行业人士讨论日益成熟的移动游戏的创新前景

原作者：Jon Jordan 译者：Vivian Xue

我们好久没请出我们的盈利智囊团了。

这是一个拥有最前沿的F2P手游设计和运营经验的精锐团体。当我们遇到沉浸度、留存和盈利方面的问题时，总是向他们寻求专业意见。

我们打算在接下来的几个月内定期与他们交流，希望借助他们的智慧为我们分析移动游戏行业的一些关键趋势。

这不是一个封闭小组，如果你想要加入其中分享你的智慧，请通过电子邮件联系我： jon@ocketgamer.co.uk。

至于2019年的第一个问题，我们希望它能提供宽广的讨论空间：

-App Store成立十年了，你认为留给手游的创新空间还有多大，无论是新的类型、混合类型、游戏机制、技术等？

-或者你认为当前市场已经成熟，创新空间已被挤压到边际？（“边际”着眼于每一个微小增量对总体带来的增加效果，是一种渐进式的增量效应。“边际创新”即在已有的重大创新的基础上进行整合和增量创新，游戏邦注。）

迪米塔尔·德拉加诺夫（Dimitar Draganov）——BoomBit Games产品总监

这是个很棒的话题。

尽管我们大多数人感觉游戏停滞不前，浏览应用商店时也看不到什么创新性的东西。但我仍然觉得：创新是持续的、势不可挡的，并且最好的尚未到来！

如果只看过去的五年，我们看到一些游戏诞生并主宰市场——《精灵宝可梦Go》《皇室战争》《梦幻花园》《家居设计》《帝国与谜题》《决战高尔夫》《堡垒之夜》，这些是西方市场上最具创新性、最流行的几个游戏。

没错，其中一些是对旧创意进行改造后的产物，但改造一个众所周知的公式，并通过有效的执行扩大市场，或者从那些主宰市场五年以上的高收入、高营销投入的老游戏那里把粉丝吸引过来，这是一项伟大的创新，我的书中有提到这一点。

未来，我相信这类规则颠覆者会越来越多，至少三个理由可以有力支撑这一点：

首先，游戏开发环境开放程度不断提高，由此，我们每年将看到更多、更优秀的游戏诞生，同时（站在发行商的角度来看）我认为发行商从发现、筛选到将游戏包装为成功产品的整个流程有了巨大的改进。

第二，游戏开发中已经形成这样一种常态：除了开发老牌IP的安全战略外，唯有创新并引领市场才能使公司获得最大的发展。

《堡垒之夜》为EA、动视和Take Two公司敲响了警钟，我预计在2019年和2020年，所有大型游戏公司都会进行大量创新。

我们已经从动视那里得知他们决心将所有顶尖系列改编成手游，因此作为一名暴雪粉丝，我希望接下来的两年内他们能做出比上一年更有趣的产品。

第三，技术进步和5G时代的到来。

我们就不深入分析AR技术将造就多少规则颠覆者了，移动端的延迟问题一度束缚着游戏设计，这也是为什么过去十年来，移动市场上充斥着拙劣的异步多人PVP手游。

未来的五年内这种情况肯定会改变，我估计越来越多的老PVP手游将转为同步多人对战模式，更多新游戏将以即时对战为核心，Supercell的《海岛奇兵》《皇室战争》和《荒野乱斗》就是例子。

这一切自然将打开移动电子竞技的大门，这个利润丰厚的行业在接下来的几个月或几年内需要更多的创新！

杰夫·古里安（Jeff Gurian）——Kongregate营销及广告部副总裁

创新正受到市场固有压力的阻挠。创新并没有消亡，迪米塔尔举了一些很好的例子，但由于技术限制和应用商店的问题，创新的风险越来越大。

在技术方面，随着消费升级周期延长，移动技术更新速度正在放缓。开发商不得不让游戏适配旧设备，否则他们将失去大部分用户。这限制了尖端技术创新。

即便移动技术进步了，开发者也不能像过去一样指望大量用户更换最新手机。5G网络的发展也许能从一定程度上刺激用户换手机，但这取决于运营商何时全面推出5G，并且最有可能从中受益的是当前的PVP技术。

应用商店的改变也造成了影响。苹果应用商店的推荐量比过去少得多，而安卓应用商店的推荐取决于游戏的数据指标。这些变化给一些中小型开发商带来了压力，过去他们通常依赖、甚至完全依靠应用商店推荐来获取安装量和收入。

这可能会进一步降低开发商冒险创新的意愿，特别是因为通过自然曝光成功的机会有限，营销和用户获取变得更为重要了。

开发者必须也必然会继续创新。然而，我更关注的问题是，未来这些创新是否能被消费者或应用商店注意到，是否能得到回报？当然如果游戏上了热门，开发者自然可以从创新中受益。

但是对很多开发者来说，创新的回报率是变化不定的。

提姆·拉克尔（Tim Rachor）-Evil Grog Games GmbH创意总监

我不太确定我们在应用商店看到的停滞是否与创新或缺乏创新有直接的联系。这些游戏刚出来时，大多都具有一定的创新性。

总是有公司选择套用现成的模式，做一点轻微的改动，或者迅速制作出精良的复制品，但我并不认为他们能取代排行榜上的那些大游戏。

我同意杰夫所说的，即如今打入移动游戏市场变得非常困难，特别是对于较小的开发商来说，但他们可能不需要像大公司一样获得巨大的成功。最终，当他们在营销或者数据指标上无法与大型工作室抗衡时，创新可能是他们唯一的出路。

这些创新游戏中的某一个可能会造成巨大的轰动，引发其他公司的关注并投入更大的预算制作下一个大作。PC市场上吃鸡类型游戏的崛起印证了这种趋势。尽管移动游戏市场在创造新趋势方面比较缓慢，但我预计未来几年内至少会有一到两款游戏引领更大的趋势。

我的意思是整个游戏行业已经有40多年的历史了，每年都有新的、创意性的游戏诞生，我认为移动游戏未来将会延续这种趋势。

亚尼夫·尼赞（Yaniv Nizan）——SOOMLA首席执行官

我打赌三年前肯定有人说过：“就这样了，应用商店里不会再有什么创新了。”但事实上，过去三年我们看到了相当多的创新：

-超休闲类游戏
-《堡垒之夜》和《绝地求生》
-《精灵宝可梦Go》

观察这些例子，你会发现它们的成功都依托重大技术或者经济因素。

超休闲类游戏的成功源于广告收入的增长，以及日活跃用户平均收入/每千次广告展示收入（ARPDAU/eCPM）的上升，这使游戏公司得以制作单纯靠广告盈利的游戏。

吃鸡类型游戏在PC和主机市场更流行，但随着移动设备越发强大，它们甚至出现了手游版。《精灵宝可梦Go》的成功源于设备上更强大的AR功能，同时也因为某些游戏巨头终于肯进入手游市场（这里指任天堂，游戏邦注）。

因此，我认为未来我们将看到三种形式的创新：

1. 成功的PC和主机游戏系列被改编成手游。
2. 这些之前不存在的类型继续融合，产生新的混合游戏（例如：超休闲吃鸡游戏）。
3. 随着广告收入的提升和订阅模式的兴起，更多游戏类型不再以内购为主要盈利方式。

本·库辛（Ben Cousins）——ISBIT Games首席执行官

在预测平台趋势时我总会仔细观察历史先例。移动平台和主机平台其实非常相似。

在这两个平台上我们看到了同一种趋势：一开始主要是简单的休闲游戏，然后游戏逐渐变得更复杂，更昂贵，并且开发商几乎是大公司。

我们见证了数个类型游戏时代（主机平台陆续被平台游戏、赛车游戏、动作冒险游戏、射击游戏和开放世界游戏主宰），但每当我们认为市场发展停滞时，情况立刻变了。

主机游戏市场近几年逐渐采纳 “游戏及服务”（game-as-a-service）的思维，我认为Apex Legends是主机平台上3A F2P游戏时代的开端。

我认为移动平台和比它更早的主机平台没什么不同。我们必须承认某些趋势是全球性的、势不可挡的（比如市场规模的扩大、用户终身价值的提高、更大规模的团队将制作出更高水准的游戏），但这并不意味着类型、机制或技术上的停滞。

西方手游业最棒的地方在于，如今我们是追随者而非引领者。因此我们总是可以把目光投向亚洲市场寻找下一个热点，并且他们每次都较为准确地向我们展示了西方手游市场的动向。

目前西方市场即时多人对战游戏的崛起其实就是3-5年前的亚洲市场趋势的重演。

贾斯汀·斯托尔森伯格（Justin Stolzenberg）——Flaregames产品及盈利部总监

我同意亚尼夫和本的观点：游戏市场停滞是一件不可思议的事，重大创新总会时不时出现。

创造力/创新不是凭空产生的。只要开发周期保持相对较短，市场准入门槛保持相对较低，通过大量实验，移动平台仍然是一个有利于创新的环境。

此外，F2P游戏机制创新需要表现出自身的价值，即至少需要一样容易被玩家理解的或有足够影响力的事物来说服玩家放弃投资别的游戏，转玩你的游戏。

但我也很欣赏边际创新。

《皇室战争》向西方开发者们证明，在手游上使用同步PVP模式是可行的。但同样引人注目的（至少在启发其它开发者上）是游戏在控制抽卡和进阶节奏方面的边际创新。

我特别欣赏那些懂得解读市场趋势并成功抓住关键点进行边际创新、打造趋势性产品的开发者。像西班牙工作室Codigames这样的开发商看起来可能不是最具创新性的，但我很喜欢他们的策略。

马克·罗宾逊（Mark Robinson）-DeltaDNA首席执行官

创新和整合之间有一个自然周期。上方的图表展示了排行榜上应用的收入增长情况，根据图表大部分收入增长来自于排行榜前几名以外的应用，并且这是基于deltaDNA 2016到2018年短短两年间的数据。

这反映了一个现状：随着收入的可预测性大大提高，如今对游戏的投资额正在剧烈回升。收入可预测性大大提高是因为有些类型收入可靠，游戏设计更加优秀，并且投资者能够更有效地将资金投入到有长期发展潜力的游戏中。

然而，创新并没有消失。它仍然在那里，在我们看不见的地方经历大量测试和淘汰。如今游戏行业对于失败已经见怪不怪了，因此糟糕的想法能够悄悄地消失。

开发者们正在筹措资金，这样便能在未来下更大赌注寻找新受众或新体验——无论是电竞、依靠技术而非运气为主的赌场游戏玩法(skill based slots)、还是混合类型游戏。如今的生产动力更强劲。

马克·索雷尔（Mark Sorrell）——Memrise工作室主管

我感觉这是一个F2P手游内在创新和外在创新的问题。

比起游戏本身，iPhone和App Store内购使F2P模式在移动平台上成为可能，它们是更重大的创新。

这些创新的主要受益者之一是游戏，但它们在游戏之外产生了更深远的影响，并有效定义了PocketGamer所讨论的许多内容。

因此在我看来，人们感到创新力在降低，很可能是在游戏所处的整体创新环境和F2P手游产业内部的产业创新对比之下产生的。

我并不认为目前创新的节奏——很多小创新，均匀地分布（马克罗宾逊的图表）和偶尔的重大创新（《精灵宝可梦Go》、《堡垒之夜》等）——会有所改变，因为引发创新的动力更有可能来自游戏之外而非内部。

我们所了解的技术——AR，5G等——看似不可能产生这种程度的影响。但是，也许呢。

迪伦·特雷德拉（Dylan Tredrea）——ZeptoLab发行主管

一家公司的投资组合中总会有高风险、高创新性的产品，这是不变的。唯一的变化是分配给这些项目的资源比例。

在如今成熟的市场上，制作这些高风险、高创新性的游戏的投入越来越高，但我认为这是合理的，因为如今风险更小、更稳健的项目回报降低了。

很多玩家找到适合自己的游戏后，就不会去积极地找新游戏了。

几乎所有开发者都至少有点擅长运营、数据分析和定量营销。并不是只有大公司才拥有优质的工具和人才。当然还有，每天越来越多的优秀游戏进入应用商店。这些导致了“安全”的游戏不再那么安全。

我认为在这种环境下，想要从产品中得到可观的收入，唯一的方式是冒点险。

尽管在结构合理的投资组合中，风险较小、渐进式创新的项目占了相当大一部分，但我认为增加对高风险项目的资源分配，将使你的公司超越那些依赖稳健的、增量创新的企业。

米克尔塞林德（Mikkel Celinder）——AppCrimes.com网站所有者

我笼统地把盈利和用户获取的创新视作一条轨迹，而玩法创新是另一条与之平行的轨迹。

最初的几年，行业似乎把精力都花在发现和创新盈利机制上，创造了几十种F2P盈利方式。小组中的一些先生们甚至出过有关这方面的书。

到了2013年，《天天过马路》这种单一机制、点击式的游戏开始病毒式传播，震撼了整个行业。

随后是King公司交叉推广的成功。于是，我们开始讨论游戏玩法本身是否重要，做好广告和用户获取你就赢了。这是一种完全不同的创新。

但过去的几十年来，游戏玩法一次次带给我们惊喜。这使我相信玩法创新将会延续下去。

以及我必须同意本的观点，移动平台和主机平台的发展是类似的。未来移动游戏和主机游戏的唯一区别可能就剩下操作方式不同了。

布莱恩·杜鲁门（Brian Truman）——GSN Games数字化广告盈利部门主管

我的回答会有点长，因为我想说明我认为创新和迭代之间的区别。

过去的十年间一些非常有趣和令人激动的游戏被发行，虽然它们让人感觉很新鲜刺激，我认为它们大部分算不上创新。

举个例子，依靠广告盈利的超休闲类游戏和曾经的Flash网页小游戏没什么区别。最重大的创新是移动设备本身，它使人人可以接触到游戏、随时随地玩游戏。

App Store上成功的游戏大多是基于早先成功的游戏机制迭代产生的，只不过把鼠标点击换成手指按压。第二个重大的创新是F2P商业模式（移动支付）。社交平台创造了新的用户获取和生命周期营销方式。

游戏中最重大的创新并非来自游戏开发者，而是开发者找到了某种方式在成功的游戏设计中应用这些创新。

那么在移动设备和社交平台被广泛使用、F2P商业模式近乎完美的当下，创新增长从何而来呢？

《堡垒之夜》正在创新商业模式。他们的成功证明了收益模式仍有创新的空间。我认为社交/社区游戏的玩法也可以进一步创新，比如让音频/视频聊天和信息传递成为玩法的主体，而不仅仅是一种补充。数据显示，那些归属于某个社区的玩家留存时间更长，并且用户终身价值也越高。

此外，开发者还可以利用硬件（如相机，麦克风和加速度传感器）为玩家创造新的体验。

我们见证了《精灵宝可梦Go》以一种创新的方式利用了相机和定位功能，以及一些利用加速度传感器的优秀游戏。但这个领域的发展空间还很大，比如提升FPS游戏的操作方式。

AR/VR正处于开发和应用早期阶段，并且未来连接速度将大大提升（5G）。

虽然我认为移动游戏市场是一个成熟的市场，但我仍然相信通过迭代可以获得可观的收益，这也是大多数大型发行商将持续关注的方面。

想要在移动游戏市场进行创新获得更大收益，开发者需要冒险尝试更多游戏机制和功能，哪怕大多数玩家一开始会极不适应。

托鲁夫·杰恩斯特伦（Torulf Jernström）Tribeflame首席执行官

正如布莱恩所说，如今移动游戏已是一项成熟的产业。我想我们可以通过观察其他成熟的创意市场来预测行业未来的发展。

观察电影、电视剧、音乐和图书出版，在我们眼里，这些是屹立不倒的稳定行业。

这些行业中存在几家处于主导地位的大型企业，并且核心商业模式多年来始终如一。

尽管如此，他们一直在寻找下一个热点，期间会出现新的流行类型、偶尔轰动的事物。我想，未来十年手游行业也将是类似的。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

It’s been a while since we engaged our Monetizer Mavens.

A crack industry group at the cutting edge of free-to-play mobile game design and live operations, they’re our go-to experts when it comes to all matters pertaining to engagement, retention and monetisation.

And we intend to be calling on their wisdom regularly in the coming months as we attempt to unpick some of the key trends in mobile games.

It’s not a closed group though, so if you think you have the smarts to add something to the conversation, please drop me a mail at jon@pocketgamer.co.uk.

What’s next?

As for our first question of 2019, we went wide to provide a broad canvas for debate:

Ten years into the App Store era, how much headroom do you think remains for innovation in mobile games, whether that be new genres, mashups, mechanics, tech features etcetera?

Or is the market now inherently mature, reducing innovation to the level of marginal gains?

Dimitar Draganov -Director Product at BoomBit Games

Great topic to jumpstart the Mavens.

Despite most of us having felt games are stagnating and there isn’t enough innovation when browsing the app stores, I think it’s safe to say that just like always: innovation is constant and overwhelming and the best is yet to come!

If we just look at the last five years, we saw the creation and domination of Pokemon Go, Clash Royale, Home/Gardenscapes, Design Home, Empires & Puzzles, Golf Clash, and Fortnite, to name a few of the most innovative and dominating titles on the Western markets.

Yes, in some of these we’re talking about a revamp of old ideas, but tweaking a well-known formula and executing well enough to expand the market or captivate the audiences already enthralled by the five-plus year old behemoths that dominate mobile grossing charts and marketing spend, is great innovation in my book.

Looking ahead, there’s at least three solid reasons I believe we’ll keep getting such game-changing titles regularly.

Firstly, game development keeps democratising and with that, every year we have more and better prototypes being built across the globe and (coming from a publisher background) in parallel I’ve seen tremendous improvement in the processes by which game publishers identify, sift through these increased number of potential hits and take a title from its garage version to a global success story.

Secondly, it has always been the case in game development that next to the safe road of well-established franchises, the biggest growth for companies comes from innovating and leading the whole pack forward.

Fortnite has been a somber reminder of that for the shareholders of EA, Activision and Take Two and I expect to see a lot of innovation in 2019 and 2020 across all the biggest players in the gaming space.

We’ve already heard a commitment from Activision to take all of their top franchises to mobile, so as a long-time Blizzard fan, I hope that move by itself will make the next two years much more interesting than the last!

Thirdly, tech improvements and widespread 5G internet are coming.

Without digging too deep into augmented reality that has so much potential to create game-changers, the latency problems on mobile have caused designers to self-censor for quite a while now. That’s one of the main reasons we ended up with the inferior asynchronous multiplayer PvP that has dominated mobile for the last 10 years.

Well, this is certainly going to change in the next five years and moving forward I expect to see more and more of the old behemoth titles on mobile adapt real synchronous multiplayer, plus upcoming titles having that at their core just like Supercell already announced for Boom Beach and has done with their last two games.

All of this will of course open the door to large-scale profitable esports on mobile, another area that begs for innovation in the months and years ahead!

Jeff Gurian-VP of Marketing and Ad Monetisation at Kongregate

Innovation is facing inherent market pressures that will will pose headwinds. It’s not dead and there are a number of great examples that Dimitar points out, but it is becoming inherently more risky, driven by both technology limitations and the app stores themselves.

On the tech side, mobile tech updates are slowing along with consumer upgrade cycles. Developers are having to cater games to older devices less they cut out a large portion of users they can reach which will limit leading-edge tech innovation.

Even as mobile tech improves developers can no longer count on mass consumer updates to the newest phones as they could in the past. Mobile network growth (5G) could help offset this some but will depend on how fast it is rolled out by carriers; it will also most likely benefit existing tech like PvP.

App store changes are also having an impact. IOS feature volume is far less than in the past and Android features are more metrics driven. These changes are already putting pressure on small to mid-sized developers who used to rely on app store features, sometimes almost exclusively, for installs and revenue.

This could serve to further cap the level of innovation risk developers are willing to take, especially since the number of organic breakout hits are limited and marketing/UA becomes more important for growth.

Developers have and will continue to innovate. However for me the bigger question is will future innovation be noticed by and rewarded by both consumers and/or the app stores? There will always be innovative breakouts who stand to benefit handsomely if the title becomes a hit, of course,

But the risk/reward economics of innovation for many developers are changing as we speak.

Tim Rachor-Creative Director at Evil Grog Games GmbH

I’m not sure if the stagnation we see in the app stores is directly linked to innovation or the lack of. Most of these games were very innovative – in one way or the other – when they came out.

There’s always a second market for companies that take proven concepts and only slightly iterate on them or create quick and well done copycats, but I don’t think they will be the ones to dethrone the big games on top of the charts.

I agree with Jeff that it has become very difficult, especially for smaller developers, to break into the mobile market, but they might not need the huge success that large companies need. In the end, their only chance could be innovation when they can’t compete with a large studio’s marketing or metrics-driven design approach.

At one point or the other one of those games might make a big enough splash that other companies take notice and bring in bigger budgets to create the next big thing. We’ve seen this in the PC market with the rise of battle royale and even though the mobile market seems slower at creating new trends nowadays I’d expect at least one or two games making a bigger impact in the upcoming years.

I mean the gaming industry as a whole is more than 40 years old and we get brilliant new and innovative games every year. I can’t see how this wouldn’t be true for the future of mobile games as well.

Yaniv Nizan-CEO at SOOMLA

I bet three years ago someone said: “That’s it, no more innovation in the app stores”. In fact we’ve seen quite a lot over past three years:

-Hyper-casual
-Fortnite and PUBG
-Pokemon Go

If we look at these specific examples, they have all being enabled by underlying technologies or economic forces.

With hyper-casual, the enabler has been the rise of ad revenue and increasing ARPDAU/eCPMs, allowing companies to create games that are sustainable on ads alone.

With the battle royale genre, it is stronger in PC and console market but the fact that it’s even possible on mobile is a result of devices getting stronger and stronger. Pokemon Go was enabled from the technology side with stronger AR capabilities on devices and at the same time by slow-adopt gaming giants finally moving in.

So I think we will see three trends that you can call innovation:

-Successful PC and console franchises finally getting a mobile version
-More mashups built on newer genres that didn’t exist before (e.g. hyper casual battle royal)
-More genres that are not so IAP-focused becoming economically viable due to the rise of in-app advertising and subscription models.

Ben Cousins-CEO at ISBIT Games

I’m always careful to look at historical precedent when predicting platform cycles. Mobile is really rather similar to console in many ways.

In both we’ve seen an era of simple casual games gradually become more complex, expensive and more likely to be built by large corporations.

We’ve seen several eras of genre domination (console had the platformers, driving game, action adventure, shooter, open world eras) but just as we see things stagnate things change again.

Console we can see transitioning to games-as-a-service in recent years, I think Apex Legends is the start of the era of triple-A F2P games on console.

I see no reason why mobile is any different from previous platforms like console. There are powerful global trends that developers must acknowledge (bigger market size, higher user LTV, bigger teams building games with better production values), but that doesn’t mean that we will see stagnation in genre/mechanics/tech.

The best thing about the Western mobile business is that for once we are following another region rather than leading. So we can look to Asia for the next big thing, as they’ve shown us what is happening next in Western mobile with reasonable accuracy every time.

The rise of core real-time multiplayer games in out region would be the most recent thing that already happened in Asia three to five years ago.

Justin Stolzenberg-Director, Product & Monetization at Flaregames

I agree with Yaniv and Ben: it would be surprising if the market would turn stale, but big innovation happens in spurts.

Creativity/innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. As long as development times remain relatively fast and barriers of entry remain comparatively low, mobile is still an innovation-friendly environment just by sheer amount of experimentation.

The mechanics of free-to-play also continue to require show-worthy innovation – at least one easy-to-communicate and impactful enough thing that convinces players to abandon their investment in another game.

But I also appreciate marginal gains.

Clash Royale proved to the western developer scene that synchronous PvP can work on mobile. But at least as impactful (in terms of inspiring other developers) was the marginal innovation of how they pace their gacha and content progression.

One breed of developers I’m particularly fond of are companies who understand how to read market trends and how to create products for a trend by achieving crucial marginal gains that make all the difference for an engaged audience. Spain’s Codigames and similar devs might not look the most innovative, but I like their approach.

Mark Robinson-CEO at DeltaDNA

Have a look at this slide…

There is a natural cycle between innovation and consolidating. The top chart shows the most revenue progress has been made down the charts, and this is over a very short period of time – 2016 to 2018 based on data in deltaDNA.

This is reflected in the fact that investment money is now coming back into games aggressively as revenues are much more predictable. And revenues are much more predictable because there are solid genre bets out there, better game designs and better deployment of acquisition capital into long sustaining games.

However innovation has not disappeared. It’s there but there is lot of testing under the surface to avoid the embarrassing flameouts. The industry now has the luxury of not being surprised by failure, so bad ideas can go away quietly.

And war chests are filling up so that more risky bets can be made in future to find a new audience or experience – be that esports, skill based slots, combining genres. There’s lots more productive energy right now.

Mark Sorrell-Head of Studio Memrise

This feels like the difference between innovation within F2P and mobile, and the innovation of the creation of F2P and mobile.

Both the iPhone and App Store IAPs (which enabled F2P on mobile) are innovations that are much bigger than games.

Games were one of the major beneficiaries of these inventions, but they were vastly impactful outside of games and effectively defined a lot of what Pocket Gamer exists to discuss.

So the feeling that innovation is declining seems to me to be more likely to come from a relative sense of global innovation in which games fit, to industry innovations within the mobile F2P game industry.

There is nothing which suggests to me that the current pace of innovation – lots of small things, evenly spread (Mark Robinson’s graph) and occasional huge breakthroughs (Pokemon Go, Fortnite et al) – is likely to change, as the impetus to cause a new pattern of innovation is far more likely to come from outside of games than within.

The technologies we know of – AR, 5G etcetera – seem unlikely to have that level of impact. But hey, maybe

Dylan Tredrea-Head of Publishing ZeptoLab

There will always be a place for high risk, high innovation products in mobile portfolios. What changes is the ratio of resources allocated to these projects.

Personally, I think the current, more mature market justifies increased investment in high risk, high innovation games due to diminishing returns of safer projects.

Many players have found games that suit them just fine and aren’t actively looking for new experiences.

Virtually all developers are at least ‘kind of’ good at live ops, data analysis, and quantitative marketing. It’s not only the big players that have access to great tools and talent. And of course, every day more and more really well-done games are hitting the stores.The result is safe games aren’t that safe anymore.

In my opinion the only way to generate any kind of reasonable return for your portfolio in this environment is to increase your risk exposure.

While less risky projects with incremental innovation will always be a sizable chunk of well-structured portfolio, I think organisations which increase the resources allocated to higher risk projects will outperform those who continue to rely on safe, incremental innovation to drive growth.

Mikkel Celinder-Owner, AppCrimes.com

In very broad strokes, I boil it down to an innovation cycle of monetisation and acquisition, and then gameplay as a parallel track.

It seems like the first few years were spent discovering and innovating on monetization, with dozens of ways to monetize F2P. Some of the gentlemen in the group have even published books about this.

Then – in 2013-ish – virality kicked us over the shin with the Crossy Roads-esque games that executed brilliantly on acquisition and brought an entire wave of idle, one-click, one-mechanic games with them.

This was really King’s Cross-game promotions on crack. At this point, we began discussing whether gameplay even mattered anymore; ads and brilliant UA and you won. It was a very different kind of innovation.

But through the decades, gameplay has shown to be able to surprise us over and over again. This assures me innovation in this area will continue.

Still I must agree with Ben in terms of the bigger innovation circles throughout the ten years of App Store and the comparison to console. Going forward the only difference between the console scene and the mobile scene will be the controllers we use – if even that.

Brian Truman- Head of Digital Ad Monetization at GSN Games

Long answer because I’ll have to clarify my thoughts on the difference between innovation and iteration.

There have been some really fun and exciting games released over 10 years and while they feel fresh and are a blast to play, I wouldn’t consider most of them to be innovative.

For example, the ad-supported hyper-casual category is no different than the games that once dominated Flash portal websites. The most important innovation has been the mobile device itself, making games more accessible and convenient to play anytime/anywhere.

Most of what has been successful in the App Store era has been iterations of previously successful game mechanics, with a mouse click becoming a finger tap. The second most important innovation was the free-to-play business model (mobile payment processing). Social platforms innovated user acquisition and lifecycle marketing.

The most important innovations in games have not come from game developers, but developers found a way to leverage these innovations with proven game designs.

Now that the device and social platforms have reached mass adoption and the free-to-play business model have been finely-tuned, where does innovation growth come from?

Games like Fortnite are innovating the business model. Their success proves that there’s room to innovate the revenue model. I’d also say there’s room for innovation in social and community gameplay, like making audio/video chat and messaging a primary component of gameplay, not just a supplement. Data shows that players who are engaged in some form of community (even loose connections) play longer and have higher LTV than those who do not.

Using hardware features, such as the camera, microphone and the accelerometer, there are opportunities for games developers to make innovative games that provide new experiences to players.

We’ve seen Pokemon Go make use of the camera and location data in an innovative way and some decent accelerometer games out there, but there’s headroom in this space to develop games that provide better controls for an FPS, for example.

AR/VR are in early stages of development and adoption and faster connection speeds are coming.

While I’d consider mobile games to be a mature market, I still believe there are still decent gains to be made through iteration that most large publishers will continue to focus on.

Innovation leading to more impressive gains in the mobile game market will require taking risks and experimenting with game mechanics and features most users will be uncomfortable with at first.

Torulf Jernström-CEO at Tribeflame

As Brian said, mobile games are a mature business by now. I think we can have a look at the other mature creative markets to make a guess at how things will evolve from here.

Look at movies, TV, music and book publishing. From our perspective, those have been around forever, and as businesses they are quite stable.

There are a few large publishers that dominate their industries and the central business practises stay constant for years.

Still, they are looking for the next hit, with new genres trending and occasionally a larger disruption. Mobile games will be similar in the decade ahead, I’d say. (source：Pocketgamer)