Barriers to entry are low?

They’re smaller; quicker and cheaper to produce – therefore they must be easier, right? Don’t believe a word of it.

The first challenge is that developers have to produce maximum impact with minimal space. They have five minutes to grab the consumer’s attention, and they have to produce something with true mass-market appeal. This goes against the grain of many artists and developers who like to show off their artistic skill and imagination on the blank canvas of a mobile game. In particular, those developers who have been brought up on the infinite memory and processing power would feel considerably claustrophobic with the limitations of mobile.

Those that are emerging as the star programmers of mobile are those that were developing arcade classics in the 80s, who were then developing to computers with memory restrictions and limited processing power, who probably instantly recognise those limitations and see them as a challenge. So many mobile games play like squashed down console titles, with career modes and depth but little in the way of actual fun. The arcade game and it’s pick up and play ethos is almost a dying breed in modern console gaming. Mobile on the other hand is the ideal outlet for arcade style games.

The second challenge is to handle the device fragmentation. Unlike console development where the objective is to push each technology to its limit, on mobile the game needs to be ported to over 200 different devices. This requires careful development of the reference builds to reduce the enormous cost of porting and QA. This is both a challenge in developing portable games, but also making sure that the game at the end is still fun and enjoyable across such a wide range of devices.

The challenge is to really understand what makes the game fun, what is the game play DNA that is at the heart of a good game and then develop a framework and a vehicle that delivers that DNA across a massive number of devices with a range of capabilities that range from Gameboy to PSOne. At it’s most basic this is raw gameplay at it’s most basic and this is a huge challenge in developing games.

Most modern games have some many layers of graphical effects that they managed to hide the game under visual pyrotechnics. In mobile the game is left bare, and that makes them so much more challenging than you would expect. The barriers to entering the market and producing mobile games appear to be low, however, the risks of failure are high.