14 DAY TRIAL // Ben Cousins, a former Battlefield producer and currently free to play app consultant, has shared a few words of advice for aspiring independent developers, cautioning them to steer away from mobile gaming in favor of focusing on the PC.
The industry veteran warned budding indie devs that, the way things are currently going, the App Store is becoming the battleground of King, Rovio, Supercell, and a chosen few with backing from Apple, and that instead of trying to break into the mobile world, they should be making games for the PC.
This advice comes from a man with years of experience working on triple-A titles, like Bad Company 2, and then on Electronic Arts' early experiments in the free to play arena, Battlefield Heroes and Lord of Ultima, as well as in highly-polished iPhone shooters, such as The Drowning.
Even though he's worked as a senior member on companies such as Sony, EA, and Lionhead, Cousins has been focused on the free to play business model since 2006, working on ten major releases across five different platforms.
He reveals that the mobile games industry as a whole is booming and that more titles are likely to hit the billion-dollar lifetime revenue mark in 2014, but that small companies without support from significant investment will struggle to cope with the big players.
"It's been clear for several years now that mobile gaming is rapidly evolving into a later stage (similar to consoles in the late 1990s and early 2000s) where the major players take most of the revenue through highly polished products supported by large marketing investments," Ben Cousins said during an interview with Pocket Gamer.
He revealed that not even a featured slot from Apple or Google themselves can guarantee success, and that the best move for indies would be to try their hand at new and interesting platforms, such as the Oculus Rift, Google Glass, and maybe some of the upcoming wearable technologies, or to focus on making PC games.
Developers working independently of the major players in the mobile gaming market will struggle to find their footing unless they can secure a prominent placement on Google Play or the iOS App Store, and even then they might not find the success they seek.
A report that surfaced in April claimed that both Apple as well as Google would be pushing for more exclusive content for their platforms, offering extra promotion to developers in return for the exclusivity, which might help some, but for the most part the professional advice is to explore alternative avenues.