> It's surprising to hear something like this out of someone inside the industry. Art costs for mobile games, including many of the top earners, are not particularly high. Compared to marketing and programming costs art won't cost a fortune for nearly any mobile game.

It depends on what sort of game you're looking for. If you're looking to build a simple mobile game, sure, art costs are pretty low. It doesn't take much to build a physics game for casuals or a Skinner box like Tiny Tower, for sure. It takes a lot more if you want to build something for anything even remotely approaching the "core" audience--the people who play games as games, who normally don't play many games on mobile because the games by and large aren't very good and aren't very engrossing. And it's not because these games are for shallow people (though many could be accused of that), but rather because if you aren't making a game with ten elements and a bunch of generic reusable pieces, it's just gonna cost money.

Like, I'm working on a 2D RPG in my spare time. I've sketched it out with an aim toward 25-30 hours of content (something almost unheard-of in mobile games, though I'm also aiming towards Windows as well so I'm cheating a bit). I've looked extensively, I've scrimped where I could, and the inescapable rolling boulder of needing stuff means I'm still looking at $20K or so in terms of asset creation. That's not expensive for the game mills like Gameloft, but it's pretty brutal for a one-guy show, and unless I can do something to alleviate it[1] is going to result in a worse game that doesn't reach what I'm aiming for. (If I was making this to make money I'd be a lot more worried about it. I'm making it because I love games. It will break even, eventually, if I port it to enough platforms--but it may never finance a second, even with my day job soaking my personal expenses. I'm okay with that, but it constrains what I can do.)

But, yeah, if you want to roll with people making games for gamers, you are going to be spending a large chunk of cash. He's not wrong here, you're just assuming he's looking at the "top earners" and not, y'know--stuff that people normally called "gamers" want to play.

[1] - There are some great games out there that rely on "space savers" like procedural generation--Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft--but there are itches they can't scratch. People jonesing for a Narrativist game, if I can slightly misuse a term from the Big Model, are going to want a game where they can see what they're doing and are not going to want to look at the same five wall textures and ten palette-swapped enemies everywhere they go. It's just the way it is.

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> On the other end of the power spectrum, OUYA was a mega-success in terms of people voting with their wallets.

The other I wanted to poke at: OUYA has succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy an undergunned Android set-top box for something at or very near cost. It has not succeeded in getting them to re-buy a bunch of games that they probably already have on another platform, especially given their super dodgy practice of polling for games people want to see and then "which do you really want?" with a list of AAA games[2]--it's not an illegal practice or anything by any stretch, but the way they've played this has explicitly tried to set expectations that have little to do with the actual machine or the games it's going to get.

I personally can't see this ending well, and I say that with an eye towards developing for it--because I can't see it making a dime for me because I'm not hawking Mass Effect or Skyrim.

[2] - https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ouyatop20