Though they may be reluctant to acknowledge it openly, I think my three kids are quite fortunate. They are growing up in an environment where gaming is ubiquitous
- we have two consoles, each child has access to their own tablet, and there are a number of PCs dotted around as well. There are even board games for when they finally tire of looking at a screen. This offers an amazing range of opportunities, as well as an interesting case study of the preferences of the next generation.
It is clear that there is a natural hierarchy of preferences among my children, with mobile at the top. Console gaming goes in cycles depending on whether a new game is out, and the PC is still the dominant platform for Minecraft, but the kids have an attachment to their tablets that goes beyond the console or PC experience. I think this has a lot to do with a sense of ownership, and the feeling of holding a premium device in your hands. There is a unique tactile experience when playing on these devices that remains exciting.
(I should point out here that my youngest daughter is only 4 so has to share iPad time with her mum. However, she did manage to customise the home screen by neatly putting all of her games into a sub-folder, which was both impressive for a 4 year old, and disconcerting for her mum who thought she has deleted Candy Crush).
For me this underlines the first part of the premium mobile experience – the raw quality of the hardware. Even if the game you are playing is quite simple, or you are just consuming content, the feel of a premium device in your hand that is light, sleek and looks cool, remains a genuine experience.
The second aspect of the premium experience is the content itself. This has been slower in arriving as many developers are reluctant to make games that only run on the latest high-end devices. But this is starting to change as more of the console developers target mobile. These days a high-end console game is an enormously complex beast to put together. This is why many developers chose to license in technology to get their game made – few can afford to invest in their own technology across the board as well as employ the talented art teams needed to produce a top-end game. This level of complexity makes it very difficult to strip back a game so it will run on an older mobile device. The consequence of this is that few developers have simultaneously targeted console and mobile. Most have opted to make a console game and then hand over the task of a mobile port to a different studio, with some mixed results.
We are now approaching a point where this situation is about to change, and the driver for this change is the rapid progress being made in mobile hardware. The latest mobile devices promise multi-core performance, fast shared memory and a powerful GPU. You can see this in the stunning specifications for ARM’s latest Cortex-A72 CPU and Mali-T880 GPU designs. Together these represent another significant quality step in mobile performance and architecturally they closely resemble the latest consoles – the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The arrival of desktop style graphics APIs on mobile is also making life easier for developers to target both platforms simultaneously.
There is also convergence in the other direction. Mobile devices are designed with connectivity in mind from the ground up. Without connectivity my tablet defaults back to being just a MP3 player. This has not always been the case with consoles, but the new generation are also built around connectivity and content sharing, often with second-screen functionality built in.
These trends are all helping to create an environment where developers can simultaneously target console and premium mobile devices with the same game, which is a very attractive proposition. For developers and publishers it offers a route out of the current mindset of free-to-play with in-game purchases, pay-to-win and irritating adverts. For me these do not define a premium experience. But if your game is targeted at those who are attracted to the latest premium devices, I think you have an audience ready to pay a sensible amount for a quality game that does not constantly ask the player for more money.
The key final step in making this vision a reality is having the technology to simultaneously deploy the same content on console and premium mobile. The main engine vendors, Epic and Unity, are already at this point, as are some of the main technology providers. Geomerics, now an ARM company, originally developed the real-time global illumination technology Enlighten for the PC and console space. Enlighten has been mobile ready for over a year now, and on the latest mobile devices is able to run with the same quality settings used on the new generation of consoles.
The possibilities for the next five years are spectacular, which brings me back to my first point. The natural adopters of premium mobile content are the current generation of kids growing up with these devices, and their minds are already set – they will continue to want the latest, fastest mobile platform which can play the best games out there.