"The mobile games market is an absolute mess, thanks to you"- a rebuttal

Every now and then there comes an article talking about the game industry that makes you take pause and think, to reconsider what's going on in the market, in games media, and all gaming culture. It is a well written, thought provoking article that, if read by the right people, can become the catalyst for real change. This is NOT that article. This is a rebuttal for Aksel Junkilla's article The mobile games market is an absolute mess, thanks to you. Original words from the article will be in bold, and beneath those will be my own words. A link to an archived version of the article here: https://archive.is/h3me2

The mobile game my team and I poured our hearts and souls into is receiving rave reviews from users. The game, Battlestation: Harbinger, was featured by both Apple and Google as one of the best new games in their respective marketplaces.

You may think that congratulations are in order. You might think that my team and I popped some Champagne and headed out on a well-deserved vacation. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Even with these successes, my company and I are in the red, desperate to bring inMORE MONEY before we have to lay off our workers and close our doors for good.

The article wastes no time in trying to rope the reader into an emotional guilt trip. By emphasizing the fact that people's jobs are on the line, and that they worked oh so hard on this one mobile game, Junkilla is really playing into the heartstrings of a generation that is currently facing unemployment levels unheard of since the Great Depression. Emotional manipulation at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

THE PROBLEM WITH MOBILE

You see, we have a problem in the mobile gaming sector, thanks to you. You would rather buy a pumpkin spice latte a few times a week and enjoy it for a few minutes than buy a game that you can play as long as you would like. In order for creative games to be made, there needs to be a major culture shift. We need to be willing to spend a few dollars on a quality app, rather than for a few extra lives or other in-game purchases.

When I read this paragraph, I felt personally insulted. Junkilla lays on the guilt on the reader even more by not only placing the blame on us, but also by accusing us of costing people their jobs by choosing to buy something other than their game, in this case, a luxury drink. What Junkilla fails to realize is that video games are also luxuries, items we don't need, but make life a little better.

Not all gamers have the option to spend money whenever they feel like it on games. Some gamers, such as myself, have a little thing called "debt," which means I owe people money. And that debt has to be repaid first and foremost, otherwise we're in trouble with the law. And after that debt is repaid, we gotta buy stuff called "necessities", like food, and pay something called "bills", otherwise we'll be without water and electric services. If we have cars, which in this day and age is a necessity as well, then more money goes into them too. Gasoline, maintenance, oil, list goes on and on. After ALL THAT, if we have any money left, does it go into games? NO! We have to put it in something called a "saving's account", because the ten bucks you spent on a mobile game could be the ten bucks you'll need tomorrow for an emergency purchase.

And even after all that, if someone decides to spend five bucks on a latte, that's THEIR BUSINESS! It's their money, they worked hard for it, let them spend it the way they want!

Being a mobile game developer for four years has made me realize a lot of things that are wrong with the market. First, only certain games can bring in money for developers.

Yeah, they're called the games people actually enjoy playing.

Second, only certain types of players will find it easy to find games suitable for them.

This sentence makes no sense. What the hell does this even mean? Did Junkilla just write this to pad out his article, or was he trying to say something, but didn't have the words for it?

Third, classical conditioning makes a lot of players feel entitled to have everything for free and punish developers for asking money.

Oh boy, here we go. A game developer who feels like they can dictate to the consumer what they can and can't like, can and can't buy.

Even apps that find success in their marketing campaigns cannot make up the money spent on development because people would rather spend $5 on a latte every other day than on the app. Why? Because the most popular games are free-to-play, with a monetization model that lets most players play for free while milking some customers for thousands of dollars.

If you put yourself in a market where most of the competition is free of charge and actually try to charge for your product, don't be surprised to see your product fail. People aren't as stupid as Junkilla suggests; we know what's good and what isn't. If I had the option of buying a ten dollar game or a free game, I'd go for the free game and save those ten dollars for more important.

Most players have become conditioned to feel entitled to free content more and more. The price of a game is not compared to a latte; it is compared to the price of another game.

In other words, the competition. That's how the market works, it's your product against theirs. Don't like it? Well then, don't be a capitalist, try some other line of work.

Essentially, these customers who pay thousands, these "whales," pay for the fun for everyone. Throw out a game with one free episode and the rest to unlock for $5 and you will have a problem on your hands. This model — one that many old-school players find very fair, a try before you buy — is not a model that works well these days. Users see a $5 price tag for more content and they quit the game and go back to sipping their lattes.

Again with the lattes. By using this imagery, Junkilla is accusing the consumers, HIS consumers, the ones he depends on to stay employed, of being over privileged. Again, I found this accusation to be personally insulting, as I am a man who works his ass off for what he has and wants, and I am scarcely the only person in gaming culture to be like that.

If I have the five dollars to enjoy a latte, you bet your ass I'll enjoy a latte. It's MY money, I work hard for it, and it's my right to spend it how I see fit.

Players have a very real power to impact the sales of a game through ratings. With many of our mobile games, we have users blackmail us with ratings. They will rate the game with one star, and then send us a message demanding the game be made free for them in order for them to "correct" their review.

That's unethical. If that happens, screencap the message and report the user. It's your right to fight back against bullying and blackmail.

It's extremely frustrating for us. On top of this, there is no way for us to request the removal of these reviews on either Apple or Google's marketplaces, so if we refuse to give in, these negative reviews remain for the lifetime of the game. Unless we have hundreds of reviews already pouring in, these initial negative reviews can be a game-breaker for small companies like mine.

Somehow I doubt that, because games like Flappy Bird managed to increase their sales thanks to the exposure given to them by gamers like PewDiePie. But again, consider the fact that you're trying to charge for a product that's competing in a market saturated with FREE products. Why should anyone pay for yours?

And that's not me being one of those "entitled" gamers Junkilla likes to paint us as being, that's a legitimate question. What makes his game WORTH the money he's charging? Because I actually looked up gameplay footage, and let me tell you: I was NOT impressed.

The whole market is heavily focused on the mass-market spectrum, and it all stems from one thing: ToMAKE MONEY as a mobile game developer you have to have your game high enough up in the top lists. If your game isn't there, you will not sell enough units to make ends meet. On the surface, that may seem to make sense; these app store lists work on certain algorithms to promote what is already popular. But there is a problem with this: Games that appeal to the masses have a clear advantage over games for niche markets.

So the more people your product appeals to, the more customers you can have, and therefore the more money you make? Jesus, that's genius! Oh, wait, no it isn't, it's Capitalism 101. That's something Junkilla should have known the moment he decided to start a company.

Since the difference in income is so huge, it makes the decision for a developer almost binary. Either we make a mass-appealing game — the Clashes of Clans or Candy Crushes— and have a chance to make a living, or we make a niche game and have no chance at all.

False dichotomy! The games market is dynamic enough that any game, potentially, can become a hot seller if its quality is appealing enough. Games like Call of Duty have mass appeal, but games like Minecraft become not just bestsellers, but pop culture phenomena. The difference lays in actually taking a risk. Minecraft, a niche game with graphics that looked outdated in 1995, is a HUGE seller, because it had something called appeal. The original Pokemon games were sold on a then dying system, and single handedly turned the Game Boy from a cute little casual system into the Juggernaut it still is today. Katamary Damacy became the surprise hit of the Noughties, selling pretty well. Niche games can, and do, sell.

ONE GAME DEVELOPER ALONE CANNOT CHANGE THIS, BUT MANY TOGETHER CAN

At the end of the day, all these factors make creating good content for mobile devices more and more difficult.

Is it really this black and white? From my experience, yes. We released Battlestation: Harbinger on Aug. 13. Despite being featured by both Google and Apple, the game isn't selling enough to make up for development expenses. A few niche games manage to make a little bit of money to support a small studio, but it is very rare. This all leads to a situation where only a certain type of game is viable to make business-wise; the market is forcing every developer to act in the same way.

If you knew the shape of the market, why did you enter it? You should have taken into account not just the kind of market you were entering, but the kind of product that tends to sell in said market as well. You entered a market where most products are FREE, and tried competing with a product you charged money for. How does that make any sense?

THIS CAN CHANGE

There needs to be a twofold culture shift. The first step is one I already mentioned: Gamers need to learn to vote with their money. This will allow developers to build the great games that everyone wants to see on the expanding mobile platform.

Gamers already know how to vote with their money. You're just mad because we didn't vote for you.

Many serious gamers complain about all the casual games coming out for mobile, but don't support the serious game developers that build the games that they want! Remember when you would fork over $40 for Zelda or Pokémon games on Game Boy? Imagine the amazing games we could play on our phones if we paid developers enough to create them! One such game that you can support is Battlestation.

Yeah, no. Battlestation is no Pokemon, no Zelda, not even Flappy Bird. If you bring up quality games, get ready to have your game compared to those.

The other shift needs to be from the developer side. Game developers are fighting against each other, when they should realize that we are allies as well as rivals. While we are rivals in achieving visibility, we are allies against the classical conditioning, the market today and the undervaluing of our hard work.

No, you are competitors. It literally is your product against theirs, with the consumers voting with their money to determine which products deserve success, and which ones don't. You're mad because the consumer said your product didn't deserve success, regardless of what Google and Apple said.

One game developer alone cannot change this, but many together can. We as game developers did this to ourselves by competing so fiercely against each other that we lowered the price of our work more and more, so much so that now a consumer won't pay even a few dollars for a game. We have created a mess that can only be solved by working together.

No, you entered a market where you couldn't possibly compete in. Let me tell you what gamers REALLY are: gamers are people willing to shell out sixty dollars for a newly released game they consider to be good. Gamers are willing to wait past midnight for the release of that one game they have been waiting months, even years for.

The games market is diverse enough that it allows for any title and any genre, no matter how niche it is, to at least break even if it's good enough. Harvest Moon, River King, Animal Crossing, these are just a few games that actually sell IN SPITE of how niche they are. A niche game that doesn't sell has only itself to blame.

Consider one of the most famous failures of 2015: Sunset. Heavily touted by big names like Patricia Hernandez and Leigh Alexander, it bombed so badly that its developer, Tale of Tales, folded a month after release. Why did it fail? Besides the fact that it hardly had any appeal (a walking simulator with graphics that looked like something from Second Life) there's the fact that it faced stiff competition in an over saturated market (Steam sees dozens of new releases at least weekly, not to mention all the games already available to play and purchase.) And what little hope there was of the game getting vindicated by later sales was completely destroyed by the developer's attitude, insulting the consumer base and then flipping us all off, guaranteeing that Sunset would remain buried forever, the punchline of the joke that is Social Justice in gaming.

As the industry stands, there is no room for creativity anymore, no room for the passion projects. There is only room for those who want to build games that milk their customers without making them angry, because that is the only way we can survive. It is not about making good games right now — the consumer doesn't care enough. I hope that we can come together to enact change in the industry, before the effects become irreversible.

The. Market. Is. Fine. You are just mad because you were dumb enough to charge for a Space Shooter game in a market where anyone can get a Space Shooter for free. You KNEW the competition, you KNEW the market was heavily saturated, and instead of offering something that stands out, you offered a Space Shooter. A good shooter? That's for the consumer to decide.

What happened to "the customer is always right"? The consumer is the core of capitalism; without a consumer, there is no capitalism. Now, I am not saying I'm all for capitalism, but I AM saying that, if you enter the Market, you have to play by its rules.

There's two things that Junkilla is doing wrong here. First, he's acting like the entitled bastard he claims gamers to be. He and his buddies made a game. So? That doesn't mean we HAVE to buy it. I am reminded of a great quote: "A man said to the Universe 'sir, I exist'. 'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'"

The second thing Junkilla is doing wrong is ignoring the fact that he himself is to blame for his conundrum. He entered a market saturated with free games, charged money for the game he offered, and then got prissy that no one bought it. His game flopped, and he's blaming us for it.

Junkilla is taking for granted the idea that his game was good, and he felt validated by Google and Apple praising it. Ultimately, it is the consumer that decides if a game is good or not. This was just a case of a game flopping because its developers were too short sighted, too stupid to release it properly. Seriously, who the hell charges money for a game in a market where I can get most games FOR FREE!?

I end this entry with a quote of my own: A game developer said to the gamer "Sir, I have made a game." The gamer replied "However, that doesn't mean I have to buy it."