As a mobile game dev, this is a bummer. I have been fortunate to get review and preview coverage on a few of my games from TA. There aren't many sites doing what that do. I get that the market has moved and now discovery happens in the App Store and via advertisement dollars, but growing up reading EGM or IGN.com and seeing people excited about a game just from a few screenshots colored me for life. I'm sad mobile game players don't have that opportunity.
unfortunate but inevitable. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how the mobile scene became in these past 15 years or so. When you have companies pouring tens of millions of dollars to advertise to a more casual audience who probably isn't looking for a professional review, where does a mobile journalist like TA come in? Meanwhile, the more console-esque audience left because less and less games out on mobile bothered appealing to them.
Not TA's fault, but they were pincered on both ends and couldn't do much as the medium they reviewed changed in real time.
You can see a bit of the Walled City in the old Van Damme movie, Blood Sport [1].
There used to be an incredible multi-story arcade outside Tokyo, あなたのウェアハウス [2], with two of the floors being themed as KWC. The weathering on all the elements (including the escalator and crane games!) was fantastic.
There's a recently released kungfu movie whose story happened in the Kowloon walled city. The government is planning to relocate the movie set to the original address for exhibition.
I first heard of this project here on HN when I shared a project I finished with a friend to accomplish a similar goal for iOS widgets[1]. I still use a server-delivered JSON file for a live widget on my iPhone. I think there's a lot of value to this type of delivery even if you can't fully customize the UI.
Awesome article! None of the videos played for me on mobile Safari, but the text descriptions were enough. I do a lot of Unity development and typically just lerp things with different easing curves. It's great to add PID to the toolbox for elements that are more procedural. Thanks for the sharing.
While I was in college, I made a half dozen games and apps for the danger hiptop (branded by T-Mobile as the Sidekick). We had a Microsoft recruiter on campus at Michigan State and it was right after Microsoft acquired danger and lost a bunch of customer data. I think the recruiter liked that I was asking about this issue and not begging for a job. They brought me back the next day to interview and then flew me out to Redmond for an on-site. Not only was the hiptop dev scene a formative experience for me skill-wise, it indirectly led me to Seattle and gave me the chance to work on Xbox, HoloLens, and more.
I was in a similar boat. It helped me to find a collaborator who could inspire me and advance the projects without everything being on my shoulders. It's easy to be paralyzed when you know every single detail of all the work that you alone have to do.
Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment.
I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.
I agree that there are lots of poorly made games that predictably flop. However, it's also worth noting all the bits of a game that matter outside of the executable. Knowing where your audience hangs out and how to reach them, having the ability to make compelling trailers and screenshots, having press contacts to help promote your game, crafting a viable monetization strategy, etc. All these things matter more than most observers would think when differentiating between known and unknown games.
It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.
[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.
Hey! Cool games! I think mobile is a different beast altogether. A majority of the games I was talking about are on the PC/console market where players tend to have a lot of disposable income and rely on stores (like Steam, Nintendo Shop) to find games.
Mobile is much harder. I think that is one medium where I agree that the OP is right. Because the games tend to be simpler, the barrier of entry is reduced drastically, so it's much harder to have sucecss. Serious gamers won't play mobile game and casual gamers are fickle, so just making a "good game" on mobile doesn't apply. I think it's especially true for word games (I saw you made two).
Nonetheless, your games look cool! I don't think they're games I'd spend more than a couple of minutes on (much less spend money on), but who knows? I think you should keep making more. The last word/numbers game I spent money on was Threes, and that was only because I heard about how 2048 stole the concept from that game. Not sure if that context even helps.
Thanks for sharing and providing some concrete examples.
My experience has been that once a small business is snatched up by a firm, customer service goes out the window and the focus on efficiency leads to a marked decline in overall quality. I'm sure it's all gravy for the people making money though.
If decline in service goes up, the people at the top most definitely feel it. It is actually multiplied by the fact that it is consolidated. So it is exponential.
The problem with ->big<- PEs is that they usually do not care too much. They usually have 5y exit plan, no matter what. If they are managing other people's money, like pension funds and whatnot, they usually do not care because they already got their fees. So yes, it can become a problem over time. Large PE firms simply gobble up every good deal they can so it is quantity over quality. But then, this can happen with small shop anyway. With PE it might be more exaggerated due to the scope but that's just the market. It bares what it financially can and it does not matter how big or small a business is if the management is lacking.
But even big PE firms can be good managers. So again, it is circumstantial and not something that can be generalized.
There are always bad apples. But those apples, once they make their bad name, they will go out of business sooner or later because other people will know of them and to avoid them.
