14 DAY TRIAL // Many mobile game developers think that the industry is in peril right now, with only a handful of variations available, and the rest of the top-earners being basically reskins.
In addition to this, the rush to the bottom made free-to-play the only feasible business model, which means that people who want to deliver a genuinely high-quality experience will either do so with their own money and fail, or get funded through a publisher and alter their game to fit the golden recipe.
So far, most of the games lining up for failure on either iTunes and Google Play fall in a handful of categories, color matching, fruit slicing, endless running or base-building with real money.
One of the things that makes things even worse is that, although there would be enough money to go around theoretically, most of the revenue is hauled by only a handful of established publishers, with many studios resorting to cloning hoping to share the success of the source material.
Even some of the actual developers admit that they don't like the games they are making right now and that they're basically slaves to the marketing people, and that design isn't being led by customer experience, but by various metrics.
The console industry had a similar problem around the time the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 came out, and video gaming managed to survive just fine, and is now even bigger and stronger than ever.
That could prompt people to downplay the worrisome trends in mobile gaming, but there are several important differences between then and now, and console gaming and mobile gaming.
Strip mining isn't a feasible long-term strategy
Everyone decries the quality of free-to-play mobile games, yet they still rake in millions. The way this works is that they are specifically designed to take advantage of the weakness of human psyche in order to drive up revenue.
The games are actually designed in a very cynical fashion, with a very specific list of checkmarks to hit, in order to make sure that the chances to become part of what's popular right now are increased. Customer retention and various analytics are the primary forces of design, and success is achieved through aggressive marketing and gambling industry tactics.
This leads to a sort of more homogenous experience that means that once you reach a winning formula, you stick to it and produce as many games that are essentially the same as possible in order to gain market share.
The uniformity that characterizes the top earners in the mobile gaming space is a worrying symptom, as all the big players are essentially strip mining their audiences. Fatigue will settle in and soon nobody will be making any money anymore.
As the global audience isn't expanding at the same explosive rate it used to over the course of the last couple of years, people will start experiencing cow clicker fatigue.
Clones outranking the originals is another sign of poor health
There are also legitimate video game makers that actually try to make worthwhile games, but that unfortunately isn't the winning tactic.
With a few notable exceptions, everyone is complaining about a decrease of revenue, due in part to the fact that the number of studios making games for mobile platforms has also gone through the roof.
The bad thing is that they are losing out by default, since nobody wants to pay anything for casual games, and they have to face the relentless marketing of the big free-to-play companies.
In addition to this, due to the fact that mobile games are usually small in scope and simplistic, which usually also translates into being easier to make, a lot of clones of popular games tend to pop up seemingly out of nowhere, in some cases even before the release of the source material.
People are making clones of popular games during a weekend, and games created in a single day manage to achieve overnight notoriety through viral means, which means that it's really hard to predict how a certain effort might pan out, and it's difficult to justify a long-term investment into something that may end up drowned by the endless sea of clones.
For the time being, I'm still looking for a good Pharaoh lookalike on Android.