4 ms·

Sales vs Profit. Mobile titles can have much better ROI.

potatolicious 14y ago
People keep saying this, but I've seen no evidence of it. Mobile titles aren't free to develop. They may not cost as much as Halo or Gears, but they're still expensive to build. A 6-8 person studio will still easily run up $1m in operating costs a year, before we even get to PR and marketing. So say you get your development cycle down to a science and can squeeze out an excellent game every year - that's $1mm of dev costs + marketing. At $0.99 a pop that's nearly 1.4 million copies needed to break even on dev costs, more if you wish to recoup marketing. How many iOS games do you think sell on that order of units? To make it worth anyone's while you'd probably have to do 2+ million units. There are certainly mobile games who have reached these sales numbers - but they are few and far between. Mobile gaming right now (excluding microtransaction-based models) is like paying $100 for a lottery ticket whose payout is $1000, with a chance of winning of 0.1%. It's insanity. Mobile gets a lot of hype, and I'm a mobile dev myself, but all the hard numbers I've seen suggests that the traditional app sales model (i.e., a one-time, pay-by-content, model) is entirely broken and economically insane. There is a reason why the entire industry is moving towards microtransactions - it's the only thing that might enable a respectable ROI.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  You seem to gloss over micro transactions, and pricing. 0.99$ is the standard app price, but its not the only price. Square Enix puts out premium priced games, and I've bought Indy games in the 2 to 5 dollar range. Why exclude microtransactions? That's simply the nature of the market. People don't experience mobile games in large blocks of time, so why should they pay for them in the same way? I don't think every game needs to be a slot machine, but something closer to telltale games walking dead makes a lot more sense. Especially on mobile.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    Telltale is doing what one normally understands as microtransactions - we're talking about credit-based gaming, as opposed to episodic like Telltale. I haven't dismissed microtransactions completely, though I'm doubtful that they are sustainable in the long run. What we've currently explored in the game industry when it comes to that really amounts to the gaming equivalent of Groupon - a surge of interest due to novelty, followed by apathy or downright aversion due to well, how un-fun it is. And this isn't just mobile specific - look at Zynga and how their player numbers are dropping off a cliff. I have serious doubts about the sustainability of microtransaction-based gaming. So, leaving aside microtransactions for a moment, this leaves us with "paying for content" (as opposed to paying for ephemeral virtual currency). I've included episodic gaming (e.g., Telltale) in this thought, and I don't believe mobile is better than traditional gaming platforms (PC, consoles) following this model. The mobile space has been conditioned to expect rock-bottom pricing. Where an indie game dev can move a game like FTL on Steam for $10+, their odds of charging that much on iOS or Android is basically nil. Advertising and conversion on mobile is also notoriously hard, adding to customer acquisition and marketing costs. I simply do not see this working out for the vast, vast majority of devs. If I were an indie dev right now I'd be gunning for the PC/Mac/console space hardcore. iOS/Android, in gaming and outside of it, is a gold rush with few winners and no economic sensibility.
    - hayksaakian 14y ago
      Regarding zynga, I think the player base has spread outward to many different games vs all on zynga. Zynga had the initial numbers because of their Facebook game success. Now you see rage of bahamut, etc. It seems like most of these games live or die for their 1% of customers that pay the most. In the future I see traditional vs mobile as TV shows vs movies. They are functionally the same media, but they are produced to be consumed in different ways. Right now we're wondering why made for TV movies are not doing as well as their theater counterparts.

People keep saying this, but I've seen no evidence of it. Mobile titles aren't free to develop. They may not cost as much as Halo or Gears, but they're still expensive to build. A 6-8 person studio will still easily run up $1m in operating costs a year, before we even get to PR and marketing. So say you get your development cycle down to a science and can squeeze out an excellent game every year - that's $1mm of dev costs + marketing. At $0.99 a pop that's nearly 1.4 million copies needed to break even on dev costs, more if you wish to recoup marketing. How many iOS games do you think sell on that order of units? To make it worth anyone's while you'd probably have to do 2+ million units. There are certainly mobile games who have reached these sales numbers - but they are few and far between. Mobile gaming right now (excluding microtransaction-based models) is like paying $100 for a lottery ticket whose payout is $1000, with a chance of winning of 0.1%. It's insanity. Mobile gets a lot of hype, and I'm a mobile dev myself, but all the hard numbers I've seen suggests that the traditional app sales model (i.e., a one-time, pay-by-content, model) is entirely broken and economically insane. There is a reason why the entire industry is moving towards microtransactions - it's the only thing that might enable a respectable ROI.

hayksaakian 14y ago
You seem to gloss over micro transactions, and pricing. 0.99$ is the standard app price, but its not the only price. Square Enix puts out premium priced games, and I've bought Indy games in the 2 to 5 dollar range. Why exclude microtransactions? That's simply the nature of the market. People don't experience mobile games in large blocks of time, so why should they pay for them in the same way? I don't think every game needs to be a slot machine, but something closer to telltale games walking dead makes a lot more sense. Especially on mobile.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Telltale is doing what one normally understands as microtransactions - we're talking about credit-based gaming, as opposed to episodic like Telltale. I haven't dismissed microtransactions completely, though I'm doubtful that they are sustainable in the long run. What we've currently explored in the game industry when it comes to that really amounts to the gaming equivalent of Groupon - a surge of interest due to novelty, followed by apathy or downright aversion due to well, how un-fun it is. And this isn't just mobile specific - look at Zynga and how their player numbers are dropping off a cliff. I have serious doubts about the sustainability of microtransaction-based gaming. So, leaving aside microtransactions for a moment, this leaves us with "paying for content" (as opposed to paying for ephemeral virtual currency). I've included episodic gaming (e.g., Telltale) in this thought, and I don't believe mobile is better than traditional gaming platforms (PC, consoles) following this model. The mobile space has been conditioned to expect rock-bottom pricing. Where an indie game dev can move a game like FTL on Steam for $10+, their odds of charging that much on iOS or Android is basically nil. Advertising and conversion on mobile is also notoriously hard, adding to customer acquisition and marketing costs. I simply do not see this working out for the vast, vast majority of devs. If I were an indie dev right now I'd be gunning for the PC/Mac/console space hardcore. iOS/Android, in gaming and outside of it, is a gold rush with few winners and no economic sensibility.
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    Regarding zynga, I think the player base has spread outward to many different games vs all on zynga. Zynga had the initial numbers because of their Facebook game success. Now you see rage of bahamut, etc. It seems like most of these games live or die for their 1% of customers that pay the most. In the future I see traditional vs mobile as TV shows vs movies. They are functionally the same media, but they are produced to be consumed in different ways. Right now we're wondering why made for TV movies are not doing as well as their theater counterparts.