Blog Archives
Motorsport Manager Mobile 2 Review: On the Podium
In the year since I reviewed Motorsport Manager on mobile, Christian West went from mobile game development star to management sim superstar. He’s now the founder of PlaySport Games which developed and released Motorsport Manager on PC and used that as the basis for the new Motorsport Manager 2.
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Clash Royale, Pay-to-Win Mechanics and Your Wallet
I’m not sure a day goes by that I don’t see justified complaints about Clash Royale over on Reddit. The game doesn’t attempt to match make on skill but is often determined by who has the better cards. Emotes should be mutable. The tournament system has died without Supercell propping it up.
There’s a perfectly good reason why Supercell isn’t addressing any of this: Money. Addressing these issues would likely take money out of Supercell’s pocket not just through the costs of making the changes but the loss of revenue from making them.
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Alto’s Adventure Review: Coolboarders
While my day job might be in accounting, the other university courses I liked were communications and marketing. One of the concepts that they emphasized is being able to pitch a product in one line. If I was to give a short line to describe Alto’s Adventure, it would be “Journey as an endless runner.” While a free-to-play mobile game won’t quite live up to one of the best games ever released on the PS3, Alto’s Adventure sure does more than hold its own in its genre.
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Nintendo Shares Soar on Pokemon Go Popularity
It might not be out worldwide yet and revenue totals haven’t been tallied but Pokemon Go is already a smash hit for Nintendo. In the two business days since Nintendo’s latest mobile game was launched, their stock has climbed over 30% and added $7.5 billion to the value of Nintendo.
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Uncharted: Fortune Hunter Review: Gold on the Run
It’s not unusual to see big game franchises get mobile spin-offs as part of their lineup. Square Enix has mobile games for Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider and Hitman. Nintendo is working on a move into that sector. EA has a whole host of mobile titles too. Now, Sony is dipping its toes into the mobile sector with a puzzle game based Uncharted that’s more of a booster pack for Uncharted 4’s multiplayer than a new entry in the franchise.
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Motorsport Manager Review: Checkered Flag
This September, Motorsport Manager is coming to Steam as a rather impressive looking and much enhanced port. It’ll be the same style of game at its core but will turn the graphics up to 11 and make some aspects of the simulation much more realistic including production of parts, rules charges, calendar changes and more. While the underpinnings of Motorsport Manager won’t change, a lot of it will be upgraded from the mobile game.
But what about that mobile game? I’ve been playing it for a while now and while it’s not quite Football Manager levels of complex, it’s certainly the best management game for motorsport fans I’ve ever played.
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Clash Royale Review: Dealing from the Bottom of the Deck
Now that I’ve got a phone that’s less than three years old, I can finally start reviewing mobile games. Let’s start with one of the latest games to top the mobile games charts.
Supercell had a hit on its hands with Clash of Clans. The tower defense game still sits near the top of Google’s top grossing games chart. For their follow-up, they took many of the elements of Clash of Clans and distilled it into a competitive multiplayer strategy game called Clash Royale.
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Activision Buys Candy Crush Maker, King, for $5.9 Billion
The company behind the biggest triple-A game on the market has purchased the company behind the biggest mobile game on the market. Activision, a publisher whose portfolio includes Call of Duty among other hits, has purchased King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion.
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Monument Valley Review: Uncanny Valley
I’ve never been much of a mobile gamer but that’s probably prejudices getting in the way. When I hear about a mobile game, I immediately think of a free-to-play game of fairly low quality and nearly impossible to play without dumping a pile of money into microtransactions.
Monument Valley isn’t one of those games. You have to pay up-front but you also don’t have to pay microtransactions and the gameplay is quite good. Unlike the stereotypical mobile fare, you could actually call Monument Valley a real video game.
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The Dollars and Cents of Monument Valley
You might not have heard Monument Valley but the Escher-inspired mobile puzzle game was one of the smash hit mobile games of 2014. It was one of the best rated mobile games of 2014 (that isn’t Hearthstone, anyway) and was the only mobile game to pick up a Game Awards nomination for Best Indie Game.
While they’re becoming more frequent, paid mobile games are more the exception than the rule. Despite costing over $1.4 million to make (including the Forgotten Shores DLC), ustwo Games sold enough copies and made enough money to more than cover the costs and get them on their way to the next game.
The lesson that ustwo Games teaches us with their breakdown of the dollars and cents of Monument Valley is that you don’t have to have a terrible free-to-play play-to-win monetization model on top of a non-existent game to make money in the mobile space. If you build a great game, people will buy.
et geekera 