While mobile gaming has come to rival and even surpass traditional console/PC gaming in recent years it still lacks many of the things that makes traditional gaming so great. Whereas many traditional games try to sell an experience or a story, mobile games stick with simplistic, addicting gameplay that you can pickup immediately and play for hours. While this is all well and good, isn’t it about time that we some more experience-based mobile games released?
I recently posted about the message being the product in mobile (and all things, really). I said that by marketing in a classified-ad/performance-ad sort of model, mobile game makers aren’t selling on experience (like a movie or a AAA game might) and thus don’t believe they can make games that work for experience either. This precludes them from pursuing many potentially innovative games, and results in a kind of game design monoculture that’s proved unstable time and time again. However the good news is that mobile and tablet aren’t going anywhere, and are far more powerful than other platforms where similar low-quality strategies eventually tapped out (Web, Facebook). Thus the blue ocean for premium mobile is wide open.
