Mobile Games

Capella

I think I'm a bit of an outlier here, but I personally love casual mobile games. And that's what I plan to develop myself. Yet whenever I search for stuff like articles, tutorials, YouTube videos etc. on game development, every other indie developer seems to be developing for the PC market or maybe consoles and mostly market through either Steam or Itch.io. It's really hard to find any info (except the purely technical stuff like how to upload to an Android device etc.) on how to publish and market a game for the Google PlayStore and the Apple Store. Why is that? Is it because the typical indie game dev is a hardcore gamer themself (himself much more often than anything else) and wouldn't touch a casual mobile game with a stick? Or is it really a market that is totally impossible to break into as an indie? It looks like everyone recommends that as an indie you should start with smaller, more manageable games like puzzle games. Aren't those exactly the kind of games that lend themselves to a mobile device? Why is it that developing for mobile is so rare in the indie community? Have any of you developed and published mobile games? (I mean games you designed first and foremost with mobile in mind, not something you developed for PC and then ported). What were your experiences with it?

Toxe

Capella I have no idea because I am not interested in mobile games and completely ignore them but if I had to take a guess then I would imagine that the market is just completely saturated and you have terrible discoverability.

Capella

Toxe
Yeah, probably, but isn't that the same for the indie game market in general? I mean, it is not like you can put your game on Steam or Itch.io and it suddenly takes off. You need to market the hell out of it if you want to make more than a handful of sales. And there are literally hundreds of hours of video on YouTube on how you do just that. But they basically all focus on Steam. And you have an at least equal number of videos from smaller channels run by indie developers that tell you that they tried to get traction for their game on Steam and that it totally did not work. So would the mobile platforms really be that much worse in that respect?

Toxe

Capella Yeah that is true. Although I have no idea how marketing to a mobile market would even look like? I could imagine (but also be completely wrong) that it is easier to reach desktop indie gamers than it is to reach mobile gamers. I mean, I have no idea how successful it would be but I could easily come up with five different ways to show-off my game to the desktop indie crowd whereas I have no idea how to do the same for mobile. Other than buying ads, I suppose?

MagickPanda

Mobile game normally needs to be tested or adapted on innumerable types of devices with different screen ratio, sub-OS's application behaviors, hardware and drivers, which is no trivial task for indie dev or indie budgets.

arly

I'm not sure if it's rare, maybe just not talking much, I'm not sure either. Maybe I can share some possible reasons on why mobile is pretty much a beast to tame, or a thing some prefer to avoid, just my opinion though.

As for technicalities, one example is, at the moment Godot 4 with "mobile" render method (Vulkan mobile, cough) has issue with black screen for some GPUs (you can look at it here). Luckily it's still possible to run gl_compatibility, although with the least graphics feature available. That issue alone is enough to tell how hard it is to develop for ~~Android~~ ..., erm, I mean mobile devices.
I believe that the old or cheap PC nowadays is capable to run mostly on what Forward+ can offer. Simply put, with PC, you're more focused on what you can deliver artistically than what you can't. Even if mobile can get more fancy features, battery, heat, and shared memory are still your biggest enemies, and I don't even get to frame synchronization/consistency and display with various refresh rates nowadays.

The other thing is likely monetization. Certain PC market lets you publish a game with upfront sales, or at best, you add DLCs. I believe, this means you can focus completely on the game itself without being bothered to balance your game over ads and in-app purchases, unless of course you decide to sell "premium" games to mobile.
I think some indie devs simply refuse IAP monetization model due to its addictive vicious cycle it can provide (a.k.a compulsion loop), some just believe it's really that hard to incorporate them in, especially dealing with the after-sales (top up failures, failed ads that won't close, oh my god!).

You can also check the difficulty in terms of distribution by looking on how to export Godot games for Android/iOS, compare to Windows. For example for Android, there are these things called APK, OBB, and AAB. I've published APKs before, but not AAB. AAB is the latest, and likely Google may ditch APK distribution in the future, or I think it's already done, since 2021? I don't really check the news. I'm not even sure how that works yet.
After that you got the tedious store requirement and policy reviews, and it's A LOT to deal with; icons, screenshot sizes and policy, privacy policy, permissions, internationalization, ratings, device selections, is it landscape/portrait, does it require internet or not, is it for ipad/iphone/both, review, and moreee. Don't forget to deal with the manifest file first too! Just saying that this is a challenge too to keep up with the OS and what the store wants.

As for the market, as you said, mobile market is pretty much over-saturated that it is hard to break. You can tell that on how the two companies proudly brag on how many apps are in their play/app stores more than the quality of the apps. Honestly I don't know how to make it in that battlefield either. but what I'm sure mobile market is vast and vary. It's not as if we got to capture all audiences. For example, there are some outliers where the players don't like it when they downloaded a 45 MB game just find out they have to download another 2 - 4 GB of data in-game. Not to mention some parts of the world don't always have unlimited data. It might be the reason why games with low package size that is casual cute idle game, clicker game, and stupidly funny viral game is also and still popular, I'm not sure. I think it's challenging market that's worth to try. I mean, we're indies, right? We take risks... right!? Okay...

Lastly, obviously preference. Some just prefer PC/console. Period.

I made two mobile games before in 2012 and 2016 I think, both failed miserably (not counting mobile web games, cause I assume this is play/app store thing). The first one was for iOS, and I couldn't continue to pay its yearly developer program so it got shut down. The last one was in Android. It was weirdly casual my mom couldn't even understand what to do with the game. so I wasn't proud about it either I pulled it faster than ever rather than polishing it (only a month!). Please allow my excuse that I was just testing Unity on Android!

I don't give up on mobile market yet, though. I just like mobile platform, I guess. The joy of being able to show what I'm doing just by bringing my cheap phone or play it however, whenever, wherever I want always makes me feel good regardless of my dim success in mobile market. 🙂

el_malo

a sinister plan would be to create such a monumental and amazing game, only to release it on mobile and make the users of other platforms suffer(I know it's not the concept of mobile games of casualness and simplicity and that with bluestacks you can play mobile games(not forgetting the GameLoop port), but it would be funny).

award

I think the way the mobile market is structured drove a lot of the passion out of it, and it's been that way for over a decade. The big money-makers tend to be games that act more as user-money-extractors than as fun, inventive experiences. It's all about spreadsheets and DAU and CPA and ARPDAU and CPM and all the other Key Performance Indicators that just suck the soul out of anyone that has one.

And if you try to just make a fun game and not care about all that crap, unfortunately you'll probably just get buried under the daily mountain of shovelware out there.

Edit: It also really doesn't help that the biggest mobile game framework provider out there, Unity Technologies, has been so focused on all of that same BS for so long.

Capella

award
I agree with what you are saying about the user-money-extractor games that suck. But shouldn't that be a chance for indie games in that market rather than a turn-off? How long will mobile users fall for the next candy crush or merge clone? There must be at least a section of that market that is looking for something fresh that does not try to screw them over. Funnily enough, the mobile game industry even seems to be aware of that. If you look at in-game ads for other games, they usually boast something like "Are you sick and tired of boring games that are full of commercials and pay-to-play? Well, get our xyz game. We are totally different", only to then deliver something that is as run-of-the-mill and full of commercials as the other games. What I like about the mobile market is that it reaches a whole lot of people who don't play games on a desktop computer or a console. It's a completely different target demographic, one, that is much closer to my own age and gender. I just don't see myself developing games for twenty year old guys anymore.

The vast majority of casual players will not pay for a game upfront, though, no matter how indie, idealistic and well-meaning the developer is. That's problematic, because it basically forces you to find some other way to monetize your game, at least a little bit. But from a player perspective, I find some of the monetization concepts less bad than others. I'm usually willing to watch an ad if it gives me an in-game reward, for example (actually, I normally get a new cup of tea or go take a wee while the ad is playing). I also like it, when a game is free with ads but gives me an option to get rid of those ads for a reasonable fee. So those are monetization strategies I could imagine using in my own games without feeling too bad about it. But I have no idea if that is even possible and how to go about it.

duane

award user-money-extractors

Several of my young relatives are constantly begging for $5 or $10 for "more robots" or "more blocks" for these vampiric monstrosities. It makes me sick to watch it. And, unfortunately, people will pay for this nonsense just to shut the kids up.

Megalomaniak

I can't speak for others, obviously. So this is just a personal take. For my part, I just really, really dislike touchscreen interfaces and don't want to develop for them. Though on top of that the mobile monetization being cancer is definitely a close second.

I just overall dislike the modern smartphones fragility and design overall such that I went back to using dumb/feature phone myself. These 'smart' phones are just a constant e-waste production scheme.

Erich_L

The game I’ve been working on I initially designed everything for mobile. As I did market research I found that every mobile game I found (tower defense) was using the same extremely predatory and outright annoying monetization strategy (buy some more gems ect…) 5 different types of monetized currency.
I have no doubt that a random mobile gamer would assume my game has the exact same kind of extra garbage. On the other hand, I believe it is true that most mobile gamers (myself included) expect mobile games to be either extremely cheap or free.
Also, I briefly worked with another developer who said he wouldn’t work with me if we continued on a march toward mobile. He convinced me that the best route for indie games is steam.

whiletrue111

Good and rare discussion on the mobile niche , it was never easy to find info on indie doing mobile . i mean never . even on UNITY forums .
Its like close garden of knowledge .
Any way my question is different .
How mature is GODOT for the mobile market ? how easy / hard is to develop for mobile ?
Does someone have examples ?
Maybe example of games ?
Im interested especially in 3d mobile games
Thanks