Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

I think that there’s more to it than that.

My own guesses are:

• I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

• Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

  In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

  They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

  So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

  kagis

  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

  Smartphone dependency over time

  Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

  Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

• I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

• Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

• Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.