>If it isn’t selling on one platform, don’t bother with the others. Maybe you have a fundamental flaw, maybe you aren’t marketing it right.<p>I think this is a good observation. Porting to a dozen platforms is double the work for, say, double the customer base. If the game catches fire that's money well spent, and if it doesn't you've saved yourself a lot of money by not doing the ports. So wait to see what the reception is before you spend. If you just get a few hundred or a few thousand users, take that money and make another game.<p>I agree with his conclusion, too. People who play serious games want more graphics power, a keyboard (or at least a game controller), and decent sound. Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.
This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile/casual game development I've read, and I think anybody looking to get into that niche should stop here first:<p><i>"Yesterday 304 apps were released in the App Store. I didn’t bother counting, but about half of them look to be games. 152 fresh new dreams went on sale. How many of those will hit the top 100? Probably 0. How many of those will be profitable? Probably 0. How many will cover their costs? Probably 0. But here is the real kicker: tomorrow, 152 NEW dreams will go on sale. Today's will be old and discarded, for you only make the new lists the day you launch. Apple boasts about hitting 1 million apps. That is about the worst number a developer could hear. It means 999,999 other people are competing with me for a customer’s attention and wallet."</i><p>Author loses friends, money, and time in pursuit of a super-fickle audience, and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
> I had a playable alpha of Catch the Monkey in six weeks. It took us another eleven months to complete... In total, across all these platforms, we made around $7k. $200k and 12ish months of our lives for $7k.<p>> A is for App, on all platforms, was finally complete Fall of 2013. A year from when we first started it, and 9 months after we had a stable playable (store purchase-only) version. Our project cost went from $25k to $200k.<p>> That weekend I gathered up the family for a family meeting... I estimated $12,000 - $20,000 to get a playable prototype of the game, then we can decide what to do next... I have assembled a distributed team of 9 to help in varying capacities to make Archmage Rises a reality. Each one is being paid, with me as lead designer with full creative control.<p>"Family meeting! I'm about to make the same mistake for a third time! Who's in?"
Games are a hard business. There was a gold rush to the App store. There have been smaller gold rushes to Xbox Live Store and Steam. Long before that there was a gold rush to PlayStation development. Before that, there was a boom in PC-CDROM at software stores.<p>This reads to me like someone who didn't know the business well and failed at mobile. I think he would have failed on PC if he had started there instead. He may succeed at the PC now, but that is partly because he learned a lot. I hope he does well going forward.<p>The low barrier to entry is making mobile casual games like flash games. Nobody wants to pay, and good games are hard to discover in sea of titles. There is still money to be made in mobile.
I'm often shocked by how awful mobile games are, at least on Android.
Whenever I look for games, all I can find is.<p>1) The popular casual F2P games, candycrush, angry birds etc<p>2) Endless clones of 1 (this is at least 50% of the market).<p>3) Low quality games that were made to cash in on some trend like zombies , military shooters etc.<p>In contrast , on Steam I could buy almost any of the cheap indie titles and find something original or fun.<p>So I've basically given up on mobile gaming altogether. I wonder if this is a product of the app store model or something intrinsic about the form factor?<p>Perhaps there just isn't any demand for good games on mobile because anybody serious about games uses PC or console?
Apple's App Store is just... Horrendous.<p>That thing needs a massive re-working. There are plenty of us who have released apps, games that were great, only to be buried by apps that were terrible.<p>The cream definitely doesn't rise to the top using the current App Store model.<p>It's just a fricken lottery at this point.
While author is probably getting the point of mobile gaming, it should be obvious that it's not about big banner games that you work on for months and hope it to be hit. It's about very quickly churning out dozens of games a year and see what sticks. People I know in this business haven't become millionaires but they don't feel this is a lost cause as business (whether this is also tasteful or not that's another question). They usually weep out a game in a weekend, sometime very silly stuff that is just made out of "template game" replaced by stock graphics. In other words, they write little or no code, design little or no graphics for most of the time. Once in a while they might make a game with some original code and graphics but that's not typical. When they do this, they have offshore people doing much of the grunt work. Sometimes these offshore people are "permanent" employees of their little company but they don't get salaries. Instead they are offered stack in the company. All these keeps net costs down when it comes to cash flow. Most mobile games that have succeeded aren't earth shattering graphics or code. So their hope is that one of their silly things would eventually work out and become a huge hit to pay off year or two worth of weekend work.
It's a special case of a deeper problem with mobile:<p>It's a feudal platform with a closed app store model and a "nerfed" OS. It was built this way because it's a lazy, thoughtless way to solve the installability, security, and app isolation problems with desktop OSes. A deeper, more well thought out alternative that did not ultimately neuter the computer and disempower the user would have been much more difficult.
Brutally honest, great read, great article.<p>The site for Archmage Rises (the upcoming PC game) makes me a little nervous. This is a very ambitious project for a small dev group.
From the article<p>"After all the lost money and time I still think Catch the Monkey is a good game. It isn’t very fun at first, but it is very fun and challenging in the later levels. Problem is no one gets there"<p>If "no one gets there", it's not fun, end of story! This has nothing to do with mobile VS PC.<p>I spent close to a year creating my first iOS game. I completed the project and then I NEVER shipped. I spent a lot of time working on the game, and it looked nice enough, but it SUCKED. The game was good for a laugh once or twice, and then it was just boring as F. So we didn't ship, mostly because I didn't want that trash on the app store associated with me.<p>I've released other apps since, no games but am working on another game now, and some have done fairly well but not well enough to quit my job.<p>So I work a day job and then I go home and work on my apps. If one of them hits it "retirement big" then I'll quit. That's a risky move; time for this guy to put on his big boy pants and get back to work.
Meanwhile, I looked at my Steam library and realized that I've been playing exclusively Kickstarter, Alpha, and Greenlight games. I think the PC gaming revolution is quietly happening.
The author of this post made some terrible business choices. The constant multi-platform time and money sink is what tanked his company. But who paid the price? The lowly worker, who had little to no say in those choices. How is the author surprised he is upset with him? When you work for a single employer you put all of your eggs in a single basket. You place an enormous amount of trust that your employer will make the right decisions that ultimate decide your future. And by reading this article it appears that those choices were awful.<p>If he had any honor he would have given him 2 months severance and let him go, only to try an make up for the incompetence he showed running the new company into the ground.
i keep seeing posts like this:<p>"we made a quality game and it's not selling"<p>"the app store is a disaster"<p>"it's a lottery"<p>no -- none of that is the problem. the issue is that all of the easy, low-hanging fruit is gone and to get workable revenue out of a game, you need to make a quality game.<p>that's quality without the quotation marks.<p>and, i'm sorry, but the games in the original post are nothing compared to the likes of papers please, don't starve, or guacamelee! -- much less amazing upcoming indies like no man's sky or ori and the blind forest.<p>you are kidding yourselves if you think something like "catch the monkey" is going to sell. i was floored to see it actually made $7k in revenue. i would have guessed $1500.<p>you -- yes, you with your fresh copy of unity and an mvp-fail-fast-idea -- are not going to cut it on the app store. you need to put out a real, honest-to-god, high-quality game.<p>catch the monkey or a is for app? really?<p>your game is going to be in the app store next to ori and the blind forest. your game is going to be in the app store next to white night. the player is going to look at both of your games and spend their money on those -- not yours.<p>the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster sitting next to those titles.<p>and swapping to pc? have you browsed through the greenlight options? you think your game is going to make it there when you couldn't cut the quality bar on the ios store?<p>let me help you with that decision:
<a href="http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pending&browsefilter=pending&p=1" rel="nofollow">http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pe...</a><p>is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun? better than bounty hounds? probably not.<p>sure, there are some mediocre games that catch fire and shoot to the top. that's where the lottery is. chances are those 304 apps released on the app store are all crap and don't have a chance in hell of real traction anyway so their only option is catching hold of the lottery tail. if you want to be part of that viral-dependent circus, more power to you, i suppose.<p>quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.<p>however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.<p>that's the key takeaway, make a real, value-for-the-player, interesting game and you'll do just fine. if you can't do that, accept it as a hobby or get a different job.
I've decided not to be a native developer, but instead focus only on cross-platform tools. Right now, I've settled on Lua, as I believe its a really powerful, yet simple technology, that has a lot to offer. Of course, I still need to do <i>some</i> native development - extending the Lua host, and so on - but the meat and beef of my applications is only going to be done in the Lua VM .. its finally delivering on the promise of Java (write once, run anywhere) and is <i>just</i> enough of a challenge to keep things interesting. I have to switch between "Host developer" and "App developer" mode, but I'm finding that context switch to get simpler and simpler as time goes on ..<p>It means the only real native effort that has to be made is just enough to get things working in the Lua side of things, of course - this has its challenges. But, being responsible for the full scope of the framework that supports my app has really made for a more rewarding experience. It has its ups and downs - certainly its not very easy to convince other developers of the merits of this technique - but it definitely results in a sharper, more consistent focus. I feel that the wall-garden effect of other frameworks/environments is no longer an impacting event in my developer chops - I <i>have</i> to understand the native way, but I don't <i>have</i> to use it for the full scope of my implementation.<p>Plus, there is something very satisfying about deploying on multiple platforms with the same code-base.
I cannot believe that even though his 2nd leason taken from game 1 was 'Making it too good... We added too many features and created too much content.'-that the next game branches in a billion ways and has open content and open world and huge scope. Are you kidding me?!! I think deep down he's hoping on crowdfunding the game dev after doing a proof of concept here- but if you're this much cash down the hole, why not heed your own advice, make a SMALL game, one in a genre you DO enjoy, recoup the initial investment and then do more?<p>He's setting himself up to get shot in the foot again. Even though he's getting exposure here for the next title, he so far has two failed titles and is working on a huge-scope third(which from what I've seen becomes too time heavy/resource intensive to build to completion for most devs to complete) and still, not an ounce of proof itll work out aside for two people, a friend and musician, saying theyd play the finished version.<p>To the dev: This is just crazy. Learn from your own mistakes!! Prove that you can actually make money for yourself in making games before of going down this third slippery slope- thus far you have not proven yourself as a good game developer. This is a go big or go home project for sure, and as much as I would like you to succeed after your failures, my bet's still on it hitting a 'go home' result.
<i>Making it too good. Sounds silly, but as a self-funded indie developer there was no one to tell us to stop, or not to add that feature. You get caught in a loop of “if I add this feature it will be more awesome, and more awesome games sell”.</i><p>I learned this the hard way. My business partner at the time summed it up as, "Every feature is a support call."<p>More stuff, even if you think it good, is more stuff that can go wrong, or introduce a subtle bug, or just not work correctly for someone, somewhere,
I think Tsung should have been the co-founder, not the employee. But perhaps it was impossible since the author was bankrolling their mobile experience.
Excellent article, but needs a Call-to-Action. Keep people like me who are casuals but might respond to the ernstwhileness in the loop. Give us a once-a-month update on an email list with the same introspective and honest passion.<p>IOW, he's learning his lesson about the game itself, but hasn't quite picked up the concept of the marketing around the game. Still, I think his fervor may be leading him slowly and steadily toward success.