Indie Games — Mobile vs PC

I know this is not a battle, or a war. I’ve just noticed that Indie game developers are kinda stuck reading articles and finding information that is not all that clear as to which area the writer was talking about, mobile or PC.

See this makes a huge different on the information that is presented, as for mobile, different things will work for marketing, and being successful. I read all the time that the market is flooded, but no real information that tells me which market is flooded. I’m making a PC game and read tons of articles about terrible things in the industry that are completely false.

I think that we, as indie game developers and writers, need to start being better

at telling people the area we are talking about. If I look at Steam for example, it only has 4500 products on its store. That is far from flooded. The App store though seems so full of junk, I even stopped looking for things to try on there.So let’s just be clearer about which parts of the industry are harder than which other parts.

If you are coding an app that happens to be a game, I think you are in for a hard road. If you are coding a PC game and think you can market it and get it in to Steam, I think you are fine. There are major differences. There are major differences in definition of the word ‘game’ on the two platforms too. There are also differences in many vocabulary words for each platform.

Everything that I have written is through the eyes of PC development and marketing. I hope that we can all get to be a bit clearer in the future. There are two different industries here with similar skills and tools needed to create the product, but still two different areas of the economy that are drastically different than each other.