Game Design Secrets

Understanding Why to Choose These Platforms over Others

The combined audience size of these three game platforms—iOS, Facebook, and the web—is massive. Drawing from the estimates in this chapter, the audience size is between 600 and 800 million total. Besides that, there are at least three reasons for small and indie game designers to create for them in particular: market acceptance of low-budget games, direct connection to social media, and portability to other platforms. These reasons are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Market Acceptance of Low-Budget Games

Due to their presence on multiple-use platforms (the iPhone is also a phone, Facebook is also for social networking, and so on), the market has proven to be far more accepting of games on Facebook, the web, and iOS. This is true even when the games are produced for low budgets and come with no-frills graphics, short playtimes, and extremely simple interactivity. Tap Pet Hotel (see Figure 1-1) is just one example of a best-selling, no-frills game.

Figure 1-1: App Store screenshots of Tap Pet Hotel, a top-grossing 2011 iOS game with no-frills 2D graphics.

Most of the best-selling iOS games, for instance, are not made with high-end graphics and other features that are typically costly to deploy.

The mega-blockbuster Angry Birds was reportedly developed by a core team of four.

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