Brands In The Mobile Market

I don't consume much news as most of it equates to noise for the brain. Much is designed to evoke reaction rather than inform or educate. I consume just about enough to not be clueless about events in the world but not too much for it to consume much time. I would rather spend my time in different ways.

One piece to tech gaming development news that filtered through to me is the discussion of brands in the mobile market.

Brands are important to games companies as they provide a bed rock from which to base your company or pull it out of troubled water if an experimental idea goes wrong. Madden hit 25 years old I think may have triggered some of this discussion.

Will people still be playing Angry Birds in 15 years time? How about Candy Crush?  I suspect because of their limited style of play they will follow the path of worms back in the 1990's. They will get follow ups but none will match the success of the original but they will remain profitable for years to come.

I also hit brands as I was recently thinking about Marvel. Iron man was created in the 1960's. He has continued to entertain us since then. Sure he has been updated many times as the world around him has changed. The idea of a highly intelligent but deeply floored man building an "iron" suit to combat evil holds it appeal quite literally across generations. Iron Man is a great brand. Of course it is just one brand of the many that Marvel have created. These brands are the reason Disney paid a good deal of money to buy Marvel.

Will some enduring brands be created for mobile devices. The is almost a definite yes. Just the shear number of creative people working in the domain means it is bound to happen. Will a brand the rivals Madden or one of Marvels be created, well err maybe. There is a chance but the stars really have to align for this to happen. For a brand to get really big it has to move out of the mobile world and onto other gaming devices. Then onto book and film. Would Iron Man be big now if it had stayed in the realm of comics?

You can read, watch and play Iron Man, he has a presence on nearly all popular forms of media. This is what brands do, provide entertainment in as many ways as possible. Of course the pacing has to be correct, flooding the market can devalue or destroy a brand. People tire of it. Imagine a new Iron Man film was released every two months people would soon tire.

To wrap this section up yep I expect some enduring brands to originate from the mobile market it is just hard to spot them without hindsight.

Does any of this help the small team/lone developer?

Big brands are for big companies. Niche is for the smaller ones. It could effect your line of thinking when deciding what game to develop. Do you go after the hit driven market or do you go for developing a longer burning, create a brand, approach. Both have their merits and both are fiercely competitive. I have not fully fleshed out my thoughts in this area other than to realize that if you are doing this as a hobby then probably it is best to not worry at all and just create what you actually like.

Personally at the moment I am a bit interested in HTML5 game development. At the moment this is highly hit driven in nature in the sense game portals license your game for a one time fee. So many developer are limiting the scope to what can be create in a short period of time. This is like a re-run of the flash era. The other day I spotted a post about a flash game company starting to port its entire catalog of 400 flash games to HMTL5 and deciding to licensing them quite cheaply.

This got some a bit worried about flooding the market and pushing prices of licensed games down somewhat. Partly it seemed a bit silly as they had been operating in the flash market for some time and had not pushed out all the independents.

It is just a reflection on the reality that wages differ over the planet and most of the development costs of a game are wages. Perhaps it is a start of a HTML5 race to the bottom but if HTML5 gaming is growing fast enough it does not have to be the case.

My next line of thinking was if you believe that is the start of a race to the bottom in pricing then perhaps starting to develop a brand or a game you can promote yourself rather than relying on portals for your revenue.

I was reminded of a guy on a game development forum that I used to lurk on a few years back. It was a pretty broad site with a few flash developers. Most were licensing their games and making reasonable money. This guy took the same flash technology on a different journey. He create a Zombie based online multi-player game. He targeted his limited advertising budget and made some serious money and then continued to make it every month as people subscribed and he advertised more and more. I got the impression he was working pretty hard person so certainly deserved the success.

I am not sure you would describe his game as a brand but I am sure to the people that played and enjoyed it the game was a brand.