Mobile Games Development : Quantity vs Quality

The future of mobile games development is very bright. It is predicted that $54 billion can be reached by 2015 by mobile games industry. Portability becomes the strongest cause why mobile games are so popular, followed by accessibility (comparing the speed to setup games in mobile devices and console, when users of mobile devices have reached level 2 in game, the console game is still loading its splash screen). The factor also comes from the success of mobile phone industry and its leverage to produce tablet devices which make the playing experience more immersed.

From the developer perspective, it seems the process of development for mobile games is not complex, except for memory management issue and compatibility with various devices. Nowadays, there are many game engines which provide super features built specifically for games in mobile phone and tablet. It makes the duration of development takes only minimum few months or even less. However, there are some developers who really emphasize on the super quality of games that makes the development time longer.

According to Project Triangle, there are three elements which declare the scope and the result of product, whether it can be good, cheap, or fast. In fact, it is quite impossible to apply all of those elements, at most only two can be done. This depiction generates two terms in mobile game development (not only in mobile games actually), quantity and quality.

Quantity

High quantity usually focuses on developing simple games. Because number of games is the key here, so the way to reach the goal is by producing as many simple games as possible. If it is related with project triangle, then quantity development model takes element of fast as its core component. Since the game would be simple, then it is not recommended to hire senior level of worker as it will make the cost becomes high, in this case the games would be simple. As the result, it might take longer time to finish the games for inexperienced developers. Therefore, it is about choice to pick the suitable combination of the elements for quantity, it might be fast and cheap or fast only.

Quality

High quality impacts on the requirement to hire good quality employee or to do outsourcing which results high cost. It can be assumed that cheap element will be forgotten, and good element might be the primary one. However, if the development team are formed by high quality developers, then the cost might be reduced, and element of cheap is included. Unfortunately, the duration of development will never be fast, it actually depends on the skill of the workers and the capability of project manager to arrange the team, but it can only minimize the delay. Hence, for quality, the mixture would be good and cheap or good only.