It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
I’m a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It’s kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it’s all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.
For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it’s at least 5 times worse.
ooph, I just started trying to make a mobile game in Jan 😬
Make it a good one. Then tell me about it, because I know I’ll never find it on the play store.
I hate to be discouraging. I wanted to do the same up until these interactions. Depending on what is a livable wage for you, or if you’re doing it on the side, it could still be possible. But I’m in high cost of living areas in the US and it seems totally unfathomable to me. I watched companies spend literal millions of dollars on just advertising to gauge interest in games they then shut down because they couldn’t make the game profitable enough to pay for the ads and their bills etc.
There are definitely success stories, and you can definitely get games released and get players. But I just want to point out that many of the games are simple and just have absolutely astronomical amounts of money behind them. Mobile is fucking crazy and I feel like it’s much harder for smaller devs to get their name out through typical advertising channels.
IMO, which is mostly just guessing based off what I’ve seen, I’d think your time is better spent finding small communities that may be interested in your game and posting about them, as opposed to buying ads etc. Indie dev subreddits and other gaming communities have propped up successful games before, and it may cost you more time and effort, but it just looks extremely hard to compete on the mobile ads playing fields against these huge companies these days.
As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you’ve said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There’s plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you’ve got serious financial backing, it’s not worth trying to compete.
Even speaking of just the indie scene, don’t go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There’s those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.
Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it’s a festering cesspool.
Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There’s also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that’s not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.
The indie scene today is the strongest it’s ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can’t think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.
It’s frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.
Yeah, I think you’re totally right. I didn’t mean that it started in 2010s, more that it was basically the norm by then and it’s a giant cesspool now. But looking back, my wording wasn’t super clear on that distinction. I do think it was around in the 2000s, but its gotten much worse with time.
I’m also super frustrated as a gamer, but to your point, thank god the indie scene is running strong.
I mean, in the 80s and 90s we still got flooded with garbage games made in a month just to make a quick buck. I think Sturgeon’s Law has always been in effect, the only difference is that there’s so much more of everything now (both good and bad), and marketing teams have gotten so much more effective at farming engagement. But I think that <10% is always there and still worth people’s time to both make and play.
I’ve been mostly making games for fun and am fairly risk adverse so am planning on sticking with a stable job and making games in my free time.
It’s discouraging, but it is reality. I still want to try, but definitely not putting more than one egg in this basket.
I’ll admit I’m knowingly doing the following haha
hopefully it’ll at least be a positive experience and I learn something from it
Sounds like you’ve got the right mindset and sounds like you have your head on your shoulders. Best of luck!
You’re only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.
I’ve been doing itch and jams for a little bit, even managed to win one once. I’ve learned a lot but can’t shake this feeling that I’m just making free games for itch. You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
It definitely is. I think it’s really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it’s gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to “suppress”. It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’re really up against in those stores because it’s so hard to even see a portion of it. There’s just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.
Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don’t want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don’t think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there’s less stuff to compete with there.
This has kind of discouraged me from getting into game development. I’m not creative enough or talented enough at game design to do it myself, and I feel like the likelihood of getting onto one of the few teams we see out there today who aren’t willing to sacrifice every last bit of humanity that their games and software have for revenue… is slim.
What are you on about? Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this?? Unless you’re looking to work for Niantic, EA, Ubisoft/Gameloft etc you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily. Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.
I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here. Why are you trying to scare people ?
I didn’t say I “needed” to. And my job did require it at the time. The circumstances of my employment are kind of out of the scope of this discussion and it’s pretty much entirely irrelevant. I was just stating where I got my information from.
Sure. You can. People do. Mobile it’s way less successful though. And I didn’t say anything about what an indie devs options are. You’re reading something very different out of what I’m saying and I don’t know what it is or where you’re getting it from.
Exactly. That’s part of what’s going on here.
Larping? What am I role playing? And we’re on the internet, so this definitely isn’t “live action” by any means. I don’t understand what you think is going on here.
Me stating what goes on inside the industry is not “trying” to do anything. I’m just explaining what I’ve seen in it. Whether they choose to be “scared” or not is their own perogative. Would you say I’m trying to scare people if I said many people have died in Gaza in the past few months? It’s just stating what’s happening.
No
https://maf.ad/en/blog/fake-mobile-game-ads-advertisers/#:~:text=This happens because some companies,that resemble movies or series.
These are all examples of exaggerated and misleading ads. Hell, the heading you linked to is literally called “exaggerated ads”. That’s not “this game does not exist at all” ads, it’s “this isn’t how the game actually plays” ads. The examples this article gives are the like weird “Omg he got me pregnant” ads that then link to a match 3 game and the like. These are a different thing than things like the OP linked which are entirely irrelevant and link to random unrelated games.
The article is from and advertising company that is selling customers who have an existing game who want to improve ad conversions and then lists techniques for doing so. They do not explain the outcome the OP is asking about. Not would they outline the strategy I’m talking about since what in referring to is a process by which you would test new game ideas. That’s not something the company you linked to would be involved in.
There are many many many types of advertising campaigns in mobile gaming. And they serve different purposes. The stuff your outlining is different than the OPs question and my response. They exist in the same market and one existing doesn’t mean the other doesn’t.
You didn’t read the article at all. My god you’re full of it.