The games industry continues to see a huge push on the mobile front, with 40 percent of all mobile downloads being games, but with 80 percent of revenue reported. That said, there needs to be something more, as Gree’s new COO Andrew Sheppard believes that the time has come for mobile games to “scale up.”
Sheppard recently spoke at the DICE Europe 2014 event in Kensington, explaining that mobile gaming needs to expand in a number of ways. “The nature of growth is changing in a way that’s subtle and often lost in averages,” he said. Mobile still has “tons of scales, tons of growth,” but it’s “not really mapping to any one type of product or gameplay experience.”
However, this is room for growth, as the “industry is only going to get smarter,” according to Sheppard. “You’re going to see new and interesting technology pushed into handheld devices, just like they have console before.”
To power the growing changes of mobile, companies need money and people behind them. “For us, there’s so much benefit to keeping development teams centralized,” said Sheppard. “So what you end up is a network of design, creative, marketing, QA and live ops at a local level, and that’s crucial. You can build a game that works well globally, but that’s not what we’re about – we want excellence in our games.”
Conviction will also play a big part when it comes to creating said experiences. “In the past I think a number of mobile developers have focused on building a number of different games and then finding out where the fun is, where the monetization is, and cashing it,” concluded Sheppard. “Building for scale is a bit more like what you console guys are doing – building something with conviction and going for it, picking your markets first and then going after them.”
Mobile has already seen immense growth over the next few years, with games like the Infinity Blade trilogy and 2K Games’ port of Bioshock leading the charge, but there’s no question that, with the right technology, they can only get better from here.
Source: Pocket Gamer
