This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile/casual game development I've read
Eh, is it? The author was sure that mobile was where it was at in 2010, observing that no one was playing consoles (consoles were and are as hot as ever), with nary a mention of PC gaming. They made a, sorry to say, easily replicated game for a niche market, among what already was 100s of thousands of app.
In these sorts of stories it's always a little more complex, and of course someone will be looking out and making broad conclusions about externals, when some of their own decisions were questionable.
I'm not trying to be a critic of the author, but given the number of "see?" type posts, people need to be somewhat more skeptical.
and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
This is almost too much. Steam greenlight is just overwhelmed with hundreds of entrants, and they're opening the floodgates even wider. And while I'm very likely to try out random little games on mobile (particularly if they're free to play -- not that I like the model when abused smurfberry style, but it is turning into a "try before you buy" tactic that is reasonable), then pay a dollar or so and get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, it's extremely unlikely that I'm going to install anything from a small studio on my PC -- everything is from megastudios where teams of hundreds worked for years, because that's the competition.
On the topic of large teams, the baseline on the PC is incredibly high now. Not only the triple-As, of course, but every amateur has a very high baseline of Unity/Unreal/etc. This seems like a godsend ("Yay I have Unity and all of these cool shaders and techniques and seemingly endless power"), but it means that the artistic and technical demands are enormously high and resource intensive.
I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers/designers. People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. Chris Roberts' Star Citizen was initially successful almost entirely due to the name Chris Roberts and his reputation. The recent game Transistor was made by the studio that made Bastion, and got more attention than it would otherwise have gotten initially because of that fact. If you establish yourself with one good game, PC gamers are far more likely to try your next game, where in mobile frequently people have no idea who wrote Threes, or Draw Something, they just download an app that their friends or Twitter feed mentioned. You still have to make at least one successful game, but if you get there it's a lot easier to maintain gamers' attention at that point.
>I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers/designers. People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.
If that's the case, the guy has not much to hope for in the PC market. What kind of brand name can he build with the kind of games he makes?
Eh, is it? The author was sure that mobile was where it was at in 2010, observing that no one was playing consoles (consoles were and are as hot as ever), with nary a mention of PC gaming. They made a, sorry to say, easily replicated game for a niche market, among what already was 100s of thousands of app.
In these sorts of stories it's always a little more complex, and of course someone will be looking out and making broad conclusions about externals, when some of their own decisions were questionable.
I'm not trying to be a critic of the author, but given the number of "see?" type posts, people need to be somewhat more skeptical.
and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
This is almost too much. Steam greenlight is just overwhelmed with hundreds of entrants, and they're opening the floodgates even wider. And while I'm very likely to try out random little games on mobile (particularly if they're free to play -- not that I like the model when abused smurfberry style, but it is turning into a "try before you buy" tactic that is reasonable), then pay a dollar or so and get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, it's extremely unlikely that I'm going to install anything from a small studio on my PC -- everything is from megastudios where teams of hundreds worked for years, because that's the competition.
On the topic of large teams, the baseline on the PC is incredibly high now. Not only the triple-As, of course, but every amateur has a very high baseline of Unity/Unreal/etc. This seems like a godsend ("Yay I have Unity and all of these cool shaders and techniques and seemingly endless power"), but it means that the artistic and technical demands are enormously high and resource intensive.