Week 8 Storm

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 Mobile Game History

For this blog post, I will be focusing on what I learned from Tift's presentation on mobile games. As a game design major, I found this presentation particularly interesting as in our major, there is surprisingly not an abundance of focus on the development of mobile games, despite them being the main money-maker for the games industry. 

As is pointed out in Tift's presentation, mobile game's make up about 77.2 billion dollars out of the 159.3 billion dollar industry, or a whopping 48% of its total income. For me, this information is exceedingly useful as throughout my college career, I have focused mainly on developing games for the PC, with only an afterthought of making a mobile game. The reason for this logic is that mobile games have a stigma of being repetitive: the same game republished over and over again with a different appearance. Since the market is incredibly saturated, it is difficult to strike rich from making a mobile game as it will likely immediately fade into obscurity. In addition, Tift pointed out the major titles for mobile games: Pokemon Go (made by a massive corporation), Clash of Clans made by SuperCell (a now mobile giant), and Mobile Strike (uses people like Kate Upton and Arnold Schwarzenegger to promote their game). This information is significant since these three games make up 18.8 billion out of the 77.2 billion dollars mobile games make. That is about 25% of all profits for mobile games held by 3 main titles. 

Another fact that struck me in this presentation was how all of the mobile games that were popular featured some sort of communication feature, such as a messenger, so consumers can talk with friends/other players. Apart from the actual development of a game, another function of a developer is to create a sense of community with the people that buy your game, so that their chance of continued play and commitment to the company is increased. Having that brand loyalty is crucial for a games company to thrive, and the fact that mobile games how found a way to have their consumers do all of the work for them is astounding.



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