I think the word is getting around about the site because there’s an increasing amount of people using this blog’s search box to ask questions about the industry. Why mobile games are terrible is becoming a common question people search for on this blog so I might as well answer it. Here are the real reasons why mobile games are terrible.
Your Answer Upfront:
Mobile Games are terrible because there are a ton of low effort games and clones released on the market from developers who are only interested in making money or have no skill and experience with making games. A ton of big publishers pay small teams or solo developers to make game prototypes that they can test on a mass market audience. If those games have a low CPI and a good ROI said publishers can double or even triple their investment.
In this article we’re going to talk about the real reasons mobile games are terrible. We’re going to talk about game cloning and the ease of entry into the mobile gaming industry. I’ll explain what template-based games are and why developers release seemingly simple 1-2 level mobile games (from my own experience). By the end of the article you should have a pretty good idea why mobile games are seemingly terrible.
Low Effort Clones and Crash Grabs
I wrote a big article on this exact subject a few months ago and you can read it for a much more in-depth look at the issue of low effort clones. The gist of the matter is that people want to make money fast. If something works well enough and makes money, then that thing will inspire copy-cats. It’s easier to replicate a proven formula than to invent a totally new one and this applies to games.
Couple this with the lack of knowledge and attention to detail from the audience (many of whom are newcomers onto the gaming scene) and you have a recipe for success in most cases. The crucial part of this endeavour is to get the clone to resemble 60-80% of the original game and it’s going to be good enough to garner quite an audience.
The App Stores have terrible discovery and most people come into games via the use of advertisements on platforms such as Facebook (or even my blog in some cases, though I do try to remove and bad advertisers of fake games form the pool of partner ads). On the App Store and Google Play developers can pay to have their ad displayed on slot 1 (the very top of the store’s search results) for some keywords. Let’s search for Forza Racing Horizon?
The two images above? They’re basically the same game, right? Well, it’s good enough for your little brother or sister to think so. And when you take a look on their phone and compare it to what’s on your screen, it’s pretty easy to ask yourself: Why are mobile games so crap and horrible?
Ease of entry in the industry
It’s easier than ever to make games, especially as a solo developer. Before you’d have to learn to program, do art, music and design yourself. You’d have to manufacturer the game’s boxes and handle its distribution. You’d have to handle payment, refunds and taxes yourself.
Nowadays it’s so much easy and the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. You can use an engine like Unity or Game Maker to handle the boring parts of game development (rendering, input handling, loading and displaying assets, etc.) and make the game on top of that.
Now even the logic is split between modules (Unity calls them components) and you can get a (arguably terrible) game up in minutes with no knowledge of programming by just copy pasting code and logic from Unity-answers or forums.
In fact, at one point, I helped hire a developer for one of my clients who’s been a lead at a studio whom had almost zero knowledge of writing code for a game. He knew the basics and had a master’s degree in C# but didn’t understand the basics of making games. I was shocked. He survived by making copy-paste and template games for that studio (who were less knowledgeable than him and were making money from ad-based games by flooding the market). A bit of art from some decent artists and copy pasting code from forums and that was good enough for the guy to be a “proper game dev”.
We fired him within the month once we figure out the truth and I learned why good HR practices are important. I’ll probably write a post about this hiring experience at a later date.
Template-based games
Look at the screenshot above. 20 game source codes for $76. With some free 3D models and a little bit of Unity skills you can turn them into 20 original and distinct games to release quickly on the Play Store. Heck, 90% of the people who purchase them don’t even edit the games, just add their own advertisement accounts and release them as is.
There’s a big article about Unity and asset templates that I wrote called “Why are so many games made in Unity?” where I talk about this “issue”. Using templates isn’t a bad thing, it saves on development time and it can help you make creative and original entries since you can focus more on design and the fun, core, mechanics.
But most people don’t do that. And if they lack knowledge in Unity they might just start with the template and make something more horrible that gets dumped on the store. Release enough of these and you’re going to earn some pocket money out of it.
Hyper-casual CPI Tests
Between 2020 and the end of 2021 I’ve helped bring around 100 hypercasual games to the market. Hypercasual games are extremely simple games designed for a mass market and a huge audience of new mobile gamers. I averaged about 3 to 5 days into making an original prototype for a hyper casual game with some prototypes taking less than 24 hours to develop.
I would get paid about $750 / prototype on average and the publisher would release it on the store and spend about $1000 in Facebook ads. They would check to see what the average CPI (cost per install is) with the publisher aiming for a $0.20 CPI. Aka if the price to bring 1 user (on average) to download the game was close to 20 cents then they would add ads to the game.
Then they would check to see if, by adding more content to the game (think levels), we could keep the players engaged and make our money back. Rule of thumb was:
- Bring a user into the game for a CPI close to $0.20
- Keep the user engaged with the game for about 1 week
- Display as many ads as possible and keep the user playing for 3 to 10 minutes at a time
Do all of that, keep the users engaged and you’d be bound to earn 30-40 cents from the user. At 20c to bring a user in you would be looking at a 10-20c profit. That would mean that for every $1000 invested in ads you’d make $500-$1000 back, a 50%-100% return of investment. If we achieved that, scale up to infinity (or as much money as you can afford to drop on ads).
Here are a few examples of hypercasual prototypes I made:
And those are just 3 examples. There’s 97 videos like that one on my account, with all those games designed in just a few days for the mass market audience. It paid really wells and it’s much cheaper for publishers to pay $500-$1000/prototype to multiple single developers than it is to pay $3000-$10.000/month for an in-house developer. Out of 100 games developed, if just 1 meets the criteria mentioned earlier they make millions and recoup their spent money.
There’s a really big article that I wrote on the subject titled “How Do Mobile Games Get Popular” where I go into even more details about this process. If you’re interested I recommend reading it.
Why are mobile games terrible?
Mobile Games are terrible because there are a ton of low effort games and clones released on the market from developers who are only interested in making money or have no skill and experience with making games. A ton of big publishers pay small teams or solo developers to make game prototypes that they can test on a mass market audience. If those games have a low CPI and a good ROI said publishers can double or even triple their investment.
Where To Next?
I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design, subjects which were brought up in this post.
I believe that you might be interested in more articles on game monetisation. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “How Do Free Mobile Games Make money“, “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have In-App Purchases“.
There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!
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