Fantastic read from a guy who got broke making mobile games and always hated them anyways

[Red Spark]

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasHenshell/20140807/222732/Why_Ive_Said_Goodbye_to_Mobile_in_Favor_of_PC.php

 

 

1. People always say “Write what you love”.  I didn’t.  I wrote what I thought others would like.  I wrote what I thought would sell.  I’m poorer for it. 
    
2. I don’t like casual games.  I don’t play them.  They bore me.  I think I made it to the 4^th level on Angry Birds, and about 12 floors in "my" Tiny Tower.  I love sophisticated war games with tons of menus. I love RPGs filled with stats.  I love FPS like Far Cry and Battlefield.  I love highly competitive RTS games like Starcraft II.  In short, I love PC games.  What the hell am I doing making games for a platform I don’t use myself?  Write for what you love.
    
3. Yesterday 304 apps were released in the App Store.  I didn’t bother counting, but about half of them look to be games.  152 fresh new dreams went on sale.  How many of those will hit the top 100?  Probably 0.  How many of those will be profitable?  Probably 0.  How many will cover their costs?  Probably 0.  But here is the real kicker: tomorrow, 152 NEW dreams will go on sale.  Today's will be old and discarded, for you only make the new lists the day you launch.  Apple boasts about hitting 1 million apps.  That is about the worst number a developer could hear.  It means 999,999 other people are competing with me for a customer’s attention and wallet. 
    
4. There are 100 winners and 999,900 losers in the App Store.  Each month the media spend (banner ads, ad words, intercessionals, facebook ads, free apps) for attention keeps climbing.  The trend isn’t headed down.  The trend isn’t even for costs to stay the same.  The trend is that the cost of customer acquisition keeps climbing, from $1 to $2 and change now, to soon $3 per install.  Casual players don’t read review sites, or follow Facebook sites, or read developer blogs, or watch threads on Touch Arcade.  They are casual! This isn’t an important part of their life!
    
5. The average casual game app store player has NO brand loyalty.  The casual player loves THAT GAME ONLY, for some reason they don’t care what else the developer has made.  This is completely backwards from other businesses.  Music: people follow an artist. Movies: people follow an actor or director.  Cars: people follow a manufacturer if not a specific model.  The casual player who likes FarmVille doesn’t care Zynga made something else, they likeFarmVille.  It is next to impossible to make a business in an environment of no brand loyalty.  Every win of a customer requires you to re-win them on the next sale, as if they were a stranger.  Look at how Zynga lost big on Draw Something.  All those customers didn’t leaveDraw Something to other Zynga games like they hoped, they just left to something new and shiny in the store.  One of the 152 new daily dreams.
    
6. The cost of making an app continues to increase.  I remember when I first installed Flight Control on my new iPhone.  I was thrilled.  If that game came out now?  No one would pay attention to it.  Graphics are too simple, too basic.  No multiplayer to rope in your friends, no in app purchase.  The cost of being status quo with graphics keeps rising.  But the selling price of games?  Still $1.  Even though costs have doubled to make a game, they still sell for $1.  This is lunacy!
7. Casual gamers don’t love games, they love distraction.  Distract them from waiting, distract them from their surroundings, distract them from their lives.  This is what they pay for if they can’t get it for free.  And when it comes to distraction, quality doesn’t matter anymore.  All that matters is fast in and fast out to kill the time.  Well I’m not going to put my heart & soul into making something that could be just as easily replaced by reading celebrity gossip in Us Weekly.

 

 

[Red Spark]

Also, some additional gems from the comments
http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574

[blackmoondev]

Really great read indeed

[Gogafem]

Self publishing games on the Appstore or Playstore is something I don't think I'll be doing any time soon... It's such a difficult an unfair market!

[CodeToWin]

this is very disheartening for someone just getting into game developing. 

 

This seems like it would be, at best, a side hustle. I know True Valhalla makes a fair amount of money, but he seems to be the exception. Can others chime in with their experiences?

[OkijinGames]

Sad story indeed, especially the lost of friendship. However, after reading the story, I am not sure the lesson learned is the right one.

 

These guys wanted their second project to be fast on the market as they identified the cost of their first project as one of the reason for failure. They got a release build on schedule but delayed its distribution by 7 months (!) due to the publisher nightmarish QA requirements, raising their initial project cost from $25K to $200K. Realistically did they think that fixing a few bugs and graphics resolution to please the caprices of a helpless publisher would increase their product value by an order of magnitude?

 

As indie maybe they could have put their game out (even with limited distribution) to start getting feedback from the crowd, and improving their product as they go rather than delaying the whole thing by 7 months to release bug-free on all platforms at once. And they could seriously question the efficiency of their publisher when they can't get them more than 100 installs on Google Play, did the publisher even spent a dollar on promotion?

 

Blaming the casual gamers and crowded market can only go so far when such mistakes are made.

[deis]

@CodeToWin

I didn't find it disheartening what-so-ever. In fact, I found it had quite the opposite effect on me, I am inspired. Btw, True Valhalla targets much more than mobile.

 

(Warning: Opinions Ahead)

 

Mobile is not a market for the truly passionate game developers out there, while a few do succeed (and I am in no way saying they are not true Game Developers), it is incredibly rare and strife ridden. I have seen AAA quality well made fun mobile games get brushed under the rug on Mobile simply because the marketing failed. Making it in the Mobile App Stores is a nightmare. For every developer that breaks even or makes a profit, there are 1,000 more that had as good of a product and it failed to produce any money. We will occasionally read about success stories of aspiring game developers quitting their jobs and starting a company to make games. But, these are 1 in a million happenstances, and happen even less when you only target mobile.

 

If you want to make games, and I mean make games, not just make money. Then start on the desktop and grow from there. The PC/Mac gaming communities are much more inviting and willing to help you succeed, and even the XBox/PS4/Wii indie communities are friendly. Many on this forum would love to see what you have made and cheer you on. There is a huge wealth of information on here for how to get yourself pointed in the right direction.

 

(Warning: Even crazier opinions and kinda ranty)

 

Publishers are all inherently evil. Whether they mean to be or not, the market demands the attitude to push push push the developers. This is incredibly unhealthy for the aspiring Game Developer and should be avoided until your feet are well planted, you're established, and have the ability to say "NO". If you cannot say that simple word with weight, you will be steamrolled by your publisher and drift ever deeper into a dark area of game development.

 

Casual mobile gamers are a different beast. You cannot please these people like you can a desktop gamer. Do not think of them as singular people, but a single conglomeration of players that all think and act the same. They do not know what they want and wish to only be told what they should have. And only those with the loud enough voice ($$$) do they listen to. But, this is also not by choice, it is the nature of the beast that is casual mobile. They do not care about your game's story line or how much effort went into making that one mechanic, they only want the instant gratification of success. (For a good example, please watch the South Park episode about micro-transactions.) Also note, there are incredibly rare exceptions and we should not be oblivious to them either. But, trying to satisfy the creature that is the casual mobile gamers is a very difficult task. You set yourself up for failure if you only target Mobile.

[BdR]

I little depressing to read, but a lot of it seems to be true I guess.

 

The Apple App Store started as a great opportunity for app- and game developers. But it turned into a gold rush. There are so many gamedevs digging for gold, the only real money is made by selling shovels and buckets (=dev tools, frameworks, app store visibility, fakereviews, PR etc.). It drove the price of games down turning it into a race to the bottom.

 

It also reminds me of what Jaron Lanier ("You Are Not A Gadget", "Who Ownes The Future") has written about online mob mentality, and also what he calls "Siren Servers".

 

Siren Servers are online services that force everyone's transactions (both seller and consumer) to go through their "gated community" so that they can take their share. Effectively turing it into a very concentrated source of wealth and power that benefits only the chosen few, while forcing the majority into austerity. I mean, look at the Apple App Store and Google Play, about half of all sales goes directly to Apple and Google. Actually the same goes for Steam, Amazon, Uber etc.

[ozdy]

I'm yet to read an unsuccessful gamedev story that produced a game that was fun for me

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

I'm yet to read an unsuccessful gamedev story that produced a game that was fun for me

Then read the first one here.

[ozdy]

Then read the first one here.

 

I usually like 2D platformers, but the way the camera moves in this one gave me headache from watching the gameplay videos in the first minute.

[BdR]

Then read the first one here.

Interesting read.

 

But they say they spent 2.5 years on the game but there's no mention of any play-testing whatsoever. I mean invite actual gamers (not family or friends) to play the game and systemically measure and analyse the feedback and their reactions to the game.

Here's my favourite bit of Leisure Suit Larry behind-the-scenes story, they actually playtested it and logged which phrases people were entering, and any missing phrases were added to the game. I suspect this was a big factor in making it an overall better game. I know 1987 was different times and Larry was a different type of game, but surely some of this playtesting carries over into html5 and mobile games. Escpecially considering how easy it is nowadays to remotely log game-metrics into some database on a webserver.

 

http://www.allowe.com/games/larry/inside-stories/softporn.html

 

So I convinced Ken we should try something new: beta-testing. He posted an announcement on CompuServe's Gamers Forum asking anyone interested in beta-testing a new game should e-mail him a 100-word essay on "why I should get a free game." It worked. We got scores of replies and ended up with a dozen great beta testers.

 

To track all the "you can’t do that here" errors (which is what the game says when it doesn’t have a clue what in the hell you typed it!), I wrote a special piece of code. Instead of just saying that phrase, it wrote a line to a file on the player's game floppy. (Hard disks were few and far between back then.) That line told me the scene number, location, the phrase typed, and many other details about the state of the game at that time. I compiled all those files, sorted them scene by scene and added literally hundreds of responses to the game.

 

[BobF]

invite actual gamers (not family or friends) to play the game and systemically measure and analyse the feedback and their reactions to the game

 

 

True. But I think the bigger problem is the game was barely being noticed to begin with, which is the big issue for most games. Even after all the marketing work the game saw little traffic.

 

There are just too many games and too few places for them to be seen. I think an important lesson here is that you will probably have to think outside the box when it comes to marketing, and design your game with marketing in mind from the very beginning. Having a fun game just isn't enough.

[mattbooth]

The whole... "write what you love" is an interesting one, it is similar to the business rule "would you buy it?".  I think this type of thing only applies if you fit into either mainstream or at least a popular niche.  I wrote a game for Android, then an app and both would fit into the categories of things that I liked to write, and things that I would buy.  Neither did very well.  FYI. they were 'Number Paradox' and 'Pipbo Physics Problems' for Android.  I also would never spend much time on a game like Angry Birds, or saga games, but those games are extremely popular!!!