Where are we today?
I make my feelings towards our Mobile overlords very clear during these posts. We share the same sort of relationship that real TV does with reality TV; an aura of one-sided hatred that must be endured because everyone knows that Reality TV brings in the butts to seats, and real TV tries to feed off the scraps to make it's living on the side. It's impressive numbers still, but they would be decidedly less impressive without Reality TV to tee up the crowd. That's pretty much how things are with gaming too. The vacuous, embarrassing wastes of space in the mobile market lowers the bar of gaming all around, and actual games with effort put into them make up the comparative minority of the market. And yeah, there's some bias there. A lot of the time we blame the worst practises of our industry on the example set by the money hungry mobile legion; and a lot of the time that's absolutely warranted, but maybe we hold a little of the blame ourselves for letting it get this bad. Whatever the truth lying at the heart of the swirling whirlwind of blame: one cannot deny that the mobile market makes bank.
In many of the largest consumer bases in the world, the number of mobile players totally outranks console and PC players on their own, entirely combined and multiplied by factors of ten. And this discrepancy is absolutely not due to the superiority of the platform. Gaming is a commitment, a time commitment and a place commitment. And neither are prices that the most fleeting of the casual market, those who make the majority of the population of the earth, are willing to feed into. Additonally much of the older generations still harbour those negative feelings about gaming and the culture around it from the scares of the nineties and the prejudices of the eighties, and thus bawk at the idea of expensive consoles or sitting down to dedicate an hour to a video game. However they still enjoy entertainment, and log into their smartphone app stores, and so they'll kill an hour during the commute crushing candy or with any of the other mindless appgames, and not even equate that spent time to 'gaming minutes'.
I understand this and I'm absolutely fine with it. Play the small time-killer games all you want, that's what they're around for. Not every type of game is created to cater for the whims of everyone, despite what certain TV settings reviewers might obstinately claim, and so if these are the bite-sized experiences that best fit into your daily schedule: then pop off. What I cannot reconcile is the point at which these mobile games start sneaking in ugly and aggressive microtransactions and these people actually buy them! How can you hold no interest in the gaming world, interact in the most basest of levels with it, but somehow decide to spend your money on mobile trash? It seems like a total oxymoron to me; but it's not fiction- this pattern of behaviour is proven and verifiable, and it's keeping the entire mobile industry as leaders of the pack when it comes to income generation in the gaming space.
Gamesindustry.Biz recently published a report which claims that during the year of 2021, $17 billion dollars in global revenue was generated for Anime Mobile games alone. A supposed niche sector of a niche branch of entertainment, soundly eclipsing cinema. Bear in mind that Anime mobile games are themselves a minority in the mobile game space. Altogether, they believe the mobile industry to be responsible for $93.2 billion global revenue. That's 'fly a beloved space-themed TV star to real space only to talk over them during the return party as they undergo a profound breakdown of ego' money. And all of that is being made through tiny MTX bear traps laid to slowly bleed the average Jane and Joe out of a little bit of money here and there. An extra retry here, a forced starter pack there, all inconsequential purchases in the moment with rewards that evaporate just as quickly as they're bought; but in bulk and stretched across billions of mindless swipes, and we near the 100 billion mark. Guess those numbers build up.
Now of course the Pandemic has it's role to play in this trend. As the years of lockdown bought society ever closer to their technology and the ways in which we can wring entertainment out of the jaws of boredom. Streaming services shot through the roof in subscribers (except Quibi) take-out services jumped from a niche luxury into an essential service and time-killer mobile games ingrained themselves further into the lives of ordinary, non-gamer, people. Only it seems that on the tail end of this lockdown, as everything begins to enter a state of relative normality, mobile gaming is not looking to drop off and relinquish this seized stranglehold as some others have, and the crash suddenly dawning upon Netflix isn't looking to spread to their shores anytime soon. This has been a springboard for the mobile market, launching them ever higher in the recognised global space.
But of course, this doesn't mean that traditional gaming is totally in the dust. In fact, 2021 was a fighting year for console revenue, as they reached a record high of $60 billion in revenue, although remember that 2021 was a new console release year, and that number would have been much higher if only the market had risen to meet the demand. Which it absolutely did not. Still, those sorts of numbers are enough to make traditional media look at themselves and wonder what they're doing wrong, whilst simultaneously making console developers look upwards at the mobile market and wonder what they're doing right. Gaming may be the 'now' of the entertainment industry (and maybe the movie industry as well with how SEGA are looking to prostitute out their brands) but with those sorts of numbers, mobile gaming is our sordid future.
And what do I mean by that? I mean that the influence over the norms of game design that mobile platforms enforce will bleed into generally accepted design the industry over. Remember that a lot of old industry heads who propagate the traditions of games that we love started as people playing those rudimentary games from yesteryear and dreaming big, whilst those coming into the market today are funnelling through the mobile space and taking the lessons they've learnt whilst working on those blunt-force money tenderisers. Designing problems to sell the solution? Mobile design 101. Flooding endless currencies and mismatched currency packs in order to confuse the audience? Mobiles games did it! How about the use of psychological manipulation tactics to tip the scales in favour of players buying premium packs? Mobile games should have a patent on that crap!
Of course that also means that all of the positive influences of the mobile market will bleed into console and PC gaming too, such as... the way that they... Okay, I'm drawing a blank: are there any positive practices that the mobile industry has bled onto everyone else? In a rare shade of optimism, I do think there's a slowly building wave of push-back against the worst of this bad adopters, sand it's a wave slowly rolling in with this coming generation of gamers that seem to come up wise to these sorts of schemes and largely unreceptive to mobile machinations. Ubisoft, EA, Square and others are learning this in the past year alone with enough failures to set your head spinning. Maybe that wave will continue onto the mobile market once that generation has settled over there too. Or maybe the trends we're seeing are anomalies and Sonic Origin's flogging of menu animations is our crystal ball glimpse into monetisation a year from now. It's a toss up.
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