Each weekend we'll be rounding up a selection of the most interesting articles related to mobile and the games industry at large.
This week, Apple goes into the history of the App Store as it celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Elsewhere, our friends over at Deconstructor of Fun feature an in-depth analysis of EA's Sims Mobile, Rami Ismail discusses what triple-A developers and indies can learn from each other, and developer Steve Demeter discusses the success of the original Trism and the road to Trism 2.
See an article you think we should share? Email PocketGamer.biz Craig Chapple at craig.chapple@steelmedia.co.uk to add it to our weekly round-up.
You can find previous editions of The Weekly here.
Editor's note: This is definitely a one-sided look from Apple itself over the last 10 years with quotes to shine a good light on the company. You won't find any criticism of the marketplace here. But it does offer a fascinating look at the impact the App Store has undoubtedly made.
3 reasons why Sims Mobile misses the mark: In-depth analysis
We’re seeing the game struggling because it lacks meaningful choices or goals, it mechanises motivations, and it doesn’t reward the player.
Rami Ismail: What triple-A game devs and indies can learn from each other
"There’s fewer game studios making fewer games, and of those games, more people are playing fewer different games for more hours. All of that together puts this pressure on triple-A where they have to find ways to make more money from a single game while also somehow balancing between creating a product and creating a service. There’s definitely a segment of the triple-A demographic that prefers their games as a game, and then, there’s a segment that prefers games as a service."
Inside the 10-year sequel to one of the iPhone’s most famous games
"In the fall of 2007, he made his first, simplistic version of “Trism” and got it to run on the iPhone.
“I went to GDC and nobody wanted it,” said [Steve Demeter]. “I was asking people, ‘Do you want to publish this game?’ and they were saying, ‘You have an iPhone game? Nobody wants to play a game on an iPhone.’”"
ArenaNet sends all the wrong messages
"In the long run, holding Price and Fries up as sacrifices to quell the outrage discourages developers from having opinions, social media accounts, or interactions of any kind with fans. It encourages more of the same outrage from fans and hate groups (whose celebrations of this decision across Reddit and social media aren't hard to spot), because it clearly gets results."
Why is there a ‘gaming disorder’ but no ‘smartphone disorder?’
"Can people truly be addicted to games, like they can to gambling, or to heroin? And even if they can, why is gaming the only official computer-related behavioral addiction? Why not internet or smartphone addiction? Perhaps the issue isn’t that gaming should or shouldn’t be a mental disorder, but that the public is so willing to assume negative behaviors are the result of individual mental defects, rather than more complex social, political, and economic factors."
The warped expectations surrounding video game classics
"Games that have a reputation for being the best of a genre, the best of a console, or the best of all time carry an unsettling amount of optimistic expectation. You want to love them before you even play them, because so many others do. Any issues that you find within a critically acclaimed classic seem to cut deeper than those found in new titles. You wonder why no one warned you. These imperfections can shatter the illusion that you were going to finally find this flawless, unmatchable, experience that others told you so much about."
PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida: Triple-A titles ‘feel too big to fail’
"It is extremely challenging to create a successful single player game or a successful live multiplayer game these days. The art of making each type of game has progressed so much that devs tend to pick and choose where their strength lies and where they should put their focus. It does not help to attach a half-baked online mode to a single player game, or vice versa. I think it is a result of rational thinking on the side of devs and publishers."
Tencent’s WeGame platform in push to go global, heating up rivalry with PC gaming site Steam
"At stake in this clash of major gaming platforms is the global boxed and downloaded PC games market that research firm Newzoo has estimated to be worth US$28.6 billion this year. It is a segment of the games market in which WeGame is behind. Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform with more than 20,000 titles, has 43 million daily active users, according to Valve in a report by tech news site Road to VR on Thursday."
