A Beautiful Dawn for Mobile Gaming

More well-known and large gaming studios decided that giving mobile phone games a go is the way to go.

In 2013, the website Newzoo reported that by 2016, the mobile games market would double in size, to reach USD 23.8 billion. The 2014 revenues came very close to this number: USD 21.7 billion. With such great growth, comes great interest, and gaming studios decided to focus more of their efforts on the mobile gaming market. It will also be exciting to see how this increasing enthusiasm towards mobiles will pan out in the mobile betting industry. Most recently, Square Enix (creators of the Final Fantasy series) and Konami (makers of Pro Evolution Soccer) announced that they will be joining the arena.

• Mobile and console games are competing
• Studios have to hurry with mobile games
• Harder to develop a mobile game

The editor of the website Toucharcade talks about how gaming studios come to the conclusion of getting into the mobile gaming business, “it’s easy for boardroom meetings to come to the conclusion that if you’re also not getting into mobile game development, that’s money you’re potentially leaving on the table.” He also predicts that throughout 2015, new games from well-known studios will pop up on our App Store. Hopefully, these games will be as professional and well thought out as their regular gaming console cousins. A buzz is starting to hit the gaming society as the Electronic Entertainment Expo is just around the corner.

The sector of mobile games still has growth potential

In an interview with Gamesbeat, Directive Games CEO Atli Mar talked about the hidden potential of the mobile game sector, “We believe that mobile has huge potential, not only in terms of numbers but also in the quality of games. The foundation of what makes a great game — game design and narrative — is still the same. We don’t think mobile has been tapped properly.” Probably the same concept applies for online Internet casinos: online gambling sites in the US still have plenty of space to expand. In any case, Directive Games managed to obtain a whopping USD 3.5 million from various investors to start on its mobile game development project.

According to Directive Games CEO, it is hard to create an enjoyable, quality game for mobile phones. Since gamers get used to playing on other platforms, they are more critical when it comes to novelties, “When it comes to mobile, the feedback from mid and hardcore gamers is that they are largely unsatisfied compared to other platforms.” This is a difficulty that even acclaimed game studios have trouble dealing with. As a result, it is up to a handful of companies to try and reshape the scene with “creativity and innovation,” said Atli Mar. Good work takes time, however.

Tick-tock, time is ticking

Time is a defining notion, especially in this field. As Toucharcade editor Eli Hodapp puts it, “Five years of development in the console world is totally A-OK,” because consoles seem to have a more extensive life cycle. The example he uses is the game Destiny: the studio started to develop it in 2009 and it was released five years later, in 2014. The problem with this is that software for smartphones get updated almost every six months. If a studio started to work on a mobile casino game that would run on an iPhone 4, and in a year the iPhone 5 was released with a completely new operating system, the company would be in trouble.

Problems, however, don’t end at upgraded software. Since trends change ever so often in this sector and there are so many options to choose from, it is hard to come up with something (in a short period of time) that people will actually buy. Successful studios, like Ketchapp, remain unbeaten in this area because, as Eli Hoapp puts it, they are “constantly releasing things and using each release as a way to snowball more interest into their subsequent titles.” For a game like Flappy Bird, the development process is shortened to a couple of weeks and when that’s done, they are popped on the imaginary shelves of the App Store by noon next day.