz
Took a lot of balls to show what's wrong with the freemium model on mobile gaming and in gaming generally.

But. yeah, i would rather pay for a decent game once. Microtransactions are not my cup of tea.
high rated
Mobile gaming exists and continues to exist thanks to the pricing model. If you try to introduce handheld prices, then people will go back to the superior handhelds. The mobile games market is an absolute mess because it attracted its customer base with rock bottom prices and hasn't offered anything to justify a price rise. People wouldn't have started gaming on mobile devices if it hadn't been for $1 apps.

Developers wanted an open market with no market entry barriers, but then complain when everyone else seizes the opportunity and creates too much competition.

That's really all there is to it.
Post edited October 20, 2015 by jamyskis
high rated
I don't play mobile games and I don't drink lattes. I'm about as culturally shifted as it gets I guess, and I don't give a shift about the mobile games market.

If you can't make the games you want on that market, don't make them for that market. Make it for the PC. If it's good, we'll buy it.
Post edited October 20, 2015 by Breja
Saw the turmoil about this article on twitter this morning. The most popular tweets were by Georges Broussard:
https://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/656241997276037120
https://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/656242205904887808
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homaretz: "There needs to be a twofold culture shift. The first step is one I already mentioned: Gamers need to learn to vote with their money. This will allow developers to build the great games that everyone wants to see on the expanding mobile platform."
archive.is/h3me2#selection-1709.0-1709.245
Lol. People are voting with their money, and his games aren't that great. :P
Mobile gaming? Well, not my cup of tea. If they want to get my money, they should make PC games or feck off!
high rated
''We made a game for an unsuitable platform, which lacks the targeted audience, and has an established monetization system that we don't want to use. Now it tanks and it's entirely your fault, you fucks!

Btw. here's our kickstarter plz gib teh moneyz kthxbye''
Post edited October 20, 2015 by Randalator
The biggest problem though here is that these quotes show a clear lack of understanding for the market they're working on.
Mobile gaming isn't taken very seriously by most game enthusiasts and it's still considered the realm for 'casuals' so the money isn't going to be big as the whole market has a very low perceived value because mobile gaming is still very much about short bursts of cheap entertainment when out and about for the average consumer. When AAA games are actually ported to mobile they're usually inferior, largely due to the terrible control schemes that come from being limited to a touch screen, so trying to make one for the platform specifically is a losing battle.

In short: If you want to make proper, high quality, games then target a platform where your audience is or you'll never make real money.
Enough people, myself included, have been willing enough to pay between 10-20 dollars for several of the Chaos Rings games. If the developer didn't charge enough for their game to cover their costs, that seems like a "them" problem since there are developers out there who have found success despite the weirdness of the mobile market, even at those higher price points.

I don't like this "I have a problem therefore the market has a problem and you're all terrible people" mentality among some developers. Cough Puppy Games cough. Mobile games tend to have a smaller scope with a shorter length and simplified mechanics, and their lower price generally reflects that. If they didn't plan around the realities of the platform, then that's their mistake and I can't muster a great deal of pity for them.

How sweet it would be to live in a world where one's failure doesn't automatically become everyone else's fault.
It's not a problem on mobile only (although it's certainly severe there), but also on PC. Game value has dropped a lot, thanks to deep discounts and the huge number of games available. It's not rare to see people complaining that $10 is too much for a 10 hour game and they'd wait for a bundle, or sale or whatever. A lot of people feel that $20 is excessive for indie games. After all, you can buy Baldur's Gate for $10, or buy Skyrim for $5 on sale, and get hundreds of gaming hours.

The game market is a place where a few make big bucks and most lose money. I think that's true for creative markets in general, but the incredibly low game prices coupled with relatively high effort of producing a game, might make it more problematic than some other markets.
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jamyskis: Mobile gaming exists and continues to exist thanks to the pricing model. If you try to introduce handheld prices, then people will go back to the superior handhelds. The mobile games market is an absolute mess because it attracted its customer base with rock bottom prices and hasn't offered anything to justify a price rise. People wouldn't have started gaming on mobile devices if it hadn't been for $1 apps.

Developers wanted an open market with no market entry barriers, but then complain when everyone else seizes the opportunity and creates too much competition.

That's really all there is to it.
That's what happens when you try to break into a well established market on the downside. You buy in low and sell high, not the other way around. Devs and tech people have a great deal of technical skill, but their common sense and business savvy is often left wanting.

Things are becoming copied and pasted in replication by an order of magnitude now. Best way to make a living in that kind of densely packed arena is to build and create new, emerging markets rather than join ones already in motion. Too many cooks in the kitchen, yadda yadda yadda. Don't waste all your time preparing someone else's menu.
Mobile games are just a vast wasteland of Temple Run clones, Bejeweled clones ,Angry Birds clones and Zynga cash grabs. If this dev thinks his creative ideas aren't being appreciated they should go just about anywhere else.
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serpantino: Mobile gaming isn't taken very seriously by most game enthusiasts and it's still considered the realm for 'casuals' so the money isn't going to be big as the whole market has a very low perceived value because mobile gaming is still very much about short bursts of cheap entertainment when out and about for the average consumer. When AAA games are actually ported to mobile they're usually inferior, largely due to the terrible control schemes that come from being limited to a touch screen, so trying to make one for the platform specifically is a losing battle.
I think you've touched upon a key issue here. As you say, mobile developers tend to try their best to cater to what they see as the "majority" market share - the casuals. And indeed, casual gamers outnumber "core" gamers many times over. But the flip side to this is that casual gamers expect their games to be free or extremely cheap, which means that they're not anywhere as profitable. This is the thing that these developers don't understand.

Also, they tend to be fickle. "Core" gamers tend to only be lost as customers when the developer actually pisses them off (granted, it doesn't take much to rile up the mob nowadays), whereas "casual" gamers just tend to fall off the grid when they get bored. They stop, they move away, they don't signal their dissatisfaction - at all.

Mobile is a digital-only platform with limited control options. When you consider that digital market share on the 3DS are in the ballpark of 11-15% and digital market share on the Vita is in the ballpark of 20%, it's understandable when people are reluctant to buy digitally that the only thing that will attract the casuals to mobile is bottom-of-the-barrel pricing. The core gamers on the other hand are reluctant to go to mobile not only because of the physical/digital question, but also the lack of physical controls, which causes issues even in the simplest of genres like point-and-click adventures, never mind full-blooded RTS, RPG and action titles.

On a personal level, mobile gaming for me is basically for five-minute time wasters. I have Canabalt, Funky Smugglers and The Room on my phone, all of which I got from the Humble Bundles.

I've also played Christian Whitehead's ports of Sonic 1 and 2 and Aspyr's Knights of the Old Republic Android port, but (a) that's because I got them very cheap (either from Humble Bundles or from a €20 voucher I got from the Amazon App Store) and (b) because the PC versions are inferior or fundamentally broken. And even then, I was desperately wishing that I could have played these games on a PC instead, where the touchscreen controls aren't a total clusterfuck and the physical joypad controls aren't so laggy.
Post edited October 20, 2015 by jamyskis
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ET3D: I think that's true for creative markets in general, but the incredibly low game prices coupled with relatively high effort of producing a game, might make it more problematic than some other markets.
The potential ROI (return on investment) in videogames is really bad compared to other creative jobs/business as for a logo design or music track, it wouldn't take more than a few days whereas a videogame is much more complex and has a too big production cycle (consuming time => thus consuming money) in regards of the potential earnings.

The cherry on the cake is when you want to try new stuff. On this matter, I've read a very interesting article this morning by the dev of Reus and Renowned Explorers (both games are on GOG) about "the price of innovation", quite a good read I must say and much more insightful than the usual complaints:
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/AdriaanJansen/20151016/255885/Price_of_innovation.php