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Mobile Gaming Giant Calls For Longer Product Life Cycles

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-it-longer dept.

An anonymous reader writes: South Korean gaming firm Nexon has vowed to release mobile games with longer life cycles, focusing on attracting users for at least 10 years rather than relying on fad sales. The company argued that developing a sustainable ecosystem in the mobile gaming industry was more important than generating immediate sales. While Nexon is the region's largest PC gaming business, it has been comparatively laggard in its attempt to break into the mobile world. Following its announcement last year that it would initiate a strategic push into the mobile sector, Nexon has built a dedicated mobile business unit, as well as global teams looking at international markets.

3 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Want to attract customers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's simple. Stop creating steaming piles of IAP-laden shit and start making quality software people want.

    1. Re:Want to attract customers? by bluescrn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The market has spoken. They'd rather have IAP-laden shit for free than quality products for even as low as a dollar or two.

  2. Yes... please. by mlts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before IAP came around in Android and iOS, there were a number of decent games, because the incentive was to get people to play the game.

    What killed gaming on both platforms was IAP. This was supposed to be useful for a game designer to sell levels or an expansion... but what happened is that it fundamentally changed gaming on the platform for the worse. Instead of playable games, we got almost everything being released winding up "F2P/P2W", where the game was free, but the difficulty was extremely high and slow, in order to get people to go, "what the hell", and buy some smurfberries/brains/crowns/tokens/serum/ to get over that hump. Even classic tower defense games wound up going this way, where if you wanted a chance at completing them, you had to toss a few bucks each level for added powerups.

    It would be nice to see the smartphone gaming market move away from Candy Crush like stuff back to games that are actually playable without having to buy large amounts of some in game currency. I would pay for levels and expansions... real content. Having to pay just for a chance at moving on... sorry, got better things to do.

    There are companies that can do gaming right. Square-Enix for example. Maybe more companies should see about going that route.