Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Downfall of Mobile Gaming”.
Do you remember when mobile games used to look like this, and this like this? All of these were from over a decade ago. These games were released at a time when we were still using iPhone 4S or a Samsung Galaxy S3 in a best case scenario, and so why now that we have phones like the iPhone 14 pro and Samsung s23 Ultra friends that are literally 50 times more powerful? Do most games still not really look any better in the same time frame we’ve seen gaming consoles go from PS3 Graphics that look like this to pierce Graphics, that look like this, and the mobile gaming market now even makes more money than the console market so time To find out why the mobile games themselves haven’t stepped up in the same way. Well, the first part of the puzzle is that not all phones are getting more powerful at the same rate, but check this out. So this is a new flagship phone. The Galaxy s23 Ultra versus one of the company’s older flagships, the Galaxy S7 Edge and running this performance test.
You can see basically an eight times performance jump just in a few years and that’s not even factoring in all the other benefits of just having newer Tech. In your phone, but if we do the same thing on the budget, end of the spectrum, a brand new budget phone versus an older budget phone with the same time, Gap and the performance Improvement is Tiny. While on the flagship end, we’ve gone up by over a million points in performance on the budget and we’ve barely gone up 70 000. now there is a reason for that. At the entry level of the market, people just want different things to what Flagship users want.
Like even if every single year, companies could put more and more capable processors in that money is often better spent, just sticking with a processor, that’s good enough and then spending the extra money, upgrading the screen, quality or the camera quality. And so what this all means is that, while we’re constantly hearing about how phones are getting faster and faster, that progression is only really happening at the top tier Flagship end and not trickling down through to cheaper phones like we expected it would 10 years ago, and So we’re now at a stage where the power gap between the very highest end phones and the Very lowest end phones has never been wider. So if you’re a mobile game developer now – and you can either make a great looking game – that only 30 of phones are going to be able to run properly or make a bad looking game that everyone can play, which are you gon na pick. But the store doesn’t fully explain why the vast majority of games don’t look significantly better. So right now, I’m running a racing game from 2013 on the top and a racing game from 2022 at the bottom. It’S really hard to tell the difference. I mean yeah. The reflections on the car look better in 2022, but then I would actually say the sky looks better in 2013, as it does the amount of stuff that they’ve actually added into the map, but there’s another Factor. That’S holding back mobile games from leveling up.
In the same way that console games have the fragmentation see if you’re making a game for PlayStation 5, you can build the game for PS5. You can look at all the components available, the Technologies it supports and make the absolute best looking game possible that can take advantage of all of them. Yeah sure you might also make a version for PS4 and maybe a PC Port too, but because there’s such few platforms, each version of the game is its own distinct development project.
That’S optimized for that platform, yeah apart from you cyberpunk, but you can’t optimize like that. When there’s a thousand possible different devices, literally that people could be using like there are with phones, and so what this means is not just that you have to cater to the lowest common denominator: the weakest phone Hardware on the market, but also that you can’t take Advantage of the strengths of anyone’s Hardware like, for example, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, that basically every top-end Android phone is powered by right now is an absolute monster. It supports like 15 different super Advanced Gaming Technologies, even the same Ray tracing in games.
Just like the PS5 can, but I’ve been using a phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside of it, and I can’t find one properly retraced Android game, I’m not exaggerating here. Zero percent of Android games, at least ones that aren’t in beta have Ray tracing. Let’S call it 0.0001, just in case I’ve missed a few, but the PS5, because the games are designed around. It has Ray tracing in almost 40 of its titles, because there are just so many different phones, each one with their own strengths and weaknesses. Developers just have no monetary incentive to program in advanced features like Ray tracing. It’S just a big investment to make the experience five percent better for two percenter players, whereas for PS5, because every console is identical, adding Ray tracing is going to benefit every user and so we’ll actually add value to your game and sell more copies.
And let’s talk about this monetization, because this is the key thing that I think turns a majority of developers off when it comes to mobile, see the way that the big budget console gaming Market works. Is you have a few main AAA developers? They’Ll spend Millions working with teams of hundreds of people to make their next game they’ll, announce it and then they’ll sell it charging 70 up front per copy. Now because these tend to be big companies with a reputation with established distribution Channels with connections to get their games right in front of viewers eyes and because they’ll earn back their investment very quickly. Assuming the game is good, it’s not a super high risk Endeavor. You can take your time developing. You can invest Millions, making sure that your game supports all the latest Technologies, because in most cases you know that you’re going to make your money back. This is not the case on mobile. The mobile gaming Market is super easy to enter and therefore also super competitive. The majority of games fail, plus, even if you succeed, you have to jump through far more Hoops to start making money from them. The default assumption with a mobile game is now that it’s going to be free, and so, even when you get your users, your job is not done there.
You have to also get your players completely invested in your game. You don’t just need a few thousand downloads. You need a competitive, thriving Community before players will even think about taking out their wallet to buy power-ups or customization skins within it, and the truth of it is sometimes that’s out of your control, sometimes well, most of the time really. The concept of the game just doesn’t stick with the masses, and so, instead of wasting years making it look nice and pretty and Polished, you can minimize your risk by making the game just look good enough and then chucking it into the void early to see. If people actually like the concept I’d say it’s quite easy to look at the games that have done well on mobile by going on the top charts, and things like that, and just thinking that all mobile games do that. Well, but the truth of it is. It is a graveyard out there like if you could sort the play, store or the app store by most recently added games and just see everything that’s getting put onto there. You’D see it at 99 of these games just disappear into nothingness. No one finds them. No one plays them plus if your game is less demanding to run, it’s likely to mean that more people are going to be able to try it and you’re, giving it the best chance to become a big game that actually has some Buzz about it, which is Kind of the opposite of how it works when you’re making a console game.
The other economic factor is just the simple fact that most mobile game developers are smaller companies like if we just have a look at the top three games on the iPhone right now, you do find quite a few sizable Brands. You get a lot of companies, who’ve kind of figured out what makes mobile games work and then they’ve just made like a ton of them. But if you look a little deeper you’ll find that the vast majority of companies making mobile games are 50 employees or less. Like a snake IO, this is a huge game made by cool apps. Two apps number of employees 26. in companies like this often just don’t – have the physical Manpower or resources to make visually stunning games and because their users aren’t paying upfront at the point of downloading their game. These developers can’t Coast on past success or word of mouth or establish distribution channels to have repeat successes. Every game needs to stand on its own and has to succeed on its own to have its own economy.
You’Re, probably starting to see why mobile game devs are not constantly out there trying to make the next Crisis a couple of logistical issues too, like the fact that in the last 10 years, we’ve still not figured out how to make touch screen controls feel satisfying. I mean yeah, there’s gaming grips, there’s some gaming phones that have baked and triggers there’s gamer goo that reduces the sweatiness of your fingers. But, let’s be honest, only like three percent of the market is actually buying these things and so games are not being built for them, especially not the gamer, good God. My trousers, I promise buzzer. It was Game ago, plus the battery life issue. We’Ve got: a number of phones are much more than just gaming devices. We need our phones to make phone calls and to be reachable. So if you jumped on to an hour of full-on console quality Call of Duty on your phone but then exited the app and realized you only had five percent battery remaining, wouldn’t be very happy about that right. So, unlike with consoles and PC that are plugged into a wall and can draw as much power as they need to to run at their best, there’s a lot of constraints that are put into place on phones to actually stop them doing that, so that you can Use them for other things, but I think the single most important thing to bear in mind here is that people think about Mobile gaming differently to other kinds of gaming. There was definitely a time when games on phones were accelerating in popularity in, like 2012., we’re looking at the number of players doubling every six months. It definitely felt like the end was here for consoles.
Wyatt actually even went as far as to Crown The Game’s console dead, but then I realized a few things, one that you can’t just take the way that something is currently growing as proof of how it will grow. There’S reasons why the growth was particularly high. At the start, lots of people were getting smartphones for the first time.
It was a novelty. People were curious about what a smartphone could do, so it would experiment more and more. Experimentation leads to Rapid growth.
It meant that developers were testing the boundaries more and therefore making more progress, but nowadays we’ve almost settled on the realization that people don’t really play on their phones as a console replacement. They play mostly just to fill time. The phone’s got different benefits to traditional gaming. It’S not this hyper immersive get comfortable on a sofa big screen experience. The console gaming is, but it is super convenient it’s the games that you’ll always have with you and that you’ll want to jump into you for 15 minutes at a time in between other things, and so because the purpose of mobile games is less about embellishment and More about the practicality, it turns out that it’s not just developer unwillingness, but most users of mobile games are also perfectly happy just to have a simple looking title: that’s quick to jump in and out of you know what else is quick to jump in and out Of hey pal honey, it sits in the background of your online experience. You basically forget it’s there until it comes to buying something.
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