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Zones on 15 July 2011
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famousringo said:
Zones said:

 

Angry Bird can be a very addictive game, but its success, alongside most iOS games, is due to the simple fact that the game is competing with boredom, not other games. So its sales and popularity gives a wrong perception to what makes a great game in the industry.

The problem with the pricing of most iOS games (not just Angry Bird) is that they indirectly hurt the industry by not allowing much room for games with high development budget to be developed on handheld platforms, because a higher budgeted game would need a higher price point. And so I don't think Angry Bird is particularly shallow, but I think the industry, and indie developers, are getting more shallow, as everyone's trying to cash in from the iOS platform.

Searching titles like "Bird", "Tiny", "Doodle", etc. would bring you hundreds of copycats games in the App Store. I think a good example would be Gameloft and how they seem to get away with copying everything successful. You know, in the description of BackStab, it quotes a site saying "This is a game that costs £3 yet provides the same amount of entertainment and graphical brilliance as a PSP title that retails for £25", and I think that's a huge problem for the industry in long-term, because a game like this, or Shadow Guardian (which is an Uncharted clone) would make it harder for people to justify the original games' price. For example Uncharted: Golden Abyss would be at least $40, while Shadow Guardian is $5 or occasionally less, and that price disparity could potentially put the real developers out of business if they don't find success, leaving us with cheap clones and maybe an occasional great game like Cut The Rope in the handheld market.

To clarify, I know lower price is better for consumers, but here, obviously, I am talking about the overall industry.

Oh, and thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that game later to see how it is.

 


Your first paragraph is pure bullshit. Angry Birds competes with thousands of games priced between free and $15 and it wins because it's accessible, fun, challenging, polished, and offers great value. It's massively successful because people love it, and that doesn't give a false impression of what a great game is, that's exactly what a great game is.

Your second paragraph just misses the point. Why are big budgets important? What's important is that consumers get games that they have fun playing, and developers get paid enough to make a decent profit on their investment. Big budgets are only useful if they bring the people more fun (in which case they'll pay for them) or developers more money (which would again require people to pay for them). If iOS really is killing big budget games, that inherently means big budgets aren't doing their job and they need to go.

I'm not sure what relevance knockoffs have to anything. Every successful game franchise or genre inspires mediocre knockoffs. C'est la vie. If Gameloft really can deliver all the fun of Uncharted at a fraction of the cost, then they win. You worry about a lack of originality, but this console generation has brought us 6 Call of Duty games and 5 Halo games (excluding Halo Wars) so far. That's before we get to the knockoffs. Originality is a rare thing in any medium.

My first point was in comparison to games on PSP/Vita and DS/3DS, not other iOS games. Professor Layton, for example, is a better game than any puzzle game you name it on iOS, but the competition is not direct, so I hope my point is more clear to you now.

Clearly though, I mentioned that I am strictly talking about the industry here, so I don't know why didn't get my second point. Fun is an abused word; more fun is not better. A decent game could be fun to someone because that person's friends playing that same game, that's especially true in online gaming; one would lure another and it becomes fun due to the social aspect between the friends. Here though, I am not arguing about what's fun and what's not, I am saying that "fun" and quality can be subjective, but the state of the industry is not, and seeing how that you could be get more money by self-developing games for iOS and smartphones, most people would eventually be discouraged to continue developing games with a longer development time under more pressure for a studio if their titles would get outsold by those cheap iOS games.

Knockoffs are relevant in the sense that iOS gaming can't seem to get much beyond the simple and unique multi-touch games in terms of originality without resorting to imitations. Again, that will not be good for the industry in long term.