Untapped market: I exist and there are a lot of us

Sepi56 wrote:

Am I overestimating how easy these ports are, or is this a market most indie developers simply don't see as worth pursuing? Is that sentiment grounded in reality? I’d think that a former PC gamer retired into office-workerhood would be a common life path, but am I really the odd man out? Or did I fall out with the times while everyone else just bought a Steamdeck?

I think multiple of these.

It isn't that games don't do that, there are LOTS of games that do it, but there's just so many games. The mobile markets have literally over a thousand a day, every day, for years on end. Over 3.5 million every year, and Google and Apple have turned up their purge rate. They have to. Without the massive, continuous purge, the stores would have drown a decade ago.

There are multiple million games in the mobile market.

Mobile isn't a problem of games that don't exist for a group. Mobile has a problem of discovery and marketing. The ones that are best funded through marketing tend to have the problems you mentioned. People who are happy with the games they've been playing tend to continue playing those games, which is why only a handful of games are the most popular and they've remained popular year after year. Roblox mobile (2012), Free Fire (2017), Ludo King (2016), Candy Crush (2012), currently surging is EA's FC Mobile (2016) thanks to world cup. People aren't in a rush to move to new games, nor are businesses willing to heavily invest trying to break into a market that has been flooded for a decade. Hobby projects, clones, copycats, gambling games, and others are already doing it, at a rate of over 1000 every day.

The app store meta is just terrible because people don't pay for stuff, and it's also uncurated, meaning it gets flooded with a lot of slop. Everything is full of ads, so nobody even expects any better. Phone people would rather play a free mobile game and have in-game purchases rather than pay for it. And developers like that better as well.

Sepi56 said:
The other thing I've been wondering about is how much effort mobile ports actually require for certain genres? Obviously not every game is an easy fit. If a game relies on mouse precision, keyboard shortcuts, complex UI, or significant redesign work, I can understand why a mobile version may not make financial sense.

Shooters play badly on touch. RTS games play badly, as well, unless everything is really big on screen or something. Basically any game that either captures mouse movement for camera or similar, or requires mouse + keyboard in a nontrivial way, or requires multiple button presses at once (like controller games that make use of the bumpers/triggers alongside joystick/dpad + ABXY). Basically, the only games that are left are games where you have large on-screen elements that you can easily hit with your thumb, and maybe dragging & dropping them across the screen; those are basically all you can have on mobiles.

In the early years of iPods and iPhones, it wasn't as bad yet, and there were loads of premium apps. Especially since Apple was all about the premium feel. But even then, the signs were already there, and it just got worse and worse over the years. The only way to fix it is to either have something where people have a subscription to the store, and pay the share of their time that they spent in an app to the developer, and ads would be banned — that would be the freeware / shareware model — or you can have a curated storefront that simply does not allow ads or trash on it. People would come there for proper games, and they'd get proper games, for a proper price.

But right now, it's basically impossible to have a functioning merit-based economy in an app store. I also build all my tech to be compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0, so that I can easily port a game to mobiles or the browser, if I just adapt the input scheme and maybe resize fonts or something. But I realised that it's not even worth it to try to sell a game on mobiles, even if you already have a working version. The people don't want to pay $10–$20 for a phone game, even if it's fully featured like a PC game. They want cheap, ideally free, casual experiences, even if annoying ads show up. They want temporary, 10-minute distractions while riding a bus or something.

PC games are about dedicated play sessions that range from half an hour to multiple hours in one sitting, and people are willing to pay actual money for that, but don't want ads or slop.

frob wrote:

Sepi56 wrote:

Am I overestimating how easy these ports are, or is this a market most indie developers simply don't see as worth pursuing? Is that sentiment grounded in reality? I’d think that a former PC gamer retired into office-workerhood would be a common life path, but am I really the odd man out? Or did I fall out with the times while everyone else just bought a Steamdeck?

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I think multiple of these.

It isn't that games don't do that, there are LOTS of games that do it, but the...

You might be right about discoverability being far greater culprit that I initially thought. I was thinking Steam has asset flips and half baked projects as well. But the thing is they filter out easily. Mobile is nasty, cause the ad/microtransaction junk that saturates the marketplace caters to a wide audience. It doesn't filter out because that's where the demand is - I'm in the wrong crowd.

This gave me an idea. Could give a shot at searching titles from Steam and filtering out titles that don't have a mobile port. This will give a ton of titles that are not applicable, but whatever remains might hit with higher confidence than searching the app store.