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's roundup includes a deep dive into Nintendo's history in the video games industry and how it's on another upturn with the Switch and mobile.
Elsewhere developers discuss using the smartphone UI as a game mechanic, Twitch tightens its grip on the game livestreaming space, and Polygon's Colin Campbell asks 'why are games companies so afraid of the politics in their games?'.
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.
"The company’s creative methods - and, more precisely, why its best games verge on the sublime - have always been something of a mystery. Over the years, Miyamoto has offered some clues. He’s often told a story about how, when he was young, he discovered a cave in a bamboo forest outside his village of Sonobe, northwest of Kyoto. Initially afraid, he pushed deeper into the subterranean world, marveling at the feelings of mystery and soulfulness that washed over him. That sense of astonishment and animism persisted, helping to inspire hit games such as Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto’s cave tale is to Nintendo acolytes as Plato’s cave allegory is to students of Greek philosophy: a way of framing the inherent challenge of perceiving reality."
Phones within phones: Simulating real apps to explore real issues
"There's this special relationship you have with this little piece of technology that is always with you, it's the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing before you go to bed. So if you want to tell a very intimate story, and that's definitely what we wanted to do with Bury Me, My Love, then using a device that is already intimate for you as a player is something that is efficient."
With Twitch, Amazon tightens grip on livestreams of video games
"Streamlabs - a San Francisco tech company whose software allows viewers to tip streamers, giving the company insight into an opaque ecosystem - suggests that Amazon’s lead may be all but insurmountable. Its data shows that, in the last quarter, the average number of people watching Twitch’s streams at any given moment increased to 953,000, up from 788,000. Twitch’s archrival, YouTube Gaming, averaged 272,000 concurrent viewers, down from 308,000 in the previous quarter, Streamlabs reported."
China’s indie game makers guard their independence in a greedy industry
“We developers don’t care that much about what commercial reports say. I don’t know what they say on the numbers of indie studios in China. But it’s a small community and we know each other. In Beijing, ready indie studios are around 10. And we don’t organize marketing events or forums that often – we’re game-for-life people. A lunch or dinner meet-up would be our ‘indie forum’,” Gao smiled, and added. “The game industry is booming. We can feel the heat. Before you came, some investors reached out to me. We’re not commercial, and we know what we want.”
Are devs suffering from triple-A fatigue?
“Narrative games are the only fertile ground for new IPs at the moment,” [Dave] Ranyard says. “I have talked with many publishers and many have done the same research, with the same conclusions… Narrative games are a huge opportunity for new IP to flourish. Indies have the experience and the agility to make great stories – how many great stories have been written by a committee of executives?”
Why are game companies so afraid of the politics in their games?
So even when game companies make relatively straightforward decisions to reflect broad societal norms, they can expect trouble. It says something that a company like Bethesda has to deal with controversy for portraying fictional American Nazis as bad guys, while adding the spineless caveat that, “Bethesda doesn’t develop games to make specific statements or incite political discussions.”
Why Warner Bros. keeps picking up new games and studios
"We have two big games, Golf Clash, the 15th highest grossing game right now on the App Store, and Game of Thrones, top 50 and moving up the charts very quickly. With millions of daily active users in our mobile business, how do we make the show [E3] more relevant to them? Even our own presence here is still focused on the games we have yet to ship this year, versus the games that have millions of active players every day. As a company and as an industry, that’s something we still have to think about. Some of the events that you saw here that were fan-centric are interesting models to think about."
What Ubisoft Crying Man did next
"I would say almost everything changed after E3 - I felt the team was completely changed. We were already a family. Many of us had worked together 20 years already. But with this experience, I felt we were united. It doesn't happen often in the video game industry. It's rare, you have to treat it as a rare thing."
