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> "all child's play. a niche industry. the true gaming platforms are android and ios, with ios users more likely to spend money on apps/games"

I question this wisdom, and will continue to do so until the day an iOS title breaks Halo 4's first-weekend sales record. Or hell, lifetime sales record.

The core gaming industry moves far fewer units than iOS/Android games (in which case "units" is more ephemeral of a concept), but succeeds in extracting $60-90 at a time, as opposed to $0.99.

We had our love affair with "casual gaming is the future" when the Wii came out - that didn't pan out then either. Attach rates were abysmal, and people soon bored of the platform after one or two titles. It failed to find a long-term place in the living room, that's for sure.

This isn't about some supposed superiority of core gaming vs. casual gaming, it's simply skepticism because every time someone has said that casual will eat core for lunch, it has failed to occur.

Sales for iOS/Android games are terrible on a per-title basis, and even including only the top titles don't come close to console sales numbers. The only real corner of that industry making eyebrow-raising amounts of money are microtransaction-based, treadmilly, slot-machine type games, and I have my doubts as to whether or not it's a sustainable trend.

> "a lot of turn based games are perfectly suited for touch, from Jagged Alliance, XCOM, Panzer General to all the adventures to RPGs (where are all the Ultima games on iOS? Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger already are available)."

"Re-releasing old games on mobile" is a profitable segment, but it won't last, mostly because we will very quickly run out of games people actually give a shit about.

And once you start contemplating development new adventure games, RPGs, and strategy games, the economics of this falls over. Even without the notion of modernizing graphics and gameplay, developing something like Chrono Trigger would hardly be worth it when the market bears $0.99 a copy, or less.

More likely, we'll see Chrono Trigger, where enemies are overpowered and you pay microtransaction credits to revive your party members when they die. This is, after all, the only way mobile devs have found that generates any substantial revenue. What a marvelous progression of this industry.

The future of the indie gaming scene lies with the PC, and potentially surprise core-gaming-targeted platforms like the Ouya. These are the only platforms where users are prepared to spend any real amount of money on gaming. Revenue extraction on mobile platforms inevitably involves fairly unscrupulous (and simply not fun) mechanisms.

Casual will not eat core; they exist in their different places (phones are definitely perfect devices for casual) and you need original content (RPGs, strategy etc), but I think original content is not what drives the price up for the studios. The whole package is what does that; Ultima can now be made by two people in an attic; that doesn't cost a lot while it's fun to play. The problem is that 'people' want a FPS with superior graphics and that whole package is very costly. For me (but i'm old), the great graphics, like 3d effects in 3d movies currently, wear thin after a few minutes of ooohhh and aaaah and then it's about gameplay. Something which a lot of AAA 'sell $100 million' games lack. Nintendo their strategy (lowish graphics, small teams) but with non-casual, original games would (and did in the past) work fine and would be profitable IMHO.

Nintendo's strategy has limits: if they can't push enough hardware in the homes their sales will plummet. The WiiU is nowhere near selling out and we can already see it will not be like the Wii. The WiiU will not sell you any new experience, it's just more of the same old shit. People will get tired of it soon enough.

Nintendo still has an upper hand in handheld gaming, because that's become their core business since the GBA days. But who know what happens 5-10 years down the road?

Relying on past trends to predict the future is always doubtful at best. The market is continuously in movement.

I didn't mean to say Nintendo is doing everything well, but I think gameplay (should) trumps graphics every time in the long run. A lot of companies are betting on non vital (for gameplay) assets too much; according to the chart in the article, graphics are 25% cost of a game; I suspect it's a lot more in a lot of AAA games. In my opinion that's not needed to get the masses playing games. If the game is addictive and depends on a lot of content, simpler graphics will make creating that content a lot easier and cheaper and will make the game worlds bigger for a lot less money. And that's the part Nintendo, IMHO, got right a lot of times.

Sales vs Profit.

Mobile titles can have much better ROI.

People keep saying this, but I've seen no evidence of it.

Mobile titles aren't free to develop. They may not cost as much as Halo or Gears, but they're still expensive to build. A 6-8 person studio will still easily run up $1m in operating costs a year, before we even get to PR and marketing.

So say you get your development cycle down to a science and can squeeze out an excellent game every year - that's $1mm of dev costs + marketing.

At $0.99 a pop that's nearly 1.4 million copies needed to break even on dev costs, more if you wish to recoup marketing. How many iOS games do you think sell on that order of units? To make it worth anyone's while you'd probably have to do 2+ million units.

There are certainly mobile games who have reached these sales numbers - but they are few and far between. Mobile gaming right now (excluding microtransaction-based models) is like paying $100 for a lottery ticket whose payout is $1000, with a chance of winning of 0.1%. It's insanity.

Mobile gets a lot of hype, and I'm a mobile dev myself, but all the hard numbers I've seen suggests that the traditional app sales model (i.e., a one-time, pay-by-content, model) is entirely broken and economically insane. There is a reason why the entire industry is moving towards microtransactions - it's the only thing that might enable a respectable ROI.

You seem to gloss over micro transactions, and pricing.

0.99$ is the standard app price, but its not the only price. Square Enix puts out premium priced games, and I've bought Indy games in the 2 to 5 dollar range.

Why exclude microtransactions? That's simply the nature of the market. People don't experience mobile games in large blocks of time, so why should they pay for them in the same way? I don't think every game needs to be a slot machine, but something closer to telltale games walking dead makes a lot more sense. Especially on mobile.

Telltale is doing what one normally understands as microtransactions - we're talking about credit-based gaming, as opposed to episodic like Telltale.

I haven't dismissed microtransactions completely, though I'm doubtful that they are sustainable in the long run. What we've currently explored in the game industry when it comes to that really amounts to the gaming equivalent of Groupon - a surge of interest due to novelty, followed by apathy or downright aversion due to well, how un-fun it is.

And this isn't just mobile specific - look at Zynga and how their player numbers are dropping off a cliff. I have serious doubts about the sustainability of microtransaction-based gaming.

So, leaving aside microtransactions for a moment, this leaves us with "paying for content" (as opposed to paying for ephemeral virtual currency). I've included episodic gaming (e.g., Telltale) in this thought, and I don't believe mobile is better than traditional gaming platforms (PC, consoles) following this model.

The mobile space has been conditioned to expect rock-bottom pricing. Where an indie game dev can move a game like FTL on Steam for $10+, their odds of charging that much on iOS or Android is basically nil. Advertising and conversion on mobile is also notoriously hard, adding to customer acquisition and marketing costs. I simply do not see this working out for the vast, vast majority of devs.

If I were an indie dev right now I'd be gunning for the PC/Mac/console space hardcore. iOS/Android, in gaming and outside of it, is a gold rush with few winners and no economic sensibility.

Regarding zynga, I think the player base has spread outward to many different games vs all on zynga. Zynga had the initial numbers because of their Facebook game success. Now you see rage of bahamut, etc. It seems like most of these games live or die for their 1% of customers that pay the most.

In the future I see traditional vs mobile as TV shows vs movies. They are functionally the same media, but they are produced to be consumed in different ways. Right now we're wondering why made for TV movies are not doing as well as their theater counterparts.

Well I have never seen anyone spending 3 hours in a row on Angry Birds. ALl these iOS/ANdroid games are for people who either have short attention span or who need to distract themselves for a few minutes in transports. Who believes these are serious games ?

Obviously serious games are those where you CARE and put dozens, hundred of hours of your life into. And releasing old games on new formats cost nearly nothing. If the industry was as dead serious as you think it is, they would be making NEW, ambitious games for these platforms and make big bucks out of them. But that's not going to happen because nobody will play games for hours and hours on these devices - that's not the right public nor the right place for it.

Big budget shit games are not dying. You are living blindfolded.

"serious games"

I get a smile in my face every time I see those two words toghether.

There are "serious games" summits, too :) But these ones refer to games used in professional contexts, such as military ones.

If you grew up playing console and PC games then yes, iOS games are a joke. If you loves games, touch-based UIs just don't cut it.

That's not a fair comparison: everyone who buys an XBox or a PlayStation, intends to play games. Only a fraction of Android and iOS users want to play games on their devices.