
Why I've Said Goodbye to Mobile in Favor of PC - n3on_net
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasHenshell/20140807/222732/Why_Ive_Said_Goodbye_to_Mobile_in_Favor_of_PC.php
======
tsotha
>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.

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.

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.

~~~
infogulch
Your last two sentences convinced me.

> 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.

EXACTLY.

~~~
georgeecollins
But that isn't true. There are mobile games today that make huge amounts of
money. They have complicated systems and depend on multiplayer gameplay. They
aren't Battlefield 3, but they are a long way away from Solitaire.

------
angersock
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:

 _" 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."_

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.

~~~
personZ
_This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile /casual game
development I've read_

Eh, is it? The author was sure that mobile was where it was at in 2010,
observing that no one was playing consoles (consoles were and are as hot as
ever), with nary a mention of PC gaming. They made a, sorry to say, easily
replicated game for a niche market, among what already was 100s of thousands
of app.

In these sorts of stories it's always a little more complex, and of course
someone will be looking out and making broad conclusions about externals, when
some of their own decisions were questionable.

I'm not trying to be a critic of the author, but given the number of "see?"
type posts, people need to be somewhat more skeptical.

 _and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go._

This is almost too much. Steam greenlight is just _overwhelmed_ with hundreds
of entrants, and they're opening the floodgates even wider. And while I'm very
likely to try out random little games on mobile (particularly if they're free
to play -- not that I like the model when abused smurfberry style, but it is
turning into a "try before you buy" tactic that is reasonable), then pay a
dollar or so and get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, it's extremely
unlikely that I'm going to install anything from a small studio on my PC --
everything is from megastudios where teams of hundreds worked for years,
because that's the competition.

On the topic of large teams, the baseline on the PC is incredibly high now.
Not only the triple-As, of course, but every amateur has a very high baseline
of Unity/Unreal/etc. This seems like a godsend ("Yay I have Unity and all of
these cool shaders and techniques and seemingly endless power"), but it means
that the artistic and technical demands are enormously high and resource
intensive.

~~~
joeheiniger
I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer
does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers/designers.
People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on Wolfenstein,
Doom, and Quake. Chris Roberts' Star Citizen was initially successful almost
entirely due to the name Chris Roberts and his reputation. The recent game
Transistor was made by the studio that made Bastion, and got more attention
than it would otherwise have gotten initially because of that fact. If you
establish yourself with one good game, PC gamers are far more likely to try
your next game, where in mobile frequently people have no idea who wrote
Threes, or Draw Something, they just download an app that their friends or
Twitter feed mentioned. You still have to make at least one successful game,
but if you get there it's a lot easier to maintain gamers' attention at that
point.

~~~
coldtea
> _I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer
> does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers
> /designers. People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on
> Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake._

If that's the case, the guy has not much to hope for in the PC market. What
kind of brand name can he build with the kind of games he makes?

------
dminor
> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

"Family meeting! I'm about to make the same mistake for a third time! Who's
in?"

~~~
ak39
It's a tough call. :-)

Of course he recognises that talking to his family isn't about deciding
whether he will hit the financial jackpot with his new gaming idea. It's not a
business strategy meeting.

He is meeting his family to tell them that he is about to embark on another
"Jackson Pollock" journey in his career where he'll likely lock himself in for
days at end, throwing paint on the floor. This, without having anything to
show on the proverbial "bacon front".

He is firstly preparing his family for this interpersonal and social change
... but most importantly he is asking them permission to fail. Yep, fail - not
succeed.

Full respect for him. And for his family for understanding him. Wish him all
the best!

------
georgeecollins
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.

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.

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.

~~~
exelius
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.

~~~
georgeecollins
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
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!

------
jiggy2011
I'm often shocked by how awful mobile games are, at least on Android. Whenever
I look for games, all I can find is.

1) The popular casual F2P games, candycrush, angry birds etc

2) Endless clones of 1 (this is at least 50% of the market).

3) Low quality games that were made to cash in on some trend like zombies ,
military shooters etc.

In contrast , on Steam I could buy almost any of the cheap indie titles and
find something original or fun.

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?

Perhaps there just isn't any demand for good games on mobile because anybody
serious about games uses PC or console?

~~~
panic
People expect mobile games to be between 99 cents and free. The same game on
PC might sell for $15. Why spend time making a quality game if no one is
willing to pay?

~~~
zanny
They may be just using the wrong business model. If you can pitch a good
enough idea, I easily see either a kickstarter one time or ongoing patreon
like project to support a games development would work, where the assets are
CC licensed and the code GPL, and the community funds its development and
anyone can play it for free.

Think 0ad, for mobile. No reason the model couldn't transfer.

~~~
jiggy2011
0ad only raised $33,251 (21% of it's target) , not really a great model for
success.

------
Sonicmouse
Apple's App Store is just... Horrendous.

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.

The cream definitely doesn't rise to the top using the current App Store
model.

It's just a fricken lottery at this point.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm a bit more pessimistic - I'm not sure if fixing the App Store will fix the
mobile gaming industry. IMO the well is thoroughly and completely poisoned at
this point.

People are learning to reject IAP-everywhere monetization models, but they've
also retained the notion that nothing should cost more than $1.

Even if we eliminate the discoverability problems, the shitty copycats, all
that noise, will the economics of mobile game dev still even work out without
stooping to EA's Dungeon Keeper-esque shenanigans?

~~~
TillE
There's a small but growing number of "premium priced" iPad games like
Baldur's Gate or XCOM which have apparently been successful enough.

I don't think mobile phone games will ever be a serious thing. The small
screen combined with no hardware controls is too limiting. But a tablet can
excel in certain areas, particularly anything turn-based.

For example, I'm convinced that a full version of Football Manager for tablets
would be massive at $15-20. They've actually done most of the necessary UI
work for a touch interface with the "Classic" mode, but apparently mobile CPUs
are still a limiting factor.

~~~
x0x0
But Baldur's Gate or xcom aren't ipad games. They're a port, presumably with a
complete codebase + assets already made. That must be substantially less
expensive than building. So realizing accretive revenue from a port, sure. As
a game target, I dunno.

------
sytelus
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.

------
api
It's a special case of a deeper problem with mobile:

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.

~~~
dsturnbull2049
Couple of problems here. You forgot about battery life, which is the primary
reason to lock a platform down. The supposedly empowering aspects of
instability and insecurity make the PC a shitty platform, too. None of those
have anything to do with games. The 'closed app store model' is a million
times more open than the preceding models. Ever try getting a game published
on a console, or preloaded onto a pre-iPhone mobile? Or even Steam, right now.

~~~
api
Battery life is a special case of priority, throttling, and supervision, which
with a proper security model is solvable with quotas and queues.

The PC's security problems are not what makes it empowering. They're an ugly
_side effect_ of the PC's relative openness. A good solution would preserve as
much of this positive functionality and openness as possible but would fix the
messy interaction problems.

This is a solvable problem. It's just harder than feudalizing everything.
Instead of solving the problem, mobile OS developers chose to punt on it and
neuter the platform instead.

I don't understand what you're getting at by comparing the PC to consoles or
console-like ecosystems like Steam. Those are more like the mobile app store
ecosystem. In fact, I've long seen mobile devices as effectively consoles.

It's just a console ecosystem with an app store interface and ranking system
that creates a race to the bottom in price, which brings us back to the OP...

~~~
dsturnbull2049
For the first point, perfect is the enemy of done, and that's (to me) quite
evident in the progression of iOS and Android over the years, those platforms
having different thresholds for what they think is acceptable for release.

I understand that security problems are not the empowering aspect; that was
snark. Still, I don't see how these aspects relate to games.

The comparison between console ecosystems and app-store ecosystems is meant as
a counterargument against your feudalist claim. We've never been freer as we
are now on iOS and Android, and as you say, it didn't solve anything. And with
me not seeing any restrictions on these platforms relevant to /games/, then
that leaves a totally unsatisfying argument.

~~~
api
> We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android,

That's the part I just can't fathom. You do not control your device. You have
to hack it to get "root." There is one app store, and all apps sold within
that store must give a percentage (30%?) to the lord of the app store kingdom.
The app store can remove any app for almost any reason, and can in some cases
even go out and uninstall that app from users' systems. At the very least it
can be made uninstallable for new devices and users at any time.

How is that not absolutely feudal? How is that at all free?

We're getting way off into areas not relevant to the OP, but I'm just in a
continuous state of amazement at peoples' acceptance of this. It almost seems
as if people have been brainwashed into not seeing it... it's like that scene
in that old film "They Live" where the guys have the fist fight over putting
on the glasses. When I talk about this I feel like that. "Put on the damn
glasses!" "No! Mobile is the future!"

Am I out of my mind?

~~~
dsturnbull2049
Sure, it's not as free as platforms in niche markets. I don't have access to
much of the equipment I own, but I don't care about a lot of that. My phone
falls into that category.

Anyway, it's all about relative freedom. The 30% tax is not the 5% royalty of
yesteryear.

$100 to push to the App Store is not the $30k to licence developer kits of 10
years ago.

A market of hundreds of millions is significantly higher than anything ever
seen before.

The level of censorship that ecosystem owners exert is much, MUCH lower than
before e.g.
[http://www.jjmccullough.com/Nintendo.php](http://www.jjmccullough.com/Nintendo.php)

iOS' ecosystem is experience rapid Glasnost. Android's is tightening up. Both
are immensely more free than anything else, historically and presently. This
is a question you have to look at over time.

How is this not exciting, and at the same time, completely compatible with the
existing and unthreatened harder-core PC market?

I think the OP's problem is we're living in a dark age of gaming, much like
the Atari bust in the mid 80s. New ideas will arrive and fix the gaming aspect
of this.

------
rnernento
Brutally honest, great read, great article.

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.

------
bigtunacan
From the article

"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"

If "no one gets there", it's not fun, end of story! This has nothing to do
with mobile VS PC.

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.

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.

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.

------
notjustanymike
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.

~~~
Yizahi
For me this hype passed very fast. I now never buy alpha, beta, pre-pre-early-
alpha-candidates-please-buy-me-I-promise-it-will-be-good, preorders, 0day
dlcs, early accesses etc. I play lots of old games through GoG, I might as
well skip all the buggy incomplete "games" and wait until they either fail or
live. My backlog is so huge that there is no need now to run for next hyped
game.

~~~
vacri
I'm in the same bucket, Alpha games are worthless. Some have been in alpha so
long that you see them in sales. I wish there was a filter on Steam to block
them.

Edit: Case in point - I just opened my email and saw: "Project Update #89:
Planetary Annihilation Now $29.99". It's drifted all the way down to $30 from
$90 in several stages, and still isn't 'finished'.

~~~
zanny
It is a false alpha. Twenty years ago, the "alpha" of today would be the
release of yesteryear. If your game shipped with bugs, well, I guess its
buggy. Because its never getting patched or fixed.

The fact you can endlessly patch your game remotely forever automatically is a
blessing and a curse. It means many games continue to improve over time, while
also meaning many games enter the market in shitty conditions and alpha state
with a promise to see them improve over time.

In reality, I think it is more that it isn't a sensible business model to
self-finance development, spend the _years_ it takes to make a competitive
product in the current market (versus Doom or Wolf3d being made in months) and
then _pray_ the sales are enough to not only cover the expenses of _that_ game
but fund enough of the next title to last to its release.

Its too unpredictable. Instead, people like continuous income. Alpha early,
release perks, gating the community, and your release notes become your
advertising. New players are attracted as you improve the game over time. And
there are benefits - you can find out early on what mechanical systems don't
work, and what features not to pursue because their early releases are
rejected by the community. You can do Agile games rather than Waterfall ones.

~~~
vacri
Well, it's more beta than alpha I agree, but it's still not 'released'. The
terminology is wrong, but the end result is the same - I backed Planetary
Annihilation on kickstarter, and left it, then tried it a few months ago. It
definitely wasn't in a finished state, regardless of final polish.

The problem with the 'alpha' release system is that it's causing a lot of
blowback. A lot of users hate it. This system sounds good on paper, but it's
not working very well, as far as I can see - it feels like for the most part
it merely delays failure of a product that wasn't going to succeed, rather
than create a bunch of things that we wouldn't otherwise have had access to.
There is a _lot_ of alpha release games out there. Planetary Annihilation in
particular is a weird one, because the dev team had heavy experience in dev
and also business, and got kickstarted way, way above their asking budget...
yet despite being an unfinished game for most of the past two years, it's been
showing up in marketing chaff for much of that.

I'm rambling a bit now, I guess, but my take-home point is that for me
personally, the advent of alpha-funded games has not improved my experience,
and has actively detracted from it. The honeymoon period is over, and it's now
being exposed more and more as what it is - nothing like a preorder (yes, yes,
no-one ever said it was... but it's still the subliminal marketing message),
just an investment with a payoff, and given the number of failures, it's a bad
investment. It moves more risk from the business to the consumers, but there
are too many finished, worthy games to bother with taking that risk anyway.

------
fred_durst
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.

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.

~~~
zanny
Yea seriously, he was commenting on how it sucked he was paid 2 months and was
not working, but it isn't his fault his boss didn't balance the books and went
bankrupt, and that he had to seek alternative opportunities.

That was the death of his dream as much as the authors, but it died due to
someone elses mistakes, not his own. I think his art assets look great, since
I imagine they are to the authors vision and spec in the first place.

------
m3mnoch
i keep seeing posts like this:

"we made a quality game and it's not selling"

"the app store is a disaster"

"it's a lottery"

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.

that's quality without the quotation marks.

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.

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.

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.

catch the monkey or a is for app? really?

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.

the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster
sitting next to those titles.

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?

let me help you with that decision:
[http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pe...](http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pending&browsefilter=pending&p=1)

is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun?
better than bounty hounds? probably not.

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.

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.

however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.

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.

~~~
tieTYT
I agree with most of this, except for this part:

> if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.

Even if your game is legit, nobody will buy it if they don't know it exists.
IMO, marketing is just as important.

BTW, are you speaking from personal experience? Have you made a financially
successful indie game?

~~~
zanny
Some games like Dust have exploded in popularity through word of mouth. For
the PC release, I'm sure Totalbiscuit sold thousands of units by himself.

In the PC ecosystem it is actually much easier to get by _without_ advertising
because this article does get something right, that if you can get the game in
front of the right people they will advertise it for you through the youtube
gaming scene at al. Look at Minecraft and how much advertising it had.

It just has to be insanely good and innovative enough to justify people giving
a shit to spread it like wildfire, rather than play it as a weekend hobby and
forget about it.

~~~
tieTYT
> Some games like Dust have exploded in popularity through word of mouth. For
> the PC release, I'm sure Totalbiscuit sold thousands of units by himself.

That _is_ marketing. Totalbiscuit probably couldn't have found it himself
without the creator of Dust getting the word out to him (directly or
indirectly).

I agree, it's probably easier and more beneficial on PC, but that doesn't
really take away from my point.

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fit2rule
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 _some_ 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 _just_ 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 ..

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 _have_ to understand
the native way, but I don't _have_ to use it for the full scope of my
implementation.

Plus, there is something very satisfying about deploying on multiple platforms
with the same code-base.

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dyarosla
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?

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.

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.

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jamesbritt
_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 learned this the hard way. My business partner at the time summed it up as,
"Every feature is a support call."

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,

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justjuju
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.

~~~
Mikeb85
Yup. The art looks better than the concept or gameplay...

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chillingeffect
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.

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.

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pettersolberg
A very interesting read. Subjective yet profound

