Good Saturday Dreamers!
How are you?
This week I had more time playing games, especially mobile games, but not only. So I think that can be a good idea talk about my idea of mobile games in 2022 and the possible future of the market.
What the mobile market has
Seriously, I think there’s a lot of good games on mobile market. Most of them are very famous and played by millions of people nowadays.
I can talk only about the games that I played, but I think that you will not be surprised to hear how it is good Hungry Shark, Hearthstone, Plants vs Zombies, Alto Odyssey, Beatstar, CSR Racing 2, Machinarium, Fallout Shelter, Jetpack Joyride, Pokemon GO …
This kind of games are good especially because are well treated. They have a stunning graphics, good mechanics, and a decent lifespan.
All this successful games put in the jar a formula that turns out to be true since the begininng of mobile gaming about how many time the player spend on smartphone to play.
All this games can be played for 5 minutes, for 10, 20, an hour, keeping the experience very similar. The “game loop” is very short so… Why this is so interesting?
On my opinion, shorter the game loop is, more easily you get bored. Can you do the same thing for several hours without getting bored? It should be very very funny to achive this.
The dark side
There’s a deep, huge, dark side. Tons of games that taste bad, look ugly or they are a copy-paste of others games of this kind. You can think “Ok, the market is open to any kind of devs it’s no a surprise”. Yes, is true. The market is accessible to anyone so even a kid after a 90 minutes tutorial of Unity can put his game on the app store. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I don’t talk about unknown games made by novice. I talk about games that put a lot of advertising to explode on market without a good reason. These games have as strength marketing. Marketing is really important to do successfull games, but it’s necessary that there’s a game at the end.
Make interesting, nice games is really hard. Is more easy to throw out something simple, easy to develop and maintain with a formula already seen EVERYWHERE.
Have you ever search “Match 3 games” on the app store? Yes. It’s a madhouse.
I really want to talk about the adv scams, but we can talk about that in another post I think, because the topic is really wide.
Future?
The market of the mobile applications (games included) is one of the most promising at all so a lot of big companies will move to fit inside. With an increase in the offer the users will start to be more selective and only the good stuffs will get good money, wiping out a lot of trash.
I think we will need a long time to finally get a decent release schedule of mobile games through the year, but some day will get this. Until this moment every indie developers (and designers) have to think about the great opportunity to release their creations in a market full of trash with few successfully gems.
See you next week!
