'Everyone ran off to mobile and left the door unlocked for us'

Just because there is a major shift going on in the industry, doesn't mean that is the best direction for your studio. In fact, argued Thomas Was Alone's Mike Bithell at Develop Conference this morning, these shifts can leave spaces wide open for indies to fill. The current shift to mobile, for example, doesn't necessarily mean you should make mobile games. "The middle ground devs all ran off to mobile, and left the door unlocked for us," he notes. He continues, "Everyone is migrating to mobile, and have left a big gap... it's a massive gap we can take advantage of." This has happened multiple times before over the years -- most recently, the shift away from PC games to console games in the last decade meant that the PC space was left wide open for indies, and many indie devs had massive success on PC. That's why Thomas Was Alone has benefitted so much from being on PC, he argues -- everyone else is making games for mobile, yet there are still plenty of people playing games on PC. Bithell's comments come in the same morning that Epic's Tim Sweeney suggested that studios who don't follow the changing industry will find it more difficult to survive.