Mobile game market question:
I always hear mobile market is "ruthlessly metric driven", ie, that it's all a user acquisition arbitrage game (spend big on ads/cross promotion, price out your competition, make a thin profit margin, then scale it all up)
1) Is this true?
...
2) To whatever extent it is true (b/c whether or not it's true for everything in mobile it seems to me to be true for certain segments of the market at least)... is there anything fundamental about mobile that means it HAS to be this way, or is just an artifact of store design?
So basically, is this meme actually true, if it is true, to what extent and what limitations, and for any segments for which it holds true, is there an easily imaginable alternate universe where it's not true, and what is different in that universe.
The reason I ask is that the mobile market seems to have way way way more sophisticated analytics and data than the console/PC market, and "necessity is the mother of invention" and all that...
...which naively makes me feel there's an existential reason so many businesses have dumped all this funding into analytics there, because it's presumably mission critical? Whereas on console/PC it probably helps but isn't as live-or-die.
Anyways, tell me if I'm wrong on stuff.
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(I did not predict this because I was not yet paying attention)
Here's Calico's movement up the North American Switch charts.
(Keep in mind this is a sliding two-week window and I haven't matched this to discounts, which matters a lot because games leap onto the charts when they're on discount then decay slowly)
Kongregate and Newgrounds was the now-nearly-vanished "Minor League" of game development, a middle step between "indie nobody" and "massive success".
You could make a mediocre game and expect a mediocre return, which is where future careers can blossom from.
This is certainly where I got my start. If it wasn't for Kong (and Newgrounds) I know for a fact I wouldn't have sold many copies of DQ1, and then I wouldn't have gotten on Steam in 2012, and I'd have picked a different career.
I've read several reviews now and the consensus seems to be:
1) Reduces loading times, often by a lot! 2) Under optimal conditions, has more lag and lower image quality 3) Under merely good conditions is intermittently frustrating 4) Under average conditions is unplayable
And that's without considering the fundamental flaws in the business model (subscribe THEN buy full priced games) and the lack of guaranteed, no-extra-effort-for-the-devs, cross-save with your existing game platform that you also own the game on.