Mobile Games: Stop being such a bitch about them.

[eldaec]

They talk about what developers need to talk about. If that is 50% marketing, the GDC is going to be 50% marketing.

[Margalis]

There was a time when GDC was almost solely about development. Now it's about marketing, social issues, monetization and a bunch of other shit. That stuff might be of interest to developers but it's not about development.

I don't really care if there is a mobile game marketing conference (and in fact there are a few of them) but it's kind of lame when GDC is barely about making games any more. The original idea was sharing insights regarding the art of making games. It's not just a conference for game developers, the idea was it was a conference about game development.

It doesn't help that most of the "how to market your iPhone game" talks are pretty useless. I don't really know anyone who goes to GDC to learn or share about game development any more - people go to meet up with vendors or friends or to have side-meetings. The main content of the conference is now almost totally irrelevant.

To swing this back around to being more on-topic, I think it's telling that when the show became more mobile focused it largely stopped being about game design in favor of being about marketing, monetization methods, etc. The actual content of mobile games seems irrelevant to most of their developers. Many of these games are not games with monetizations models, they are monetization models with games bolted on.

[Amarr HM]

Flappy Bird - sums up the mobile game market. How the market ate up that furore over said dev taking the app down because it was too hot to handle really fucking irritated me.

[Khaldun]

I like many mobile conversions of board games--Carcassone, Small World 2, Waterdeep. I play Ascension a fair amount.

I do wish someone would make a decent Western-style RPG for mobile.

[rk47]

Wish I can make fun of the mobile games more.
I like School Idol Festival.
Every hour I look forward to spending life points and just tapping away at the circles.
It's a pretty big deal because I always boasted to my friends that I see no point in mobile gaming since I spent most of my time at home and when I head out, the last thing on my mind is to play a game on an inferior platform.

Yet, there's nothing on desktop at the moment that made me want to sit down and play.
Instead, I kept my Samsung Galaxy on standby so I can just get spend those Lifepoints in the most efficient manner.
And those precious Life Gems are too nice to be spent on game time. I should keep them to roll rare cards.



  Precioussss. I don't wanna spend money on it. But I'm having fun on it at least.

[Yegolev]

Conferences have marketing.  Conferences also are informal job fairs.

[Raph]

You guys are all cute.

Acquisition cost if you do marketing/ads/etc for a single mobile player is now $4. This is why F2P is winning.

A 99c game moves 1/10th the copies a free game does. A game over $4 moves... nothing. A few hundred units.

Unless it happens to be one of the damn few that go viral or get featured by Apple. Keep in mind it's some insane number like 100 games released a DAY now. (http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/) so if you don't spend marketing money, you are basically playing roulette.

Meanwhile, dev costs continue to rise. So 400 units of something at $4 doesn't pay for anything.

GDC very much does the talks that developers need to hear. Mostly, younger developers, with few exceptions (as I often say "GDC is a teaching institution, not a research institution." It didn't use to be, but that is what it is now.) This is shit that devs need to hear before they can't afford their rent. Marketing and biz skills equals devs getting to actually make the games you want.

If people were actually willing to pay for premium mobile games, then maybe you might get titles that you want, stuff that is more core. But as a group, core gamers just aren't paying for those games. I know so many great devs who have tried, and gotten back piles of 1 star reviews saying "this isn't worth more than 99 cents" -- for a game that on PC downloadable would be worth $20.

F2P is the only thing letting a lot of these devs eat. And yes, it distorts the game designs. Yes, it lets in shitty douchebag marketing approaches. All that stuff was always there behind the scenes, it's just now you can see it better.

If you ask me, we're heading for a crash.

Go read: http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/05/07/the-financial-future-of-game-developers/

[Sky]

I know so many great devs who have tried, and gotten back piles of 1 star reviews saying "this isn't worth more than 99 cents"

I guess I need to start a mobile gaming review site for the sake of balance.

[schild]

Unless it happens to be one of the damn few that go viral or get featured by Apple. Keep in mind it's some insane number like 100 games released a DAY now.

And this is why we get to be bitches about them. Market is flooded with bullshit. Apple controls the fate of basically any game in their app store. The vast majority of games are total butt.

But are we heading for a crash? Far as I can tell, the crash already happened. Gaming has turned into shit.

[Maven]

Marketing and biz skills equals devs getting to actually make the games you want.

I cannot stress enough how much this type of education needs to be given to anyone considering getting into the games industry. My father didn't teach me anything about business, and I ran off to the west coast with nothing but a passion for video games and no *fucking* clue about the industry or what it takes to make it. And this was 1999!

[schild]

Marketing and biz skills equals devs getting to actually make the games you want.

I cannot stress enough how much this type of education needs to be given to anyone considering getting into the games industry. My father didn't teach me anything about business, and I ran off to the west coast with nothing but a passion for video games and no *fucking* clue about the industry or what it takes to make it. And this was 1999!

Did he teach you anything about nepotism? Because that'll get you further than business in the money pit that is gaming.

[Raph]

The polite term is "networking." 

[schild]

That was the polite term in 1996. Now it's inbreeding, incest, and Why The Gaming Industry Doesn't Get or Deserve Nice Things.

[Maven]

I had to learn that "Fit" was the most important hiring quality the hard way.

[Margalis]

I'm really curious what mobile games Raph thinks would be $20 PC games. I can't think of a single one except for maybe X-Com.

Trying to make "core" mobile games seems like barking up the wrong tree to me. At most you want to make games core gamers would play when they needed a break from core gaming. A core game on mobile just isn't going to compare favorably to one on other platforms, even if it's cheaper.

[Yegolev]

Alternately, there are some $20 pieces of shit on Steam.

[Sky]

X-Com is incompatible with my Samsung Note Pro that came out this year. 

[IainC]

X-Com is incompatible with my Samsung Note Pro that came out this year. 

It's shit on my iPad 3 as well, it takes up so much space that I have to uninstall and reinstall it every time there's an update which means I lose my campaign progress as it's not Gamecentre enabled.

[Kail]

Alternately, there are some $20 pieces of shit on Steam.

There are a fair number of $20-ish titles on Steam which are way cheaper on iOS, maybe that's what he's referring to?

WH40K Storm of Vengeance, for example, is $10 on Steam, but $5 on iOS.  Rover Rescue is $5 on PC, and $1 at the iStore.  Plague inc. is $15 on Steam, $1 on iOS.  That kind of thing.  What they're "worth" is a whole other discussion, though.

[Raph]

Do people not remember when casual games cost $20?

[Sky]

I remember when gas was under a dollar.

[dd0029]

25 years later, I can still hear my mom saying "I don't know David, $20 is a lot for a game." The game in question, Legend of Zelda.

[HaemishM]

Dev houses who try to make core games for core gamers on mobile platforms that are NOT purely game machines (phones and tablets and Glass and whatever the fuck else anyone comes up with) are doing it wrong and likely will die a well-deserved business death. Core gamers are whiny, entitled bitches who hate everything including and especially everything they love (or claim to love). You will never please them especially on mobile platforms and mobile doesn't really lend itself to core experiences anyway no matter how many pixels you can push out or how many "this is a joystick peripheral" attachments you strap on to a goddamn phone.

Stop trying to please core gamers. They will only eat your limbs off while they fuck your rotting corpse.

[Venkman]

They talk about what developers need to talk about. If that is 50% marketing, the GDC is going to be 50% marketing.

Exactly.

Mobile game development has allowed a lot of developers the chance to try something without quadruple mortgaging their souls, and if it succeeds grow it, and if it doesn't, stop and move on. It's like iterative development as applied to business. Try something, get it up and out there, and if it sucks, learn that early before you invest further.

You can do that with Flappy Bird.

You can't do that with The Division.

And there are far fewer companies that can handle the latter than there are people who want to try their hand at the former.

[Margalis]

They talk about what developers need to talk about. If that is 50% marketing, the GDC is going to be 50% marketing.

Have you actually been to GDC? Most of these talks are sponsored sessions (AKA advertising masquerading as advice) and most of the rest are still completely useless.

The reality in mobile is that you either need to get lucky, have an established brand or spend a lot of money on marketing. That's it. There's no fucking strategy for success beyond that. For small developers the mobile success strategy is "don't make a mobile game." If you insist on making a mobile game your best shot at success is to make a good game, which ironically GDC basically isn't about at all any more.

It's basically a con - there is demand for the advice so people offer it, even though they advice they have to offer is not at all worthwhile. It's like those seminars you can pay to go to that teach you how to get rich.

[IainC]

I go to GDC Europe every year. There are always more talks that I want to go to than I have time to see. Even the sponsored sessions can be valuable.

Edit, here is the schedule for GDC San Francisco this year. There is one track for business, management and marketing and one for monetisation, the rest are design, art, sound, programming and production. Clicking on any of those will give you a list of more talks than you can take in over the conference timeline. The quality will be variable of course but it's my experience that the GDC submissions panel are pretty pro-active about trying to filter out the poor value sessions.

[KallDrexx]

The strategy for mobile is that you have to pump out as many games as you can as fast as you can that involve a free to play model.  There isn't much strategy beyond that.  Most successful mobile games so far have shown that, and that's pretty indicative on why most of us have such a low opinion of mobile games.

[schild]

GDC is three or four interesting, insightful talks a year and the rest is either awkward marketing or dinosaurs clinging to the last thing that remotely resembles relevance. Parties used to be good though.

[Margalis]

Edit, here is the schedule for GDC San Francisco this year. There is one track for business, management and marketing and one for monetisation, the rest are design, art, sound, programming and production. Clicking on any of those will give you a list of more talks than you can take in over the conference timeline.

The ENTIRE monetization track is sponsored!

It's a scam. The mobile market is completely flooded due to the gold rush, nobody is making money, so there are a bunch of sponsored sessions that purport to tell people how to make money - and oh, by amazing coincidence, the way to make money is to integrate the sponsored products or use the sponsored services.

The strategy for mobile is that you have to pump out as many games as you can as fast as you can that involve a free to play model.  There isn't much strategy beyond that.  Most successful mobile games so far have shown that, and that's pretty indicative on why most of us have such a low opinion of mobile games.

There definitely is an element of "whether or not you succeed or fail is largely chance so just blast as much shit as possible and hope to get lucky", which of course makes success even more fickle.

[IainC]

The entire monetisation track is also all of 7 talks as compared to 99 talks in the Design track alone and comparable numbers in the other development tracks.

[schild]

The entire monetisation track is also all of 7 talks as compared to 99 talks in the Design track alone and comparable numbers in the other development tracks.

While I'm not in Margalis' camp of chasing the red herring that is sponsored talks (as they're fundamentally worthless and not worth mentioning, I did look through the design track to look for combinations of both seasoned and recent success. I wish I hadn't.

[Margalis]

The ratio of fluff to shop talk in the design track is extremely high.

[Venkman]

I can't remember what this thread is about anymore

On Mobile: why begrudge people taking a shot? There's way more games in existence than anyone here will ever play. Shit, there are entire platforms we've never touched. Think back to all the shit third party crap on Wii, or all the shlock on greenlight, or all the crap they'd peddle in GameSpot when they still mattered to game discovery. Every generation of hardware and gamer gets it's own set of 80% junk/20% worth checking out. It's just mobile's turn. Soon it'll be Occulus Rift and then Glass and then whatever we're jacked into.

On GDC: It's been good each time I've gone. Some of the offshoot events like GDC mobile, eh, not so much. I generally won't bother unless I have meetings though, because unto themselves, the events aren't worth the $thou+ in travel to me. And I haven't rated an event by its in parties since my 20-somethings

[KallDrexx]

On Mobile: why begrudge people taking a shot? There's way more games in existence than anyone here will ever play. Shit, there are entire platforms we've never touched. Think back to all the shit third party crap on Wii, or all the shlock on greenlight, or all the crap they'd peddle in GameSpot when they still mattered to game discovery. Every generation of hardware and gamer gets it's own set of 80% junk/20% worth checking out. It's just mobile's turn. Soon it'll be Occulus Rift and then Glass and then whatever we're jacked into.

I think the contention (at least for me) is that the current state of affairs have come up with a massive race to the bottom that rewards trying to make the simplist gameplay out for free and hide extra content behind a paywall, which means it's much harder to make a deeper game that cannot be financed by incessant F2P extras.  Everyone has proven that episodic games are extremely difficult to pull off successfully (even Telltale doesn't imo, as they take way too long between episodes and the episodes are too short). 

I just want to sit down and play a deep and interesting game that can entertain me for an hour  or so in a given session and I don't mind paying for it, but all the shovelware gets in the way and makes it hard to find the good games.  I also don't want to be always nagged to pay extra while I'm in the middle of trying to immerse myself in a game.   It's rare to find a mobile game that entertains me for more than 20 minutes at a time and after a while I just stopped trying because it's too hard to find.  I don't doubt that it's there but the current marketplace does nothing to make it possible for those games to succeed.

[Venkman]

Ok, with that, and as a gamer, I totally agree. I better, because I think I've ranted about it myself I can understand why development, business, and marketing have all needed to overlap. But I don't like the results myself. It has the feel of design-by-analytics, which makes mobile games feel much more like gambling games, where the math and brain centers triggered are so well optimized they're really not games in the sense of how gamers think of games.

What I don't agree with is the idea that the slate of what I'd consider schlock on mobile is any kind of new and unique occurence in gaming. I remember bitching to my buddies about how many crappy Atari 2600 games there were for chrissake. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if those guys who worked up Spacewar in the early 60s had 49 other attempts that sucked