Mobile gaming has moved ahead of consoles, and it’s going to stay
SuperOne's founder Andreas Christensen, has been in the mobile and tech industry for almost two decades and knows quite well that video games have played a significant part in many of our lives, including his own.
Just cast your mind back to the console you used to play Super Mario growing up or the machines you stuck a coin in at an arcade to transport yourself to a Grand Prix circuit.
And when home computers became a thing in the 1990s, if you weren’t using them as word processors, you were downloading Doom, Duke Nukem, or Grim Fandango and getting stuck in with a plug-in joystick. Mobile phones took a really long time to catch up.
You might remember the dreadful Snake on early Nokia models in the early 2000s. Everything was monochrome or pixelated. Until smartphones came along, a mobile phone after all was mainly a mobile phone. Even internet browsing was highly unsatisfactory. You could consider yourself lucky if you figured out how to send or receive a text message.
The rapid rise of both Android and iOS over the course of the last decade in terms of providing a rich graphic output to its game, plus sufficient complexity and depth, means mobile games now compete hard with the most expensive consoles and PC games in terms of desirability.
With advancements to come in the realm of artificial intelligence and augmented reality, many people are already reckoning that consoles could even become obsolete in the not-too-distant future
What do the numbers say?
Mobile gaming and apps are, mercifully, indestructible from the effects of the pandemic. In fact, their growth has been exacerbated by people being unable to spend money on eating out, socializing, traveling, and so on. A report by mobile insights firm App Annie and market researcher IDC has produced the headline conclusion that “mobile is the primary driver of growth for digital game consumption.”
By the time all the stats for the calendar year 2020 are digested, it’s expected that record levels of app downloads and consumer spending across the app stores will be chalked up. Worldwide, users downloaded 35% more mobile games per week in March than in January.
Mobile gaming first overtook both home game consoles and desktop computing for consumer spend way back in 2014, and its lead has widened dramatically as the trend sets in. In 2020, mobile game spending is set to extend its lead to more than 2.8 times over PC gaming and 3.1 times more than home game consoles.
That’s not to say there is no competition. In fact, there’s quite a lot of it. The launch of new consoles from Sony (the PS5) and Microsoft (the Xbox Series X) as well as the general growth of gaming in the pandemic, has kept the console business ticking over nicely too. And when it comes to mobile, a staggering 70% of the worldwide consumer spend on both iOS and Android products is on gaming
What kind of games are mobile games?
Some people who haven’t played mobile games in a while tend to think of titles like Angry Birds and Candy Crush but there has been considerable development in both the scope and variety of mobile games since these familiar staples. Many games are set up in such a way that you are gradually coaxed into parting with real money once you are fully emotionally involved in a game that is invariably free to download.
Small “microtransactions” add up gradually and incrementally over time. A couple of dollars here or there may not seem much of a psychological barrier. But just consider that a $4 coffee every day adds up to well over a $1,000 annual spend in a year and you can quickly comprehend why in-app purchases are such a big deal — and why more than 37% of total video game revenue since 2017 has been generated by mobile games.
Because of the huge amount of time, people spend on their smartphones — for some up to five or six hours or day — it’s only natural that while cycling through apps someone’s attention might turn to Google Play or the App Store in search of a game to while away some time.
SuperOne’s position: Taking a unique course
Already developing an extraordinary Genesis Community of partners switched on to the world’s fastest-paying affiliate platform, Andreas Christensen's SuperOne is a company in the perfect position to take advantage of the continual demand for mobile gaming.
SuperOne’s game steers away from the various genres of games that have inundated the sector, however, by tackling the world of trivia and big cash prizes square on. It has its own angle on microtransactions, with some free-to-play games and other premium offerings where players can “buy-in” with gaming tokens. It also may offer a system that allows players to pay extra to skip tough questions.
Sectors involving gambling, puzzles, shoot ’em ups, and so on are saturated; by contrast, trivia is under-exposed and positively untapped. It’s a rich seam for a new type of game offering big cash jackpots to the brainiest people out there.
These are the people who will be playing SuperOne games in their thousands. Devices like the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9+ are good enough to play high-quality games that will engage players for hours with story detail and action that pitches it right up alongside other platforms.
SuperOne is not even bothering with a console or PC version of its game. An editorial in The Wired Shopper concludes: “Console has had its day. The ultra-portability of a smartphone will eventually outpace it.”
At SuperOne, that’s all we need to know as we move forward with the launch of a game that we already know has a captive audience on hand to eagerly lap it up!
And: If we add on Andreas Christensen's experience, after over two decades in the industry, it goes without saying that SuperOne has enormous potential to make a big success in the mobile gaming world.