The Mobile Trap

I’ve been a PC Gamer all my life and of course my concepts were aimed at PC, but life has a funny way of not letting you do what you love all the time, so during the years i worked on consoles too, but on PC i have all the freedom i need to make the games i want and have a proper audience for them. Of course during the years i made a few games for mobiles too and for this i received a lot of negative comments, but i did it to experiment that horrible market and at the same time to finish some small games like Doggy Strike and Station Defense. They weren’t the most interesting or unique games, but i was happy that i finished them, one of them was played by over 50000 people which made me happy, of course it barely made any money, but it wasn’t meant to. 

What most people don’t understand that everybody these days makes games, everybody is an indie dev, the problem that many don’t ever finish a game, that’s the most important thing, since most all developers i know, start a game and never finish it, i was one of them until a few years ago. I have tons of playable prototypes developed during the years, but i didn’t finish them for several reasons, but luckily now i am all in this time, and everything should work smoother, with a few bumps here and there.

So what is this mobile trend? Well the advantage as a single developer its the low entry barrier, you can make very small games and finish them. The disadvantage is that the platforms are pretty bad on performance if you not careful, they are many devices if you dare to go on Android, 80% of the games are IAP games to milk the players, and most of the players are not even gamers, they expect “one awesome button” ( Bioware, Dragon Age II – TrollFace:) games.

Can you make a living and make good games on Mobiles? In short yes, on tablets where you have more freedom, where  you can make some decent turn-based games, but you are still limited by the gamers, so your projects wont reach the complexity you would like, so its better to stay on PC with proper gamers and find a niche, make games that you love to play, and in time based on your skills and luck, you might even make enough money to continue to do more games.