Will mobile gaming crash?

[themistermanguy]

One of the reasons the video game industry breifly crashed in 1983 was because of the distinct lack of quality control. Any company can grab an Atari dev kit, wip up something quick, then sell it at a cheep price. With iOS, it's kind of the same thing. Anybody with coding software can wip up a quick game and sell it for $0.99 on the App store. If the entire industry almost crashed because of this. Do you think the same will happen to the mobile gaming market?

(Note: This does NOT include handheld gaming platforms like the 3DS as the companies behind them have a licensing system already in place to control the game output)

 

[Mocmocman]

Maybe. If any department of gaming were to crash, it would be the mobile market, for the reasons that you stated. However, the thing about the mobile market is that the hardware is not usually purchased for games, but rather to do phone/tablet stuff, and games are downloaded secondary. People will want their little time wasters for the few minutes of free time they got, and mobile games will fill that. However, many seem to just stick with the established games, rather than checking out the new ones that people make, due to the lack of quality control allowing the market flooded with duds and weak clones. I think that the mobile market will just stagnate with the largest developers getting sales, and the rest getting zip.

 

[TehCookie]

With the internet and ratings, I think people do a better job sorting through the bad games and spreading the good ones so I don't see the same thing happening. I wasn't around in the 80's, but it seemed like consumers were a lot less aware of what they were buying than they are now and better titles were drowned out by the bad ones.

I hear of more people being tricked into buying bad games in the AAA industry (like ME3, Aliens CM) than mobile games.

 

[Tom_green_day]

Games on my phone crash every 3 goddamn minutes.

 

[Eve Charm]

A crash will never happen in the mobile market neither the digital market. After you purchased the software and license mobile games cost 0 dollars to make. There will be plenty of games that fail because they cost to much to make as far as paying the people that are making the game and not selling enough because of pricing but it will never be like the Atari crash.

Atari and the rest crashed so hard because those games cost money to "physically" make the game, the console, the controllers and stuff. After spending all that money to make all that stuff and none of it selling and just taking up space on store shelves you have money "lost" on your product. The mobile market will never lose money cause they made to much of the same product and it never sold.

If pc gaming and stick around still no matter what, And if sliver dollar still has the ability to make a dollar game every damn week there will never be a massive crash, just companies failing on their own for other reasons.

 

[Zarkov]

Well, I mean, I guess it could. But I really don't think it'll happen.

Mobile gaming is just a particularly open platform, and with freedom you sometimes have to deal with a lot of shit. The crash was also due to many other factors, like the outrageous amount of consoles sharing the same market.

But hey, if it does, hopefully it comes back with a more organized market, because I definitely agree that the mobile market has a much greater potential for great games.

 

[Olas]

You're comparing industries that are in VERY different situations. In 1983 videogames were still new and many people still saw them as a fad. There wasn't much variety to them, and finding info on them was hard. They were also relatively expensive and burdensome to set up.

Now gaming is a huge well established industry, mobile games are ubiquitous, cheap, and easily accessable. Information on them is plentiful and lots of people out there want to make them. It would take something DRASTIC to cause another crash, like discovering that they give you cancer or something.

 

[Tom_green_day]

Im going to guess you run Android then.

I think it's more Android running me... into the ground...

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

I really, really doubt it. With reviews being a helluva lot more common, with games being as familiar as they are now, and with the software costing a whole lot less and being a whole lot easier to get (including the tons of freeware apps), I can't see mobile gaming stopping. The gaming industry has changed a lot since 1983.

Games on my phone crash every 3 goddamn minutes.

I had that problem until I got a new phone. I had a crappy Android knockoff that could only use an outdated version of Gingerbread, while everyone was still messing around and learning Jellybean and Kitkat. HTC Wildfire, biggest piece of crap ever.

 

[Maximum Bert]

It may do havent Capcom just invested 40 million dollars into it of their already dwindling cash reserves? so going by their horrible decision making of late that means mobile gaming will crash hard soon.

Personally I dont think it will crash but I also think it will be largely ignored by the vast majority of gamers (already is it seems) while a few casual games will make top dollars and the rest will make almost nothing.

 

[Atmos Duality]

With the internet and ratings, I think people do a better job sorting through the bad games and spreading the good ones so I don't see the same thing happening. I wasn't around in the 80's, but it seemed like consumers were a lot less aware of what they were buying than they are now and better titles were drowned out by the bad ones.

That's pretty much how it went down. We didn't have many widespread any reliable sources of information to describe or rate games to each other, and eventually the shovelware just overtook the market. (so no, it wasn't E.T. for the Atari 2600, but a deluge of shit of similar quality)

 

[lacktheknack]

There were other reasons the 80s crash happened.

The big picture is that it crashed because it wasn't worth figuring out what games to buy any more, and the market was spread too thin. Is there a decrease in demand for mobile games? If not, then clearly the current state of affairs isn't going to crash anything.