Red Spark Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 Everything is not fine and that’s fine by Rami Ismail Every segment of our industry has gloomy news for us. In mobile, user acquisition has never been as expensive as it is today – with the cost of ‘acquiring a quality user’ now often exceeding the revenue such a user brings in on average. The giants of this industry deal with ever increasing costs, and ever decreasing willingness to buy a sixty dollar game. The aspiring developers of today need to shout louder than swarms of no longer aspiring developers to get noticed at all. And what is there to gain on mobile anyway? The race to the bottom has pushed the prices down so far that it’s almost impossible to keep making games at all. The people that can buy seats on the gravy train buy more seats than ever, and those still believing you can board the gravy train after it passed their station are left with the illusion that they simply missed the train, instead of understanding that unless they got exceptionally lucky, there wouldn’t have been seats for them anyway. You know what is a failure? That rather than pricing our games at the price we believe is right for our work, we price our games where we believe it’ll sell. In our blind rush to make ends meet, we’re continuously hurting both ourselves and others. The expectation of what you’ll get for a dollar has gotten so out of proportion, that on mobile you can’t even say ‘what you’ll get for a dollar’ anymore, because that’s too expensive already. Games launch in bundles, are fine with pricing down over three quarters of the value to get some eyes on the game and are made to bid against each other in terms of how deep we’ll go for major sale events. I’m nothing but optimistic about the future of this medium, of this industry. It might not survive in its exact current form. It might not be all the same people. It might not be me, and it might not be you. Or we might be fine, or we might be doing something else. When people ask me whether the industry is headed for another 1983, I wonder where they were looking when we crashed over and over again in the past few years. Where do you think premium on mobile went? Did you miss the mid-budget console game go extinct between today and five years ago? There won’t be the spectacular train wreck in slow motion that everybody seems to be expecting. We lose some things, and then celebrate other things to ignore that and just be fine. ozdy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozdy Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 Kind of agree with him, it's getting tougher every year. But I still believe indies can make good money for themselves if they work smart and hard. Well, good enough to reach the average software engineering salary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Red Spark Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 Kind of agree with him, it's getting tougher every year. But I still believe indies can make good money for themselves if they work smart and hard. Well, good enough to reach the average software engineering salary Yep, working 80 hours per week Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozdy Posted February 7, 2015 Share Posted February 7, 2015 Yep, working 80 hours per week Ouch, just noticed that you live in Moscow... Other Russian devs have it so easy living in the smaller cities Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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