History repeats

We had this with the early PC market, we had this with the early mobile market, and we had this with the flash market.

Yes, but what does it teach us? The early birds, the first ones on a new platform are always winners. So it pays off to be open for new technologies. These were always the growing markets and will always be.

angry birds is no original idea (there were many games like that before) and it's a very simple game. the only reason for its success is the marketing machinery behind it. it got done by a huge marketing company.

And still Angry Birds works very well on the iphone and is very good designed in my opinion. At least I accept its success more than the success of doodle jump .
Though, I still don´t understand the fail of iAtoms .

keyword here: "marketing"

Aye - the reason for my statement concerning jcl and Conitec.

It's not that easy to pin down though. I mean it's not like people didn't try. We had Nokia and N-Gage which failed and we for a long time had Java etc. handy games which were a niche market at best though. Then the iPhone happened to be some sort of catalyst and poof - the market growth skyrockets...

Maybe JCL wants to try to get a slice of the pie but I have to say I'm not very confident that this will be a good idea. Others have been on that sector for too long and for engines like Shiva I even have the feeling that the focus sort of has drifted in that direction (considering that 90% of their showcase is filled with mobile games and even their initial orientation towards small to medium games with e.g. their very early browser plug-in). Without wanting to repeat myself for too often I'd say 3DGS needs to specialize to a niche rather than starting to broaden their target group...

The N-Gage was too early and Java games could not compete with what people were used to play on handhelds. Also, N-Gage had a big problem: it was neither a proper gaming machine, nor a proper telephone. It feeled like a compromise, and was destined to fail.
The MIDP stuff at that time was supposed to be mutli platform, but mobiles were too different - so you had to adapt your game for 10 or more mobile phone types.
iPhone is one big thing where you know if you app runs on one, it will run on millions of iPhones, and the release time was placed very clever - when everybody was talking about Apple and iPod.

N-Gage tried to compete with handhelds, which of course had to fail.
Handhelds were superior to anything a mobile could offer game wise back at that time.


But already at times of N-Gage there was a lot of money to make with mobile games. Just two years later you either needed some contract with TV commercials to get you product sold at all, or you needed a real killer. Too late for lone wolves, as mobile game studios already had their frameworks set up and were able to release games in next to no time.

Apples Appstore centralized the place where you get all your apps, which made it easier again for indies. Before you had stuff like Jamba, and what do I know. You had compatibility problems, and endless amounts of CRAP. Mean contract stuff, pitfalls and all the like. Slower web access with mobiles.
All this reduced the impact of the mobile game market.


And you wonder why the interest on iPhone and Adnroid is even bigger now?
Easy. Platforms like PS3, X360 or PC offer huge hardware power. For the smaller studios and lone wolves it is hardly possible to keep up with visual quality of their games. It is a lot more time and money consuming than just a few years ago.
So the iPhone and Android market is perfect as place to get games sold which are less effort and less cost intensive.

The big studios?
Wherever there are indies which make their money, the big studios can do so too. With the payoff that development costs are a LOT lower compared to PS3, X360 and PC.
Once indies make no money anymore in that section because the big studios more or less blasted it, just look where indies go next...

Yeah, someone will come up now with "But what's with XXX? It sold a million time and was programmed by a single guy". Get real, those are the very exceptions and are not really representative for the common indy developers.



All this is "IMHO" and own experience I had while working on mobile games.

Once indies make no money anymore in that section because the big studios more or less blasted it, just look where indies go next...

It will always be people making games even more if they can's sell them they make it for free, for fun, for pleasure to
share big things
I remember when i prorammed on my CPC 464 with basic than assembler.
Lot of joy to see sprites you could control

PS3 and 360 have indies section where you can find very original games.
Big game company don't invest on making small games a lot.

Sometimes people flyw from big companies to make their own
successfull game with tehir own experience and ides :
TorchLight (using ogre 3D) , Torchlight 2 is coming with multiplayer also

Their are lot of japanese indie shootem up, or RPG also.
I played this week a great indie turn nased RPG on PS3;
i had fun and satisfaction ,even if i got FF13, why ???

Because teh universe, characters, monsters ,design are all original with new ideas even on a standard turn based system.
They stoen also some time bar ides form FF13

Well great original games will lot fo time come from individual people having their own ideas, with no constraints
or obligatio ot produce from Big companies.

I really like to play Two Worlds 2 on PS3, really great.
But sorry, the story is original, apprt form that
it has not originality , always magician, warrio, orcs etc ...
again same fire , water powers etc ...

This is the main problem, big companies can't take the risk of putting millions of dollars on original ideas, they don't know if it will success.

Even more little studios make great things also :
Grass Hooper : Killer 7, Okami , No More Heroes !!
I really like a lot thid studio !

Well indie or lonewolf people making games will never disappear indeed.
Even more they have all tools like Blender, 3D Coat, Sculptris, Free and affordable 3D engines ....

Or they can make 2 or 2.5D games also.

Gameloft a little company growing big and sepcialized on
Mobile 3D games :
They make succesfull clone games like some clone
of God Of War, or Halo, racing game.
Their last creation is a Zelda Clone
Zelda Clone

Is 3DGS Dying ? I don't think so. After a while i came back to
3dgs and noticed many changes. Pfew I had to start all over again.

One thing does not change and that is the lack of getting started without programming skills. Sure you have template stuff but learning from it is hard, figuring out what all means and how stuff works, all those separate scripts combining. For a noob is this very hard. ( I still am) small easy questions are rarely answered. The same for easy to use simple code snippets
However it gave me a boost to start my own book (always wanted to do that) teaching 3DGS the realspawn way. (older memebers will remember) it will include complete from scratch coding and will have video’s and text information how all works. I got help from Helgast and Slin so even i am learning all over again The main goal is to make people enjoy creating and learn in a fast but most simple way. (if i succeed you all have to await)
I still am convinced that it is the artist that makes a game cool or not. Engines are fun but graphics, models, game play decide if a game succeeds or not.

Just my 2 cents