Free to play mobile games Survey

@yourbuddyaaron , surveys are not permitted in the Writing forum. Moved to the GDNet Lounge where previous surveys have been moved. Before posting again, please review our community guidelines. Good luck with your degree.

I think most people who program/develop games are PC users and I would also assume therefore also not phone gamers. I think programming is as hardcore PC audience as it gets.

The video is getting a little older so you may not have seen it, but this Extra Credits video is relevant to your survey.

“these are our only two options” — or we ditch the AAA budget and get back to games made by small teams, with much lower development friction due to communication and coordination overhead, and with designers like Jon Blow who are simultaneously also the lead developer. The order of the sinking star cost around $25 Million in pretty competitive salaries to make, and in that price, making a new programming language and a new engine are also included. And that game will have more playtime than a AAA game.

Studios need to start taking money seriously again, and not live off of basically infinite funding that is basically loan/debt. Don't scope a design that you don't have expertise or budget for. Plan to get it done with your own money and maybe get some final financial help from a publisher if it takes longer than expected and you ran out of money. And care about player appeal & satisfaction more than political messages that raise your credit score with blackrock.

I will never buy in-game currencies or in-game cosmetics and I will also not play pay-to-progress games, whatever that means. I'm ready to pay up to 40€ if the game is really really good. 10€–15€ for normal games, 20€ max. I don't have a phone anymore but phones are also not a good gaming platform. I recommend making a game for handheld consoles instead and building the engine & codebase in a way that lets it also run on a phone with dialled-back graphics and smaller install size. And then charge 5€ for it or something. People will pay proper money for proper games, and if it's just a secondary platform for your game anyway, it doesn't matter much if some people don't want to buy it.

Targeting mobile as a primary platform for games is simply a bad idea due to the slopification of the app stores that happened 10+ years ago. It wasn't as unhinged in the beginning. The tragedy of mobile is that there is no real curation of the storefronts and developers aren't really held accountable with proper standards. So everyone just pumps out some slop app that is either free and full of ads, or 99ct or something and just as bad. The entire app store meta is catastrophic and even the userbase has been conditioned for 10+ years to expect nothing else, either. IMO the only way to fix mobile in specific is to have a new platform with a curated app store of high quality apps only.