If you don’t really have time to play and you buy as you play, that’s quite understandable. I also noticed this from my Steam friendlist: The people who play less and have fewer games, don’t care if there is a sale or not. They buy games if they want and start playing right away.
It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.
I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.
Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.
the problem with the mobile game market is that it is aggressively opposed to any kind of premium experience. Time and again, the market has proven that they are not willing to pay very much upfront for a premium gaming experience. Games that try to charge a “premium” price like $10 or $20 tend to suffer for the choice to charge that much. You’ve seen attempts to address this problem (like Apple Arcade), and they’ve seen moderate success, but it doesn’t seem to be changing the overall shape of the market. App stores are still full of free-to-play slop because that is what gets the most downloads and plays and positive reviews.
How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.
Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.
PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.
There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.
There really aren’t that many premium experiences on mobile that are worth a damn imo. They’re usually just ports of games from other platforms that control terribly on a touch screen. For me to be willing to pay for a mobile game it has to be a good game and a good fit for the platform. Apart from Balatro not much comes to mind.
But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.
So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.
It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.
If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.
I find a big impetus to mobile games (on phones) is the interface. Touch screens absolutely SUCK for most games. Holding a rectangle is uncomfortable.
Its interesting to me that playstation isn’t new to the mobile market.
They’ve had the accessories for the psOne to add a battery and monitor, the psp, and the psvita. They are one of the companies I’d be interested in another mobile platform.
It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
I at least like the idea that a console can act as both. I just can’t get behind this form factor of “handheld” consoles that are so large. Like, yeah, I can hold it in my hands. But a steam deck, or even a switch aren’t exactly easy to carry around.
Not in the way that my old DS or GBA could. Hell, there’s a reason I do most of my handheld gaming on a Miyoo Mini Plus. The idea of taking a full console experience with me, on the go, was a neat idea when I was 10. But those kinds of games just don’t lend themselves to riding the bus, or sitting in the doctors office waiting room.
Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.
There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.
I think people just go for the cheaper option which coincides with being a mobile form factor. If Sony thinks they can be more expensive than the switch they are mistaken.
I would really like to see a company go back and make unique handhelds. Handhelds have become portable consoles, which is cool, but I miss the unique games that were built around limitations or unique hardware like the DS and 3ds.
Also I would really like a handheld that doesn’t hurt when you hold it for extended periods of time.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don’t like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it’s doing laps around all 3.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
I think even if they did, we’d still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they’re not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they’re maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they’re outliers.
not too suprised, given the game runs fairly poorly on the base PS4, and I believe with Natlan, they made the decision to increase the quality of certain elements of the game, and its not going to get any lighter.
I just hope they don’t get burned out and there is no crunch. The only other company that did so much in short time I can think of is Insomniac Games. It’s actually how it was used to be with how frequent we got games from single studios. But since they are so big and expensive nowadays, it seems a bit unreal for how fast some companies are able to pump out so many high quality games in relatively short time.
I always worry about that with From, and Japanese studios in general. They are often black boxes, and the only reason we don’t talk about them as much is because they do a good job of “keeping it in the family”. Maybe From is way bigger than we realize, or maybe they are just grinding entry level devs into dust. We truly just do not know.
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