Tag: mobile gaming industry

Mobile gaming is more than just a fad

The game industry is beginning to evolve as it puts more focus on the mobile sector. The mobile games market has been heavily saturated for some time, but large publishers and development studios that had initially been averse to the concept of mobile gaming are beginning to enter into the market with their own products. As mobile gaming continues to grow in popularity, the practices that have become common in the mobile gaming business are also becoming common in the overall game industry.

The game industry has been focusing more heavily on the mobile sector for good reason. Mobile games represent one of the most lucrative aspects of gaming today, with some 247 separate game companies earning more than $1 million in mobile revenue in the U.S. alone. Google, which provides access to a wide range of mobile gaming applications, has seen more than 300 million downloads for the mobile games it supports, with the developers of these games bringing in a collective $600 million. These may be astonishing numbers, but Google is widely considered within the game industry to be the least lucrative market for mobile gaming applications.

Many people enjoy mobile games because they are simple in nature and can be played anywhere and at any time. They offer on-demand entertainment that people have come to expect thanks to their growing reliance on mobile technology. Moreover, people have shown that they are willing to spend money on these games, whether it is the price for purchasing the game or buying in-game items, digital currencies, and bonuses that make gameplay more enjoyable.

Microtransactions, a term that represents in-game purchases, have become somewhat infamous among consumers. Some people claim that mobile games are nothing more than cash grabs, using microtransactions to take advantage of people that are willing to spend their money. These microtransactions are becoming a more integral part of traditional gaming, with developers and publishers introducing in-game purchases in order to cater to a more mobile-centric audience.  As mobile games continue to gain prominence, they may end up determining the course of the game industry’s future, which may cause a serious division between consumers and game developers that have an interest in microtransactions.

Developers have been waging war throughout the Christmas season, and now they wait to see the results.

When it comes to the holiday season, mobile gaming is just as competitive an industry as everything else, as developers do everything they can to make sure that their games will top the list of downloads that gift recipients make when they unwrap their new smartphones and tablets, this year.

It is believed that this year’s user acquisition and marketing costs will have been the highest ones yet.

Moreover, it is also believed that these expenditures could likely surpass any revenue that mobile gaming will bring in throughout the festive season. The cost associated with obtaining new users by way of smartphone apps and on social networks with pay per click ads is rapidly heading skyward.

This year, mobile gaming has more competition than ever before in the hopes of becoming the next big thing.

Developers are spending a lot of money in the hopes that their games will be the next “Clash of Cans”, “Angry Birds” or “Candy Crush Saga”. This also presents those developers with a massive challenge, particularly to smaller independent studios that are hoping for the best but don’t have the marketing budget of some of their much larger competitors.

Throughout the holidays, spending from consumers around the world hits a peak, making it one of the most important times for developers to do everything in their power to be able to try to draw the largest possible number of Android and Apple device users, particularly on Christmas morning, when the number of those users suddenly spikes.

This year, the typical revenue gains of up to 200 percent for mobile gaming developers on Christmas will likely be greatly wiped out as a result of the massive competition that led the amount spent on marketing and CPI (cost per install) to double or even triple. After these massively expensive campaigns have been put into place, and now that the presents have been unwrapped, all the developers can do is to hope for the best and watch their figures to see how effective their strategies have been, this year.