Take out your phone, be it a lovely Android device or your favorite iPhone, open the Play or App Store and search for “Crashy Racing”. Now search for “Cube Stack”. And once more for “Knife Game”. All games that appear are not only similar but in 90% of the case are the exact same game. Why does this happen? Why are all mobile games the same?
Your Answer Upfront:
Mobile games look and feel really similar due to the adoption of pre-made template packages that are widely distributed for a cost or free. Many developers just purchase the templates and, instead of putting time and effort to customize them or to create something new, release them on the stores as is (or with minor modifications). This leads to an influx of extremely similar games with different titles flooding the app stores.
In this article we’ll go over the root cause of the issue that’s been plaguing mobile games for years. We’ll explain why “all mobile games” look and feel the same, what’s going on in the mind of the developers and go over what we can do to help fight this plague.
Let me preface the article by saying that not all mobile games that are released use the same templates and source codes but it’s important to recognize the scale at which this happens. Every day there are tons and tons of original titles, mechanics and IPs released on both stores.
However, the mobile gaming industry is plagued by copy cats driven by a single need: to score a quick buck from new or casual players. Smartphones, and I mean modern smartphones, have opened the flood games to an audience the games industry could have only dreamed of back in 2007.
How did we get here
Access to gaming devices meant having a pretty beefy computer (at the time), knowledge and passion for games. You used to have to physically go to a game retail store, search and want to spend money to acquire a game.
With the introduction of the app stores everyone ended up owning a gaming device in their pocket. The need to visit a retail store, driving there, browsing for a game, choosing one and taking it to the counter to pay has been replaced by two single motions: Open up the App Store and pressing Download or Get.
The simplicity of this act of acquiring a new game meant that even people who are not interested in gaming can end up downloading a game just because they are a single tap or swipe away. And with mobile devices still being primary focused on a single task, and with the new audience not being primed to search for games in magazines and on specialty websites, this new influx of gamers and casual players became the primary target force.
When a user opens up an app store for the very first time he is bombarded with icons, images and a flurry of available titles. A new and casual user won’t know or immediately recognize a low quality game, since his quality meter has no data. There’s nothing to compare the first game he or she sees.
And with tens of thousands of low quality clones, the chances that a first timer’s introduction into the mobile gaming scene is such a game is through the roof. Remember, first impression matters and sticks with you.
This made new smartphone owners the driving factor behind the mobile gaming industry’s rise to riches
Suddenly devs everywhere didn’t have to fight amongst each other to get a great review in a magazine in order to drive sales. All they had to do is get in front of as many users as possible. And they could do in one of two ways:
- Via quality, recommendation and a proven track record
- Via sheer numbers of apps made available
And guess which route money hungry developers took? Hint: It’s not the one that required work and knowledge.
The simplicity and sheer scarcity of quality titles available in the incipient stages of early app stores coupled with the initial refusal and ignorance of the game development industry at large led to the priming (teaching) of new users to accept lower quality games.
“Mobile games are not real games” became a saying for a reason back then. And now there are about 6 billion smartphone owners out there who are used to these kind of games. And, for them, those games are the status quo. Premium, high quality games? They are an exception to the norm, not the target or expectation.
Revenue Now, Originality Never!
Once the mobile gaming industry started to swell up and numbers began to be reported people in suits and advertising companies saw the untapped potential of this new market segment.
Pre-2010 there were venerable and respectable forums dedicated to game developers. Forums like Tigsource or GameDevelopment.com were bristling with developers looking for ways to make their game more appealing to players everywhere.
Tigsource used to be a place bristling with creativity topics, business plans, questions about advertising and improving one’s game. Nowadays Unity’s forum is the place where newbies go to, not because of it being of a higher quality but due to Unity’s own engine being the driving force in this modern game development era.
It used to be hard work to clone a game!
Pre-2010 there was a higher barrier to entry in game development. A higher level of coding knowledge was required to be able to ship a product to the masses. Unity’s streamlined approach to game development did wonders for the game’s industry, but it also opened the flood gates.
Unity is a lovely engine and I owe most of my success to it and its tools. I love it, it saves me a lot of time during development and work and has allowed me to succeed a lot earlier than I was expecting.
But its ability to quickly share assets, code and tools – and to make them available for anyone to download, meant it would go down the same route as the App Stores themselves.
Templates and pre-made Unity projects
It’s just as easy for me, as a developer, to download a game from Unity’s asset store as it is for you to get it from the Play Store. The difference is I can take my download, change the package name and upload it as many times as I want to the Play Store while you, as a player, can only consume it.
The games featured in the screenshot above? For just $8.99 I have access to their source code, and so do hundreds of other developers.
Please understand that Unity did not set out to facilitate the usage of assets as a means of flooding the market. In fact Unity did what we all used to do back in the day – made it easier to get started with making a game.
Unity’s asset store has but a single goal: to help you make games faster. And the usage of templates or pre-built games can aid in that goal. We don’t have to waste time to get a driving engine up and running, we can get one easily and spend the time and effort to make it unique. Less grunt work and more creativity work. A noble goal.
Or at least that was the goal. As less passionate and creativity driven people entered the business, the many templates and prototypes available were instead used as a means to make revenue. Why bother to make a game when I can pay pennies for one and just release it with ads? Why put in the extra effort?
And it worked, oh my how well it worked. Crashy Road is based on this very template shown above. It sits between 50.000 and 100.000 installs. It certainly made it’s $10 back. And so did may many other games available out there.
It’s a flood that’s going to keep on coming
Even if Unity shuts down the store and all templates are erased from existence, this won’t stop. It’s not Unity’s fault at all. Even before the widespread adoption of the engine, reskins existed. The only difference is that it had a higher barrier to entry. You needed to know what a compiler is, how to access the assets and how to do the reskin. Nowadays, especially for the Play Store, it’s a 1 click process.
And to be honest? Nowadays they’re not even reskinning the game. At best it’s the title and icon for the game. But removing Unity and the Asset Store from the equation won’t fix anything.
The smartphone industry keeps on growing
And mobile games are a commodity down. Quite literary a dime a dozen. And with each new smartphone owner that opens up the app store for the very first time the quality bar gets lowered. It got to a point where players are asking developers to put ads in their games so they can progress and consume the game faster.
It happened to me with BSG – Dragon Battle (a case study game I made for this blog) and it happened with other developers as well.
As long as people out there are looking to make a quick buck and new users are being brought in, this won’t change and the app stores are going to keep on being flooded with a ton of new, low quality, template-based games with minimal or no effort put into them. So what can we do?
Taking the fight to the industry
The only option left to those who appreciate high quality games or for those who just want actual new games to play, or for those who actually care about the legacy of this medium is to take the fight to the industry.
If you ever wondered why app stores like Google Play removed the “New Games” categories (and instead it replaces them with limited, curated ones) is because of this flood of low effort games (it’s not the only reason by the way, the store’s profit is also a factor).
If “redistributors” of low effort games can’t even put the time and thought into their quick crash grab, we need to be the ones that pickup the slack.
Report Clones
Both Google Play and Apple’s App Store have means through which you can report low-effort games with a no quality. For google you can start by going here to learn how to report them. For Apple, you can go their Report A Problem page and sign in with your account. Select “I would like to report a quality issue” from the first drop-down box and proceed to select a title/game that you’ve played.
But please do not use these means to report GAMES YOU DIDN’T ENJOY just because. You could end up hurting developers that actually put time and effort into their projects and HELP CLONE MAKERS. Only report blatantly low quality games and clones.
Give them Bad Reviews
The review tool, the ability to give less than 3 stars for a game is magnificent. It’s one of your strongest weapon against this kind of developers and games. While devs are known to manipulate the usage of the review process (I wrote all about it here) they can’t really avoid getting a 1 star review from a player.
Be honest in your scoring and know that new players and platform holders are aware of the ratings. If enough people give them 1 star reviews their ability to surface and be discovered by new players goes down considerably.
Turn Off Wi-Fi or play with Airplane Mode On
Most of the developers of low quality games do not take the time and effort to implement online checking in their game. They download the source code of a project, put their ads id in there and that’s it.
So if you turn off Wi-Fi or turn on Airplane Mode, the ads will stop coming and you’ll be able to enjoy the game. The only reason they’re doing it is for money so if we cut off their revenue source? We’ll hurt them exactly where they care the most.
Why are all mobile games the same?
Mobile games look and feel really similar due to the adoption of pre-made template packages that are widely distributed for a cost or free. Many developers just purchase the templates and, instead of putting time and effort to customize them or to create something new, release them on the stores as is (or with minor modifications). This leads to an influx of extremely similar games with different titles flooding the app stores.
Disclaimer
I’m an avid user of Unity as a game engine and have used many templates and pre-made assets from their store and incorporated them in my own games. Using tools, templates and assets is not a bad thing, nor will it ever be. Even games from before the era of smartphone shared assets, be it from the same company or not. The usage of assets from the asset store should not be condemned. Re-packaging the assets with the sole intent of making a quick buck off a player should be.
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 monetization. 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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