In this week’s TPoI; press reaction to Nintendo announcing 2-3 mobile games per year, E3 opens up to the “public”, and Valve confirms VR game development (no proof of Half-Life 3… yet).
In this week’s TPoI; press reaction to Nintendo announcing 2-3 mobile games per year, E3 opens up to the “public”, and Valve confirms VR game development (no proof of Half-Life 3… yet).
This week, the Clash Royale-playing contingent of TriplePoint PR is devastated that a former low level colleague of ours has ABANDONED our clan. Something about not donating enough giants…we were all ignoring his near-incessant requests for high level cards anyways.
But, in all seriousness, this week’s TPoI is full of developer outrage, VR eSports, and the continued growth of mobile gaming!
Mobile Games Make Money, Lots of It
According to an industry report from Newzoo BV, mobile games are forecasted to generate more revenue that PC and console games in 2016. The Wall Street Journal reports that this will be the first year that mobile games overtake traditional games in revenue, and that mobile platforms will make for 37% of all software sales world-wide this year.
Games Industry Outrage on the Internet – Developer Edition!
Game industry vet Alex St. John penned a byline in VentureBeat this week shaming game developers’ “wage-slave” attitude and criticizing devs who complain about crunch and being overworked. This sparked much outrage in the games space, with many coming out to challenge his arguments – Rami Ismael of indie studio Vlambeer penned a line-by-line retort, and St. John’s own daughter even described his comments as “vile”. One particularly interesting topic that this has kicked off is that of video game developers potentially unionizing to help promote a healthy work-life balance and avoid the dreaded crunch.
eSports + VR = PlayStation VR?
Writing in Fortune, John Gaudiosi writes that Sony is thinking about virtual reality eSports in advance of the October launch of PlayStation VR. While there are no specific plans for VR eSports content just yet, Sony is starting to talk up the eSports potential for VR games like RIGS, a futuristic mech combat game.
Congratulations on taking the plunge into the mobile games market! No doubt it’s been a remarkable and difficult journey for you and your game, but the design is nearly perfect, and you’re ready to share your creation with the world. Mobile games have come a long way since we first figured out how to put Tetris on our graphing calculators in high school, and it’s an exciting field that’s evolving and improving every day.
Sadly, when you dwell exclusively on the cutting edge of game development, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics. There are a few core tenets of mobile design that should be prerequisites for publishing nowadays, yet every so often, even the most experienced of developers forget them. No matter how impressive the graphics or how amazing and innovative the controls are in a game, it pains us when designers still get some of the basics wrong after all these years. Continue reading Mobile Game Design – Don’t Forget the Basics
I have a confession to make: I was once a biased, prejudiced gamer. I was a zealot on the front lines of a civil war ravaging the United States of Video Gaming. This war wasn’t about the color of a character’s pixels, nor even the content of that character’s coding – it was over the definition of a video game.
I thought that video games were played on corporate-designed consoles and overclocked PC towers of graphical prowess. I was of the belief that a game had to have hours upon hours of immersive content and require a controller, joystick, or other peripheral.
Then, I bought an iPad. I had just joined TriplePoint PR and would be working to help launch a number of iOS games. With newly acquired iOS device in hand, I started digging into the world of mobile games. My assumption was that I would find a market flooded with cute, cartoony, physics and puzzle-based games that wouldn’t hold my attention for more than 10 or 15 minutes each. Boy, was I wrong. Continue reading Hardcore casual gaming: How I learned to stop worrying and love my iPad