Why are mobile games less complex than PC games?

Whenever I tell people I’m a game designer that makes games for the mobile market I get asked “Why are mobile games so simple”. Instead of answering straight out I usually ask them why they think that’s the case. It’s always fun to see what people have to say. After doing this for so many years I think I have a pretty good perspective on the matter, from both a developer’s perspective and from the players perspective. So, why are mobile games less complex than PC Games?

Your Answer Upfront:

Modern smartphones are capable of rendering and running highly detailed and complex games. The only reason such games are rare is due to the fact that most smartphone owners aren’t gamers with knowledge of gaming. They are mostly newcomers who never played games. As such, developers make less complex games that newcomers can play easily in the hope of being able to monetize this audience.

In this article we’ll talk a bit about how games are designed for PC, Console and Mobile Platforms. We’ll begin by looking into the principles of game design, how design differs between the platform and how a mobile game’s design is influenced by the monetization process.

We’ll also see if complexity is actually tied to the hardware the game runs on. In the end you’ll get a pretty good idea on why mobile games are less complex than PC games.

The principles behind Game Design

Game Design is a pretty new field of research and study. It’s about 40 years old and it’s one of the few fields where people who are practicing the art can be older than the art itself.

Since it’s a pretty young field it didn’t have the chance to solidify its rules and set it in stone with the principles evolving with every new hardware iteration and platform that arises.

No one came up with these rules in the 1980’s. There was no course or standard. Instead, developers did what they thought would work and, over time, the things that didn’t got dropped.

Or better yet, people just “cloned” the games that worked really well.

The entire Game Design field is based on an “evolutionary” process with each new game building upon the predecessors. Let’s go for an analogy on the matter.

Tally ho’, I say those ol’ chap, those gas motors do not get tired at all.

Game Development as Racing Cars

Think of game development as a car race.

On the first year of the race 100 people show up with what they think a car should be like. Some have square wheels. Some cars are bulky and tall.

Some cars have round wheels but use pedals that drivers have to push upon (like bikes). Some cars have wind sails and use wind power.

The race begins and the cars go full speed. At the end of the race we have a few types of car that finished. Most cars with round wheels finished, some cars with pedals, some with an electric engine and a few with sails.

Only one car with square wheels finished the race.

It’s time for year two and the second race. At this race there’s almost no cars left with square wheels. Most of them use round wheels, pedals, wind sails and a new type of car with a gas engine.

The race is off. At the end, once again, only a few cars finish. Most of the victors have round wheels and pedals or a gas engine. The wind didn’t blow that well so the wind sail cars never even got to finish.

On year three there are less wind sail cars. Those that are there either have a pedal for backup or a gas engine. All cars have round wheels and quite a few of them use gas engines.

But there’s a new kind of car that lines up for the race.

It’s a car with square wheels surrounded by a metal track (think of it like tank tracks). This time, most of the cars finish the race. The wind sails and pedals were in the last positions with the gas engine cars being the first.

And so on and so forth.

New hardware platforms, new opportunities for breaking the status quo

The previous analogy is pretty good to understand how the design process works with games. Just imagine the race analogy from the previous chapter as taking place on the beach and that being the Arcade/PC/Console era.

Picture the new smartphones market as introducing a new type of circuit – street races.

Once you change the environment, the old, discarded rules are ripe for taking. Tank tracks would be less efficient on the asphalt compared to just round wheels vs tank tracks on the beach.

Gas and electrical engines would dominate. But pedal power could be used once again to quickly navigate the city surroundings in order to take shortcuts and go on the sidewalk in a bike-like car.

This happened when smartphones came along and it constituted a shift in the design process, opening new avenues for experimentation. There were some clear differences though.

Function Follows Form < > Form Follows Function

There are two concepts in game design:

Form follows function
Function follows form

Think of it as two approaches that you can use to solve the same problem. Look at mobile games and mobile phones.

Design a game that works well with the platform targeted (phones)
Design a phone that should play well with the current games we’re making.

Clearly when smartphones took over our lives they weren’t trying to be the best gaming platforms and weren’t designed to play games specifically. They solved other problems.

The first few games designed and development for smartphones used the Function Follows Form approach. You didn’t have triggers, shoulder buttons and D-Pads. You had a big-ish screen and you could use your finger to interact with it.

That caused a lot of the early games to be 1 button games (think Canabalt, Flappy Bird). With swipes and multi-touch becoming more and more prevalent so did their complexity of interactions. No more single tap. Now you could swipe and drag.

You’d pinch to zoom and move the camera around.

But, outside of a few outliers, games never fully adopted the complexity of controls and interactions from their older brothers – the PCs and consoles.

For one, smartphones lack a ton of buttons. They lack analog controls and they lack the screen space that some people have at home. They also lack the expertise and knowledge of long time PC and console gamers.

Mobile Gamers are mostly first time gamers

In 2021/2022 the number of PC Gamers sits at around~1.7 billion compared to ~6.3 billion smartphone owners. This is important to understand because that means that there are more newcomers to smartphone gaming than people with PC gaming experience.

And I hear you say, that’s not right. Because you’re not comparing PC Gamers with Smartphone Gamers, you’re comparing PC Gamers with Smartphone Owners. You should check the amount of Computer Owners and, normally, I would agree.

But look at the gamers intent and access to games on PC vs smartphones.

On a smartphone if you want to download and install an app and you’re a smartphone owner you use the same method. Open up your favorite app store and you’re there. And you can see both games and apps.

On a computer or console if you want to download a game and play you have to want to do that. You don’t become a PC gamer by accidentally installing steam and creating a steam account and adding a credit card and purchasing a game – all of it by accident of course.

This is an important distinction.

On mobile a lot more people play games than on PC because access to games is built in, it’s simplified and can happen without a GAMING INTENT (as opposed to purchasing a PC or a console FOR GAMING). AKA you checked out the built-in app store and saw a cool icon of a game that’s free and you’re one tap away from opening it up.

And that means that there are 4 times as many potential people approaching gaming with no knowledge of controls, color coding, name tags and aiming down sights.

And Game Designers and Developers know this. As such, they plan their games according it to target as many people as possible – with no knowledge of how to play a game.

If you shove a game like Civilization 6 or Divinity Original Sin 2 into the face of a brand new smartphone owner you won’t get much out of him or her. Too complex, too much to read, how do I play it.

But if you shove a hypercasual game with a simple swipe to move mechanic the chances are he or she will play for quite a while. And this is important because….

Monetisation goals affect the design of a mobile game

You’re making a game for smartphones and you want to make as much money as possible (all of the money! Every. Last. Bit). And you have the following facts:

70% of your possible users are non-gamers.
They won’t pay for a game because they are not used to paying for games since they are non-gamers.

What do you do? Do you design a complex and highly detailed game with a lot of rules, lore and deep mechanics?

Do you design a simple game that looks fun and can entertain the user for 5-10 minutes at a time, without spending too much of your budget on the game?

And most developers choose the second route. That’s why we don’t have so many complex and detailed games with deep game mechanics.

Because the possible audience isn’t used to playing those games and isn’t used to paying for those games.

Another important factor to consider is the hardware specifications. A lot of people think that we don’t have complex games because the smartphone hardware isn’t up to par for those kind of games.

Hardware specs don’t affect complexity. But hardware does look cool in closeup photos 🙂

Complexity isn’t driven by hardware specs

The thing is, mobile phones nowadays are by far much more powerful than computers even 10 years ago, not to mention 15, 20 or 35 years ago.

We have special hardware for AI based learning, for optimizing neural networks, for analyzing and crunching numbers that we only dreamed of 10 years ago on a computer.

And we have that on our everyday phones that sit in Timmy or Jimmy or Sandra or Jenny’s pocket.

Civilization 6 runs on a smartphone or tablet without much issue. Yet Civilization has always been a really complex game, ever since the first release so many years ago.

A lot more complex than all of those big brain games with fake ads you see everywhere (we wrote an article on “Why Games Use Fake Advertisements” btw, if you’re interested in the subject).

Modern Smartphones are capable of rendering games with graphics that can even surpass the XBOX 360 and PS3 and can trade punches with PS4’s and mid tier PC’s.

A few days ago I wrote about an article on 5 PC Games ported to Mobile Phones and those games look amazing and have a lot of complexity behind them. So the whole idea that “phones lack the hardware needed to run complex games”? That gets thrown out of the window pretty fast.

It’s all about the target audience and being able to make some money off of them. And if you take a newbie and put him in front of a Stick and Throttle / Joystick, strap a VR headset to his face and get him to pilot an Anaconda in Elite: Dangerous with the goal being to dock the Anaconda in a rotating space station….

You’ll get a lot of anger, possibly some nausea + vomiting and a deep hatred for Newtonian mechanics.

The chances of getting any advertising or money from that person is really small.

Slowly easing that newbie gamer into understanding games and gaming concepts, giving him bite sized access to games (minutes at a time), slowly making 1-2-5-10c from him with every gameplay session and keeping him in that loop for months to come.