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Mobile Gaming Cements Its Dominance, Takes Majority of Worldwide Sales (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Newzoo's 2018 Global Games Market Forecast now predicts that mobile games will make up a slim majority (51 percent) of all worldwide gaming revenue this year (including smartphones and tablets, but not dedicated gaming handhelds). That's up from 34 percent in 2015 and just 18 percent in 2012. Console and PC games will split the remainder of the pie relatively evenly in 2018, at 25 percent and 24 percent of worldwide spending, respectively. The growth of the mobile market doesn't show any signs of stopping, either: by 2021, Newzoo estimates that 59 percent of all gaming spending will go to mobile platforms, with console and PC games dividing up the scraps. The report finds that China is responsible for 28 percent of all gaming spending in the world, up from 24 percent in 2015. "Mobile gaming is overrepresented in the world's biggest gaming market, responsible for 61 percent of all Chinese gaming revenue and poised to grow to 70 percent by 2021," reports Ars. Japan's overall spending on mobile games is nearly on par with the United States, despite the country having one-third as many gamers overall.
You mean as in on itty bitty phones?
I would take the original DOOM on a 486 before playing a game on a stupid phone.
"Majority of non-gamers have short attention spans, spend money badly."
No buttons, no directional controller, no rumble packs, crappy framebuffers with low-rent API's. I love games and I love game devices. I collect consoles and micros from the 1990's mostly. So, I'm definitely biased. I just don't "get" the appeal of gaming on a phone. I guess that it's because a parent will buy a phone for their kid so they can use it as a leash to track them. The kid gets unlimited gaming access, albeit on a shit-platform.
What I really wonder is what these kids will do when they get old. You won't be able to find that old phone with a sealed battery. It'll be way way way gone to the landfill. The games will also still be squirreled away into an "app store" etc... I have cartridges. They don't have DRM etc...
Listen, you know what's bigger than the movie industry or the gaming industry? The lottery industry.
Size of the market doesn't dictate cultural dominance as much as you'd think. It just indicates what folks dink around with when they're not thinking.
It's like comparing tabloid magazine sales in their heyday versus book sales, and saying that it's all a sign of the future. I mean, if that were true, we'd have something crazy like Donald Trump as president.
Oh wait.
51% is now considered dominance.
Trolling is a art,
I still don't like gaming on consoles, I could never get the hang of a console controller vs the mouse and KB, and can't understand watching videos or gaming on a tiny phone screen. Give me my PC and a mouse, hooked to my big screen TV. I still am waiting for a controller that takes a mouse into a true 3D mode. For those that remember the Descent engine, and Descent into UnderMountain. I was so looking forward to a truly 3D dungeon crawler with incremental sword control, but the lack of a good controller setup really killed that concept. I still think a cross between a joystick and a mouse with a gravometer (sp?) to detect altitude and motion changes would be AWESOME but the WII was the closest to that and their game selection was silly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Wow, and here I'm still playing Skyrim on an XBox 360 which has no network connections.
I figure if I don't do any more of the quests I can keep playing that forever as a time waster.
The last time I completed a quest I had to fight some pesky battle and buy back my own damned house ... who needs that? I can just gold farm that now and then until the XBox dies.
And since all modern consoles demand an internet connection, that will be the last of video games for me ... my XBox 360 got unplugged the moment I got ads in a game that I'd paid full retail for. I want neither social media nor on-line aspects to my gaming. Ads and analytics even less.
Me, I'm betting most of this revenue is in-game purchases and ads, which I consider to be the epitome of an evil and shitty video game. More pointless garbage brought to you by mobile phones.
I'm heartbroken I'm missing those whole smartphone obsession I see around me as all of these idiots can't take their phone out of their face long enough to walk across a room without bumping into people.
If they are including ad revenue in the figures it's easy to see these numbers go through the roof. How many free to play games on mobile float those ads all over the place?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
With Linux now owning 80% of the mobile market and the 49% of the non-mobile gaming market split between PC and console, this means that Linux now dominates gaming by revenue, and even more so by units.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The market for games on phone and pads is huge.
All you Na-Sayers and old timers that don't play games on your iPhone because your PC is better, well your not the target audience, and you probably never played a game on your phone or pad.
Its not as bad as you would think and it's designed for those devices and the graphics are way better than you think.
No one wants to lug around a PC computer to play a multiplayer game.
There is a place for everything for everybody,
BTW, I have been playing games since the 80's on all devices and still do, including PC.
I do not have (or want) a smartphone or any gaming consoles -- and in fact I stopped bothering to PC game at least 15 years ago (last game I bothered with was Warcraft 2). So when they're referring to 'mobile gaming', do they mean these 'twitch games' people play on their phones? Or something else?
I have my game Blade Master of Mibu on both mobile and desktop. I find no one is willing to spend a cent on mobile but still make the occasional sale for desktop.
The people who finance AAA Console and PC games insist on having the same 6 types of game made over and over again. Same game mechanics. Same storylines. Same types of characters. Same game engines, 3D graphics styles and graphical effects. Same physics engines. Same online modes. Same Steam/Origin/Uplay DRM tether. Same in-game purchases, loot boxes and other crap. They have taken a Stallion that was very beautiful and muscular and could run really fast, and beaten it to death with metal pipes to make profit, pretty much. Its the same crap over and over with minor variations. Its frustrating and boring and expensive at the same time. Mobile gaming on the other hand allows people - some of whom have no experience of the gaming of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s at all - to relive the magic of the 8 Bit / 16 Bit / 32 Bit gaming of that era. The games are fun, colorful, experimental, diverse, challenging and satisfying. I am reminded of a time when one day you'd get something like Midwinter 2, then Mortville Manor, then R-Type or New Zealand story, then Speedball 2 or Ski Or Die, then Powermonger or Flood, then It Came From the Desert, then Alone In The Dark, then SimAnt, then Car and Driver or Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade or Lemmings or Cannon Fodder or or or or.... Both people who were not born yet when those games were made, and older people who were not into computer gaming back then, are getting to relive something very much like that Golden Age of Gaming where small teams made greatly satisftying games with little to no corporate interference. PC and Console is in pathetic shape right now by comparison. No innovation. No experimentation. No freedom to try new things. No "customer is King" attitude. No regard for what gamers actually want. Very high expense though - both the games and the hardware. PC and Console is going to drop to about 24% of the market in the next 5 years in my estimationg. Many older gamers I know have stopped upgrading their PCs and only touch their Consoles occasionally. They do game on smartphones and tablets increasingly though. The AAA game developers have pretty much committed Harakiri, while thousands of smaller mobile developers are thriving.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
In fact, there's a whole slew of great mobile games that won't translate well to a controller - the likes of Jetpack Joyride, Collossotron, Threes, plenty of table games etc.
Jetpack Joyride is a flappy game, and flappy games are ultimately clones of the "Balloon Trip" mode in Balloon Fight for the Nintendo Entertainment System. There's a Threes clone for NES by tsone, titled 2048 . I had to look up Colossatron, and everything I see in a gameplay video looks doable with a mouse, an analog stick, a Nintendo 3DS touch screen, or a Wii Remote.
And it's perfectly fine - the best games on any platform make use of the platform's best features and try not to imitate features that don't exist
In other words, one- or two-button or point-and-click games. Game designs under that restriction have on the whole tended to be more shallow than games using a keyboard or a gamepad.
Read the summary. The "mobile" figure is "including smartphones and tablets, but not dedicated gaming handhelds" such as the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita.
One slight correction: Your list included AM2R, a port of Metroid II. Metroid II is a first-party Game Boy game from Nintendo, which was released when Nintendo dominated handheld video gaming. That looks way more AAA than indie to me. Had it instead been an original IP, it would have been indie.
I was into mobile gaming before every game was infested with frustrating microtransactions, free-to-play mechanics, or built in ads. Now it seems like everything wants me to pay it money to continue playing or it punishes me with waiting for another turn in 20 minutes. Even Angry Birds retroactively added microtransactions. So few games have an option to buy a full version to disable the "constantly harass you for money feature" that I've given up on the platform. That and most games eat up my battery so I either have to play attached to the wall or I get 30 minutes of playtime before my device dies.
... but I guess it was hibernating.
Unfortunately, this monetization of everything has spread to the AAA segment of gaming and I can't even play my $60 game in peace without it also begging me for money. I thought I'd escaped this practice when arcades fell out of favor
On the plus side: I've been reading books and playing table-top games a lot more lately.
A dollar here, a dollar there; all impulse buys. How many of these mobile gamers are actual gamers? I'd be interested to see the numbers of people who buy these games, play them a few times, then never touch them. I'm a dedicated console and PC gamer, but I'll be brutally honest with you and say that I have quite a number of games on my phone, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've launched each game. If I wasn't a pirate, I'd have wasted a crazy amount of money on all the games I've put on my phone that I don't actually play.
WOW, that does look cool. Too bad my PC does not meet any of the specs :( I may have to work some overtime to get a new gaming rig and then look into this. Not sure I've seen any new titles I'd really want to play that badly though.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This is why former Japanese heavyweights like Konami are exiting the console games business and focusing on mobile; if you can slap a new coat of paint on the same game design, you can save tons of money. Oh and then you can fire your designers like Kojima.
If it weren't for sequels, Square-Enix and Capcom would've gotten out of the console games business as well. Look at how few new IPs they've created in the last 15 years, it's depressing.
It seems like Platinum Games is the only AAA-ish Japanese developer taking risks with new IPs. Suda 51 and Team ICO keep being given money, somehow, despite bleeding cash (boutique exclusives?).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Tap Tap, Tap Tap Tap , Tap Tap Tappity Tap Tap Tap.
Pay 1 dollar for more Taps
Pay more than one dollar for Extra Special Taps
Tap Tap, Tap Tap Tap , Tap Tap Tappity Tap Tap Tap.
rinse repeat ad infinitum
You forgot swipe
No. I can assure you PC gaming will once again make up the majority of revenue this year, as with every year.
Is that you WindBourne?