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We would love to develop for mobile but the mobile market is untenable for indies. Go complain to Apple and Google about it.

This Week in Videogames - TWIV@thisweekinvideogames.com

With constant price hikes and next-gen gaming hardware likely to break the bank during a cost-of-living crisis, @edmondtran.bsky.social proposes developers keep lowering the bar. Meaning? It's time to really embrace low-spec benchmarks so we can keep playing new games on devices we already own.

thisweekinvideogames.comThe Future of Games Is Expensive, Time To Embrace Low-Spec and MobileOpinion: It's about time the games industry prioritises lower-spec benchmarks again, and reclaims mobile as a standard platform for games

If you think Steam discoverability is bad, the mobile storefronts are abysmal; they have absolutely no conception or intention of trying to put new releases in front of people who might want them or supporting the long tail.

And if you think Steam sale race-to-the-bottom pricing is bad, look at mobile where the vast majority of the audience will reject anything you have to buy to download at all.

Mobile is also terrible for backwards compatibility and back catalog games. Both major mobile OSs require continuous updating of software for it to run at all on newer versions, *regardless of actual breaking changes.*

18/6/26, 2:55 pm3 reposts90 likes

In the world we live in, where most studios that ship their first game go out of business, this means any game you buy on mobile probably has an expiration date of about 3 years before the OS itself will not allow you to download or install it.

Ultimately those platforms are designed to be bad for everyone involved and people perceive anything on them as inherently crappy and low-value. People with big IPs to bring to bear can pierce that, but the average indie studio cannot.