Website Editor pocketgamer.biz Following the results of the conference, GDC identified 21 trends in the modern mobile industry. Here is the third and final part of this article.
You can read about the first ten trends here, and about the second five here.
16. The right tools
Now almost all companies specializing in the development of console engines support the hardware of the iPad 2 level and consider such mobile platforms a full-fledged part of their business.
For example, British developers from Geomerics have already prepared a demo version of their Enlighten technology (it was used in Battlefield 3) for release on iOS as a separate application. Recall that Epic released something similar a year and a half ago, demonstrating the capabilities of the mobile version of Unreal Engine.
Of course, this is far from the only example, the other day, for example, Crytek, released their first mobile game developed on their popular engine.
By the way, for the reason that there are other opportunities and a different business model in the mobile segment – working with high–tech engines here is likely to develop in a slightly different way than on consoles.
17. ID – elephant in the china shop
Apple’s refusal to use UDID is currently one of the main events of 2012.
No one knows exactly the reasons, moreover, no one is ready to talk about how to solve this problem, but, nevertheless, everyone is actively working on it.
You can read more about the reasons for the introduction of UDID and that it will not be introduced yet here and here.
18. Crazy business
Until recently, it seemed that the word “madness” – in the context of “insanely profitable” – could only be used by Peter Vesterbacka from Rovio.
But the mobile industry is growing so fast that this word – along with the related term “hypergrowth” – is being mentioned by various market players more and more often: many companies – even Zynga – claim that they expect mobile profits to double in 2012.
19. Back to hardcore
More and more companies are declaring their intentions to develop f2p projects, wanting to reach a hardcore audience.
There are plenty of examples: online companies like Aeria Mobile, companies focused on the Facebook platform a la Kabam, startups formed by people from the console business, such as Industrial Toys and so on.
20. Do globally, think locally
Everything is very simple here. The best mobile developers and publishers now publish their games in at least eight languages, often ten.
Five main European languages plus Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Polish and Russian.
21. Do not underestimate the cost of the user
The term “user engagement” sounds terrible (especially in Russian). It’s like you’re recruiting people from the street and making them play your game. Although, of course, it is not at all necessary that everything happens in this way. Word of mouth, integration with the Twitter service, thanks to which they will be able to share their records in it, are also good ways to gain an audience.
Anyway, for most developers, the days when the game could be found in the App Store during a simple surf or thanks to cool reviews are over.
However, the dream of a feature remained. But no one will ever be able to guarantee that your project will be promoted by Apple itself – and this, as marketers say, is the only thing you can be 100% sure of.
Therefore, everyone is engaged in attracting users – its essence is spending money to ensure that as many people as possible see the project. They use completely different tools for this. Someone is FreeAppADay, someone is standard mobile advertising, and someone is bots.
The problem is that the industry is becoming more profitable. And where there is a lot of money, companies with tight wallets appear – and they can buy up a significant part of the traffic.
However, some already do so. For example, Zynga bought up all the possible users it could by launching Dream Heights. Perhaps GREE will act in a similar way, spending about $ 50 million of the marketing budget to attract users (at least GREE herself called a similar amount).
Such steps on the part of large companies may soon significantly raise the already unstable prices for users, which, in turn, will hit small companies hard.
A source: http://www.pocketgamer.biz