Ben ward guest lecture report. 6/2/2015

 

During ben’s guest lecture he talked about the usage of mobile and desktop platforms in the indie market, mainly about the pro and cons of mobile platform developing. One of the aspects of mobile developing was how mobile games can be monitored through analytics so he can see what games trend in which countries, what languages, what games and levels are difficult, how long people play for and when they play. One problem with this analytics systems is that they aren’t properly representative. Ben told us about when he once saw that five hundred thousand people downloaded one of his games that cost 69p on android but he only got around 10 pound for it as a huge portion of the people who downloaded the game actually pirated it so he only got a fraction of what the analytics said he should of received.

Another aspect the indie development scene is time management when actually making the game. This is important as if you don’t use your time correctly you can spend far too long making the game and I end up not being financially viable.

I looked more into the piracy of mobile games and found mixed reviews from different sources such as an article from a website called re/code who interview Ustwogames about the amount of piracy their game Monument Valley went through they were quoted saying “mobile game piracy isn’t all bad” .

(This is a link to said article: http://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad-says-monument-valley-producer-qa/ )

 

When I read this article I thought it was strange when they addressed it so casually especially when they said “not complaining, just observing”.  Which seemed quite relaxed to the whole thing. On the other hand there are other people approaching this issue treating it like a problem and stating the effects of it on developers. Such people are James Brightman who wrote an article on gamesindustry.biz addressing the problems app developers face when it comes to piracy and profitability. He talks about the statistics of piracy that occurs.

 

(Here is the link to the article: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-09-23-app-devs-facing-major-problems-with-piracy-profitability )

 

When it comes to piracy of games on any level I tend to think more of it as a problem more than a learning opportunity because of the time and effort the games designers put into making the games it isn’t fair or just if people in essence steal from them.