What the heck happened to mobile gaming
publish #mediareview Backlink: Musings on everything else
Review of The Escapist’s video of the same title: https://youtu.be/Q30qZSEnI9Q
Summary of the video
- Mobile gaming is weird.
- Case study of this: within 3 months of an innovative, labor-of-love indie game releasing on Steam called “Unpacking”, “Unpacking Master” released on the iOS store, ripping off the concept with near-identical art and design. And of course it is riddled with ads.
- Mobile gaming in its infancy seemed like ripe ground for innovation.
- Phones having no physical buttons demands a total rethink of user←>game interaction.
- Plus, there’s a large audience to advertise to because everyone owns a phone.
- However it seems the average person surprisingly doesn’t want to mentally engage in a game.
- Case in point: Mobile phones are often used one-handed before catching a train. Arguably, people don’t have the luxury of engaging.
- Hence, we’ve seen the market shift towards providing mobile gamers quick satisfying dopamine rushes rather than engaging content (e.g. “sort” puzzle games).
- The most efficient way for developers to administer these rushes is to play ads at the beginning and end of short levels.
- Side note: advertisements for mobile games are weird and formulaic.
- These advertisements probably seek optimal attrition, however temporary, in order to boost user numbers so they can sell ads to advertisers in the app.
- “The state of mobile gaming feels like the tail end of a gold rush after all the smart miners have left and the only ones remaining are the latecomers seeking a quick profit, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder by the riverbank panning away, ready to start slitting throats at the first sign of glitter.”
- Flappy Bird, Yahtzee postulates, was the catalyst for the downfall of mobile gaming. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the cause.
- Because it showed how little effort was needed to turn a profit.
- When Dong Nguyen took down Flappy Bird out of concern for what he’d created, he created a vacuum that was quickly filled with imitators.
- And now we’re here.
My takeaways
(6.1) needs fact checking since I’m not sure that’s how advertising works on the app store.
- According to Venturebeat, in-game ad revenue is projected to reach $56b in 2024.
- Looks like developers take their pick from advertisers according to this Quora post. MoPub is ads from Twitter, AdMob from Google, and Facebook Audience Network.
- Furthermore looks like there’s a “triopoly” in the Android ad space between Unity Ads, AppLovin, and ironSource. Article. So I guess developers certainly choose their provider. I’m curious which providers are the shitty ones that recommend more mobile games.
- Well I guess I know where the money lives because searching for that pops up >1 screen’s worth of Google search ads before I get any content lol.
- My search results pointed me to the Udonis ad I already linked. There’s clearly a whole ecosystem of ad providers here.
- It makes sense for a $56b industry but I still wonder what distinguishes these ad providers from each other. Surely they all do more or less the same thing?
I wonder if there’s a way to make mobile games interesting again without necessarily being engaging. Like Pokemon Go.
- The trick is probably to achieve Player-game goal alignment despite the medium preventing players from being very engaged.
- Maybe seeking unengagement is the point; even though Pokemon Go sort of flopped it had the novel idea of not implementing any chat features at all, instead organizing IRL meetups for people to play the game while engaged with each other.