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Mobile games suck primarily for three interdependent reasons: 1. There are very low barriers to entry to coding a mobile game. 2. Game mechanics on mobile are

by exelius 12y ago

Mobile games suck primarily for three interdependent reasons: 1. There are very low barriers to entry to coding a mobile game. 2. Game mechanics on mobile are limited due to the small screen and lack of hardware buttons. 3. Customers have become conditioned to expect prices that are too low to sustain the market. The three items above have led to an end state where large publishers who can afford the marketing spend hire armies of low-skilled developers to develop hundreds of games in hopes that one or two of them are wildly popular. If the game isn't popular, you can just swap out the pixel art for new assets and release the game as a new product. Free-to-play is the new hotness in gaming, but a successful F2P game is basically a marketing platform in disguise. It's not something a game developer should try to build without experienced marketing/product people driving the overall strategy. But given #3 above, F2P is the only realistic way to grow revenue per user. In other words, #1 can be deceptive to people who think development == coding. Programming mobile games is easy, but building a mobile game development company has significant barriers to entry that most US-based developers simply can't overcome. A software developer in the US is easily $100,000 per year -- a guy living in India with the same skillset makes closer to $20,000 per year. Hence why most successful mobile development companies are NOT coming out of the US or western Europe, but rather out of Eastern Europe, South America or South Asia.

vacri 12y ago
I think your third point is the most overlooked one. Mobile gamers are incredibly tight-fisted, and if you want to make money, you have to build that into the app somehow.
georgeecollins 12y ago
I don't think the mechanics on mobile are that limited, as you say in #2. Certainly an iPad can do anything a PlayStation 1 could do, and many things it couldn't. What is limiting is the use case. People play games on phones and tablets to fill time in the cracks in their day. They don't seem to go to an iPhone or an iPad as a destination entertainment device, in the way they do with a console or a PC. People make a lot of really simple games on mobile, partly because its cheaper, and partly because the assumption is that if you are going to spend more than fifteen minuted uninterupted playing a game, you are going to do it on another device.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Respectfully I have to disagree - the Playstation had hardware controls, the phones being sold today don't, tragically. I really, really, really miss sliding keyboards. How would a game like Twisted Metal work on a phone? A tablet? Screen controls, for me at least, don't have the responsiveness you want, and the lack of available buttons makes it hard to do anything beyond one to three button layouts. One game that managed this pretty well was Swordigo, but that was with nothing but left, right, jump, attack, and a special weapon. For that matter, how would you make Doom work on a phone halfway decently? Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat? Touch screens are a sad replacement for real buttons, and today's devices are pretty much universal crap for lacking them. The best typing experience I ever had was Android on an HTC Touch Pro 2 because it had a sublimely wonderful keyboard, and that phone ran Windows Mobile 6.5 by default!
- exelius 12y ago
  IMO the mechanics are limited for the following reasons: 1. The buttons take up screen space. You either have to design your game with a touch interface in mind (touchable objects) or ensure the action all takes place at the center of the screen. 2. In order to hit a button or make a gesture, you have to obscure your view of the screen. This means soft buttons need to be larger than the size of the average finger tip. Which limits the number you can have on screen. 3. The buttons aren't tactile. Again, this limits the number of buttons you can have since it's hard to differentiate between them without moving your finger and seeing where the button is. Given these restrictions, it's no wonder that certain types of game mechanics have become very popular: parabolic motion games like Flappy Bird or Jetpack Joyride, tower defense/strategy games, swipe gestures (Infinity Blade or Fruit Ninja) or puzzle games like Candy Crush. In fact, the mechanics for these games would likely be very frustrating on a controller or mouse/keyboard. I've played a number of action games on iPhone as well, and the controls just kind of suck. Secret of Mana is only playable because the console version's hit logic was glitchy to begin with so it works ok on mobile. I probably wouldn't have played more than 5 minutes if it weren't for the nostalgia factor.

by exelius 12y ago

vacri 12y ago

I think your third point is the most overlooked one. Mobile gamers are incredibly tight-fisted, and if you want to make money, you have to build that into the app somehow.

georgeecollins 12y ago

I don't think the mechanics on mobile are that limited, as you say in #2. Certainly an iPad can do anything a PlayStation 1 could do, and many things it couldn't. What is limiting is the use case. People play games on phones and tablets to fill time in the cracks in their day. They don't seem to go to an iPhone or an iPad as a destination entertainment device, in the way they do with a console or a PC. People make a lot of really simple games on mobile, partly because its cheaper, and partly because the assumption is that if you are going to spend more than fifteen minuted uninterupted playing a game, you are going to do it on another device.

CalRobert 12y ago
Respectfully I have to disagree - the Playstation had hardware controls, the phones being sold today don't, tragically. I really, really, really miss sliding keyboards. How would a game like Twisted Metal work on a phone? A tablet? Screen controls, for me at least, don't have the responsiveness you want, and the lack of available buttons makes it hard to do anything beyond one to three button layouts. One game that managed this pretty well was Swordigo, but that was with nothing but left, right, jump, attack, and a special weapon. For that matter, how would you make Doom work on a phone halfway decently? Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat? Touch screens are a sad replacement for real buttons, and today's devices are pretty much universal crap for lacking them. The best typing experience I ever had was Android on an HTC Touch Pro 2 because it had a sublimely wonderful keyboard, and that phone ran Windows Mobile 6.5 by default!
exelius 12y ago
IMO the mechanics are limited for the following reasons: 1. The buttons take up screen space. You either have to design your game with a touch interface in mind (touchable objects) or ensure the action all takes place at the center of the screen. 2. In order to hit a button or make a gesture, you have to obscure your view of the screen. This means soft buttons need to be larger than the size of the average finger tip. Which limits the number you can have on screen. 3. The buttons aren't tactile. Again, this limits the number of buttons you can have since it's hard to differentiate between them without moving your finger and seeing where the button is. Given these restrictions, it's no wonder that certain types of game mechanics have become very popular: parabolic motion games like Flappy Bird or Jetpack Joyride, tower defense/strategy games, swipe gestures (Infinity Blade or Fruit Ninja) or puzzle games like Candy Crush. In fact, the mechanics for these games would likely be very frustrating on a controller or mouse/keyboard. I've played a number of action games on iPhone as well, and the controls just kind of suck. Secret of Mana is only playable because the console version's hit logic was glitchy to begin with so it works ok on mobile. I probably wouldn't have played more than 5 minutes if it weren't for the nostalgia factor.