Mario Bautista
Our secret developer blogs allow well-known mobilegamer.biz readers to rant about the mobile games business anonymously. Here, a veteran game developer explains how Apple has made launching a new game harder then ever.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Apple killed UA with ATT. But what I see discussed less often is how mobile game marketing was already suffering, starting with when Apple changed the App Store in 2017.
Before that, the App Store had a layout that showcased many games every week. ‘Best New Games’ and ‘Best Game Updates’ features were prominent, and usually showed at least 25 games a week. More fun curated selections were also featured elsewhere on the store.
This meant that there were many opportunities for games to be showcased, and that these showcases were powerful. It was possible to launch a game, gain organic traction, then use that traction to support further investment in UA and development.
Apple has always been very coy about featuring, and it has always strongly cautioned devs not to depend on featuring support. But what Apple is effectively saying is: “you should spend more on UA”. What other form of mobile game marketing is there?
The recent death of Touch Arcade shows us how consumer-facing media doesn’t market mobile games effectively. Apple tells us that our options include tools like its pre-order system, and we can also work on social media virality, and cross promote between our own games. But devs all know the truth: nothing comes close to the success driven by featuring and UA. And Apple has now skewed featuring towards those who are already spending hundreds of millions on UA.
It’s funny, then, that Apple followed up the App Store redesign with ATT, which effectively killed UA on iOS too. Most developers can only afford to run UA on Android now, because they don’t have the deep pockets that allow them to blindly spend money. The problem only got worse.
Old games reign supreme, because launching new (non-hyper/hybridcasual) games is no longer viable. You either create a game with an economy designed for UA, or you drown.
Success is never guaranteed. But it should be possible to recoup your development budget. Except even that is difficult now in this market.
The result is that games are robbed of innovation and risk. And the games with values that Apple espouses through Apple Arcade – privacy and family-friendly monetization – are actively punished if you’re a smaller game developer.
The sad truth is that many mobile game developers I’ve spoken to at conferences have all said the same thing: if you can’t run UA, you can’t make mobile games. And that means many types of games are now no longer welcome on mobile.
In the next few years, expect to see a lot more mobile developers shift back to PC, and for mobile games become more homogenous.
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