The fact you have mobile games go to console yet you don’t have console games go to mobile tells you everything you need to know.
Oh, console/PC without a doubt. Mobile development, at least in my experience, is a constant struggle for relevance and a nonstop sense of urgency. Creativity is only allowed if it answers the question “how can we better trick players into giving us their money?”
Console/PC development, however, is focused on making a good product that will last. Nobody ever asks “how much money will this feature make us?” At worst, the question is “how much will this feature drive engagement?”
I’ve only worked for major companies, so my experiences don’t reflect what it’s like at indies.
Thanks that’s quite close to the hypotheses I had.
To expand on this from a different perspective, I’m not a game developer, I have an analytics background. A mobile game company popped up on my Indeed feed not too long ago, looking to fill what basically amounted to a position whose sole goal was to make their games as addictive as possible. I’m not saying that those kinds of roles don’t exist in more traditional game development, but it seems par for the course with mobile gaming.
Very right. As a content/systems designer, it was my job to carefully balance a feeling of progression with a frustrating lack of progression at key points, thereby pushing players to spend.
The first few levels are easy and free, then progression starts to slow, but you’ve already gotten to level 10 easily enough, so you can take a bit of extra time to get to level 15. By level 15, you’ve invested enough time that the sudden valley of progression from 15 to 30 convinces you to make that first purchase; after all, why not spend just $5 to instantly double your level when you’ve already spent a few hours in the game? Progression speeds back up from 30 to 45, letting you feel like you’re in control of your leveling, then another valley hits and you’re now even more invested, and, since you’ve already spent $5 to get from 15 to 30, what’s another $10 to get from 45 to 80?
Rinse and repeat, steadily increasing the cost of each purchase while seemingly improving the in-game value per dollar spent.
Our biggest whales were spending over $10,000 per day on that disgusting “game.”
I had to get out. My next job, one at a prominent console/PC game studio, only paid about half of what I was making at the mobile game company, and I loved it. No more panicked 2 AM meetings because our revenue dipped 10% over the last hour. No more convincing myself that players enjoyed wasting thousands of dollars on an endless treadmill. No more 28-hour shifts.
Rant over.
Bonus: I’ve since become a dad, I’m actually proud of what I’m making now, and I’m excited to share it with my child when they’re old enough.
Our biggest whales were spending over $10,000 per day on that disgusting “game.”
I wonder what the hell kind of people those are. Surely you can’t accrue debt that way? Are these insanely rich people?
Are these insanely rich people?
Oh, yes. Emphasis on the insane.
The assumption around the office always was that they were Saudi royals or kids of oil barons.
not a game dev and we don’t have a console/pc game industry here, but i’m friends with a mobile game developer in a third world game studio (targeting a local audience rather than an overseas audience which means ad revenue is going to be higher rather than micro transactions), and the best way i can summarize it is to compare it to a monkey experimenting to see where its own excrement could stick to.
their productivity is measured in games they can make per month, they have to monitor and see what shit could grab attention anywhere and replicate it as fast as they can. no creativity whatsoever and the gameplay must be preferably loopable so that it shows better in ads/you can automatically generate a crap ton of levels for more ad spots. on the slim chance that your game might have a whiff of story, working on anything besides a very basic premise (which serves its utility by being converted into direction for producing art assets) is time wasted on not working on the next game.
the result is what you expect, word games tile matching games and those basic infinite games where there’s a ball jumping on platforms and its jumps are synced to a basic loop that can be made (and has been made) in FL studio in 5 minutes but is somehow broken into levels (for the aforementioned ad spots). if someone is bold enough they try their hand on making another supercell clone (which almost instantly fails because somehow clash of clans is still king after 12 years).
every two weeks they meet and see which 2 or 3 games are ok enough that they can polish, insert ads and micro transactions into and push onto the market. they change their name on marketplaces every couple of months so each studio name doesn’t have more than 5 or 6 game on it. if a game gets successful enough (some idiot kids actually come back to it everyday) they assign one of the devs to it to milk it dry, basically pump out “content” and micro transaction and ads, until the audience leaves and they get back to making more games.
and this business model is barely profitable. the mobile gaming market has been already calcified by gambling companies that have made better and more addictive products which have hooked audiences onto themselves and won’t let go. there was a golden window to grab a captive audience when smartphones were still relatively new, and that window has passed since at least the pandemic, and making money in a market where your audience is not willing to spend money on transactions is hard.
