![]() Sure, there are examples of this succeeding, but it's a tiny proportion, and it's only getting harder. So we came up with one, and like most sensible plans, it involves taking things step by step.įor a small, unknown developer to launch an original IP into the furnace of the App Store, now, is irrational. Paradoxically, mobile offers the lowest barriers to market entry ever seen in game development.Having said all that, we have no intention of giving up on mobile: we just need a sane plan for how to get there, without relying on vanishingly small odds. Maybe you can use cross-promotion, funnelling users from your existing games, or sharing your existing audience with another developer.īut when you're just starting out, you have none of these things, and a mountain to climb. If you have an established brand (either in your game, or yourselves as developers), that can win you some attention. Every rational developer in this brave new world of self-publishing expects to do a lot of promotion. Of course, there are other, better ways to find users than buying them. This is what has driven the user-acquisition cost boom of recent years, culminating in warnings that the costs of paid UA are approaching or exceeding the typical life-time value of a user (whether they pay up front, or over time). Free-to-play is considered the best way to balance accessibility with profitability, but it doesn't actually solve the problem: why will someone download your game instead of the one of the other 100+ released that day?įree or paid, you need a way to bring an audience to your game, in the face of ever-more-intense competition for 'eyeball-share' from the many, deep-pocketed publishers and developers dominating the market. You can't just drop something out there and hope its quality will carry it. We are ready with a monetisation model we think is ideal for iOS, but it just isn't realistic to initially launch on mobile, for one big reason: discoverability.ĭiscovery is a real issue: there are 4,000 games released every month on iTunes. We think tablets offer perhaps the most natural interaction with the game. In fact, we are not ignoring mobile at all: we have designed TerraTech to be ready for touch-screen devices, with an art style that can scale to lower power GPUs. It seems like the obvious way to go, but we're not. Our lead designer, Kris Skellorn, and I have both been making mobile games since the earliest days of iOS, with #1 titles under our collective belts in both the premium and F2P spheres. Mobile is still the fastest growing game market, and uniquely accessible to small-scale developers. The prospect can be terrifying.It's a fair question. "But," some people have asked, "why aren't you making a mobile game?"īut when you're just starting out, you have none of these things, and a mountain to climb. It took longer than I expected to raise finance, and my first prototype didn't get any traction, but last summer things started to click, and now here I am with a team and a cool demo that's getting people excited. ![]() What an amazing time to be an independent developer, I thought, with new opportunities all around, and the barriers to entry lower than ever! I did this because I saw an opportunity: the mobile markets were growing like nobody's business, new platforms were sprouting like mushrooms all over the place, and middleware was making it easier than ever to get a game to market. I worked here and there to stay solvent, but my real aim was to found my own startup. Nearly two years ago, I packed in my job as Creative Director at London mobile developer Ideaworks Game Studio (aka Marmalade) in order to go it alone. Russ Clarke, is the founder and West London Games & Project Lead of TerraTech.
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