Discussion
I'd've happily carried it on for years, joyously banging out little slices of arcade zappiness with the frequency and creativity of the best of the Commodore years, had circumstances been more favourable, had there been any way to sustain it. Who knows what we might have come up with.
But mobile became a hellscape, and our reward for some of our most joyous work was near-extinction.
But there's still joy in those little games, and I hope you'll find it when you play them :)
@wohali it may seem like an easy target in terms of game design but the chilling thing I learned from all this is that the actual quality of what you make, in terms of just being an enjoyable thing for people to play, means absolutely nothing. Mobile games are made with the sole objective of extracting the most amount of money from users as ruthlessly as possible. They are just vehicles to get players locked into an addictive playloop as tightly as possible.
@wohali I don't even think it's the same thing any more. "I want to make a game that's quick and fun that people will play for the pleasure of playing" is an entirely different objective from "I want to make a structure that extracts maximum revenue from the greatest number of users". One is art, the other is some kind of continuous exercise in the psychology of addiction fine tuned by feedback telemetry to maximise revenue.
Not even in the same ballpark.
@llamasoft_ox i worked for a mobile game company that had to shutter several years ago. they had a couple of top-10 app store titles...with some interesting gameplay.
it all collapsed. it's insane, there's SO much potential.
maybe it'll resurface some day. it feels like low-hanging fruit, doesn't it?