Thing is, as a former engine and graphics programmer, I have to say I agree with them, we got gaming software wrong. It took me years to actually see it but we do it wrong. A game like all software should be incredibly light and fast. A game that examplaries that is World of Warcraft which is incredibly light for a game of its stature.
It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.
If that was really a consideration that correlated strongly to success, the market would've shown that a while ago and the most successful projects would sail through Apple approvals. However, this is not reality, and when our philosophy fails to describe reality, only one of those two things is capable of changing.
"the market says otherwise" its a lazy and thought-terminating refrain and we need to retire it. it teaches us nothing to say "they market says otherwise", universally we need to go deeper and actually understand why things are wrong. your god "the market" also hasn't run A/B tests on GPs hypothesis, so this is just bad science.
It's bad science, but it's great shorthand for an HN comment. Otherwise you get into a quagmire of "how do you define quality games" and I didn't want to type out the text of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in a comment thread.
Mobile games have been bigger than PC or console for awhile, and a few of the titles are massively popular and profitable. Though App Store review policies differ in permissiveness, the approach from below has been the industry model both on iOS and Android. Remind me what you were saying needs to change.
> Mobile games have been bigger than PC or console for awhile
Of course mobile games are "bigger" than PC games. It's because today 18yos use mobile phones to "type" their homework. It's because they have never actually used or owned a computer/mac keyboard. It's because +80% of visitors of all web pages come from mobile.
It's because everyone has a mobile phone, and relatively fewer people use or own a classic computer. It says nothing about the scale of mobile gaming. It says everything about the scale of mobile.
It's not just about reach, though it wasn't actually inevitable that popular small communication devices would become a major gaming platform. The quantity of games and number of standouts (whether measured by quality/profitability/talent of creators/license/something else) is also high.
parent did not suggest that good and correct correlated with market success. we all know a market only demands profitable, which is a distinctly different objective.
It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.