Rising expectations and saturated market favours the big firms, says Assyria’s Adam Green
A leading iPhone game studio has questioned the sustainability of small-scale titles on the App Store, as bigger publishers circle the lucrative mobile game market.
Adam Green, the managing director at iPhone game developer Assyria Game Studios, said that brand awareness on the App Store is favouring the bigger studios and publishers.
“Examples of this can already be seen on iPhone as the likes of EA and Ubisoft dominate the top 10 slots of the App Store. A year ago it was full of unique independent games,” said Green, whose own company has made a trio of iPhone titles.
“Without very careful monitoring and design of the online stores, I can’t see the small developers managing to get sufficient exposure next to the likes of Assassins Creed in the future,” he continued.
“Constant production of small-scale games, while ok at the moment, is unlikely to be very sustainable as consumer expectation grows.”
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Speaking as part of this week’s Develop Jury, Green suggested that the expanding popularity of the iPhone and App Store is ultimately leading to an increased expectation of polish and quality – something which is more possible, in theory, with bigger teams.
“As broadband and cellular data network speeds increase, this market and the size of games in it will gradually increase,” he said.
“This will lead to increased consumer expectation of digital distributed games and therefore more difficulty for a small team in terms of getting noticed on these kinds of platforms.”
Green added that small developers can of course do well on the App Store, but in order to succeed smaller devs will need to meet the ever-escalating market expectations.
I don't think it's a fair assumption that just because the teams are small and independent that they will be unable to meet "consumer expectation of digital distributed games".
Just because something is harder and filled with more competition doesn't make it impossible. And it certainly shouldn't be a deterent to any independent developer that wishes to try their hand at the market.
The one point I will concede is that independent developers need to be realistic with themselves about the level of competition their game has and what level of polish they need to strive for.
Larger teams allow for larger scale projects. We have all seen enough high quality/polish 1 man games and enough garbage big budget games to know the claim that "big team = quality" is not true.
Yeah I agree; my point was really that as the larger publishers really start to produce product for the market, they will raise consumers expectations for what constitutes a "Good iPhone Game".
Within the full quote on the Jury it mentioned that while small games are fine now, looking to the future it will be those companies that grow and expand their product offering to meet the rising expectations that succeed... My point was really that the quality bar is increasing and developers need to be able to keep up with it in order to succeed.
The quality bar is rising just as it did in the casual market which makes it harder for new developers - especially indies with limited resources to break in.
More importantly the big players are breathing all the oxygen. Getting reviews of your iPhone app is tough enough given the vast number that are being published. Now the big players are turning up for press visits with multiple high profile titles for review/preview which take up a lot of the, already limited, column inches that are available.
I think we need to get away from this idea that more resources and bigger teams means better quality. The quality of the game is as good as the people working on it, not the amount of people working on it. If it needs more time, then spend more time on it. Devs need to stop hiding behind the "well, they've got more resources than us", because it doesn't mean they they have "better" resources, just more.
People are that focussed on money, money, money, that they think that rushing the game out to start earning, is more important than getting the game to market in a high quality.
The old saying "you reap what you sow" is very apt, put the time in, get the rewards out... cut corners and rush, then pay the price.
