What makes mobile game developers so angry they can't sleep at night?
That was the concept behind the final session of the Smartphone & Tablet Gaming Summit at GDC Online.
Kicking off the rant (and moderating) was Caryl Shaw of ngmoco.
Her key complaints include Apple's opaque app approvals process, the lack of a live App Store updating system (something ngmoco is working on for its Android games), and the difficulty of acquiring new players.
"I also wish I could talk directly to my customers," Shaw said.
Although pointing out that no one was yet making money on the Android, she was bullish on its longterm opportunities.
"We want Google to succeed," he said.
Only scraping the surface
Arash Keshmirian from Limbic Software spoke about the deep experiences he enjoyed playing games such as Final Fantasy 7, Fallout and Deux Ex 3.
With the exception of games such as Sword and Sworcery, "We're not seeing that from mobile games," he argued.
Indeed, in Limbic's game Zombie Gunship originally had a plot about a pilot trying to save his daughter from zombies, although this was dropped as being too risky.
"It was successful, but we feel like we sold ourselves a little short," Keshmirian said.
"I don't feel like I satisfied my creative juice. I think we can do a lot more in terms of investigating human experiences. I want to play the first mobile game to make me cry."
Unrealised expectations
Fresh from his rant yesterday about Android development, Appy's Steven Sargent took issue with the quality of mobile advertising or promotional middleware he has to implement in games.
"They always say it will take 10 lines of codes, you can do it in an hour, and it will increase our revenue 300 percent," he explained.
Issues include problems with device rotation, memory leaks and multi-tasking. "Sometimes we end up fixing the SDK for them," Sargent said.
Too many numbers
Last up from the professionals was Graeme Devine of GRL Games.
"I love metrics, but we have gone over the line when it comes to metrics," he ranted.
"The word monetisation is a bad, bad word, and it shouldn't be in a game designer's vocabulary."
Taking an old school view on what a game should be, he argued that metrics have become the over-riding concern for all mobile games, and this, in turn, was limiting the type of games made.
"We're killing mobile games," he stated.
"We have to have the gall to make games that could fail and be happy about it. We've failed our gaming audience."
News
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
Related Articles
News
Oct 12th, 2011
GDC Online 11: MocoSpace on the opportunities and challenges of the 'HTML5 gold rush'
News
Oct 12th, 2011
GDC Online 11: John Vechey on the social gaming transition and why PopCap now has monetisation designers
News
Oct 11th, 2011
GDC Online 11: Zynga With Friends' Thakkar on why the studio forces users to update their games
Top Stories
Feature
May 17th, 2024
New release roundup: The best new mobile games from a battle royale to a console classic remake
Feature
May 16th, 2024
Behind the scenes: How adding sandwich offers to an idle merge game boosted three metrics at once
Events
Digital Dragons | Europe | May 19th |
GamesBeat Summit 2024 | North America | May 20th |
Mobidictum Meetup Tallinn May 2024 | Europe | May 21st |
Nordic Game Spring 2024 | Nordic | May 21st |
Impact 2024 - Indie Games | May 23rd | |
Morocco Gaming Expo | Africa | May 24th |
MomoCon 2024 | North America | May 24th |
Unreal Fest Gold Coast 2024 | Australasia | May 29th |
Popular Stories
Feature
May 14th, 2024
53 top mobile games in soft launch: Squad Busters, Battle Guys: Royale, Plants vs. Zombies 3, LEGO Hill Climb Adventures, and more
Feature
May 13th, 2024
Hot Five: Dubai's new Gaming Visa, April's mobile game charts, and Xbox studio closures
Interview
May 13th, 2024