The community is too in love with low budget, paid indie games that look like they belong on SNES or 10+ years old ports looking to squeeze a few dollars out of nostalgia. Freemium mobile gaming exceeded PC/console in revenue during Touch Arcade's existence. In Q3 King scored more revenue / profit with Candy Crush than Blizzard's entire family of games, that is how incredible mobile gaming is. Touch Arcade has zero Candy Crush coverage. But the Touch Arcade community doesn't realize this, only cares about niche games and cries foul in 2017 on energy/gacha systems. As a result, Touch Arcade has a hard time getting sponsorship from freemium publishers with boat load of money to spend, makes peanuts from small fries, and cries about patreon income. TA needs to do a 180 change in direction before it is too late. Full coverage of hottest, top grossing games. Do articles on Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Game of War, Golf Clash (how did you guys completely miss one of the hottest US/European games around, a genuinely great game at that?), Lineage 2 Revolution. Ignore the current community, ignore the $5 games that sell 10,000 copies total. You guys still have EXCELLENT search engine ranking, if I search for "Clash Royale" and set time frame to last week on Google, I get TA article first, and it was the TA article that reminded me of the tournament on Twitch. Work out a relationship with big publishers like Netmarbles, Supercell, and Machine Zone's of the world. When a Lineage 2 Revolution launch with huge marketing budget, you can actually get a slice of the pie and pitch your site to the giants of mobile gaming industry. Tencent is about to launch Arena of Valor in North America, the money they are about to spend on marketing, a bread crumb is enough to feed TA staff for a year. The majority of Touch Arcade readers do not voice their opinion on forums. TA gets more hits from one top grossing game article off search engine traffic alone than ten indie articles combined. Sure, the freemium haters make a lot of noise, but in the grand scheme of things they don't add up to much traffic. If anything they DISCOURAGE giants of mobile gaming investing in TA. If you are Netmarbles, you log onto TA forum and see nothing but complaints about freemium on Lineage 2 Revolution, would you spend money to advertise on TA? First get rid of the negative value readers that scare away advertisers, then the advertising revenue will come. Just look at the community size of your last four reviews: Paid: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDevTycoon/ - 1200 readers (99% are for Steam version of the game, mobile community most likely less than 15 readers, doesn't even have its own reddit, game sold 1500 copies, it is a joke, why waste a review article on this?) https://www.reddit.com/r/GridAutosport/ - 52 readers Freemium: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineage2Revolution/ - 9107 readers https://www.reddit.com/r/ACPocketCamp/ - 16683 readers Which game will bring in more hits, advertisement revenue? The real reader base is much much bigger than Reddit. TA has outstanding SEO, you can write Animal Pocket Camp articles all day long to get hits from people looking for tips/strategies.
Hi hitmantb, The hard challange in life is to get paid to do something that you like. Getting paid in general it is also necessary but if that become the main goal existence can be pretty sour. Im quite confident that the staff managing TA knows very well which titles are top grossing, as this is common knowledge in the industry. They also own appshopper that offers charts by revenue. The website also log the view of each articles, offering insights about what users prefer. The choice of covering a wide range of titles seems to arise in light of their passion for gaming in general, and as such hard to confine to f2p titles that while entertaining are pretty limited in terms of variety, content and scope. If they were looking to cater to that spefic audience only in the name of profit they would have already done it. If they would decide to do so in the future it would likely be a sad turn, unwillingly made and driven by necessity. All in all your insights dont add much to the knowledge the staff of the site already have, and seems to point out an unnecessary amount of hate towards the coverage (and the existence) of indie titles, or anything besides the f2p titles you mentioned. A sentiment that I find hard to understand. cheers
Matthew 16:26. We're trying to save TouchArcade, not rip its face off and staple it onto something completely different. If we wanted to do that, we could have done it ages ago.
I think hitmantb makes an important point. If I were Netmarble then the persistent sneering from the anti-freemium brigade in the forums would discourage me from advertising here. I guess thats what they want. As for TA itself, I would say plenty of coverage is given, e.g. the recent Clash Royale articles. I play freemium titles such as Lineage and Game of Thrones whose existence I learn about from the TA front pages. Even Candy Crush gets a mention occasionally. All the same, what makes TA essential reading is the wide variety covered and it would be sad to see the indy experimental games disappear.
to use the OP's nickname : will a poor but honest family man that gives in and turns into a hitman for money, be the same man afterwards? it's nice that you want to save TA, but if they sell out, they just wouldn't BE TA anymore. Maybe a happy medium, with some more articles and coverage of commercial hits would help with revenue though. As for anti-freemium, i personally do it to avoid a future where games (mobile, console and pc) are aimed only towards princes, superstars and all other people who can shell out 1k$$ like it's nothing just to get some resources, and thus games for 5, 30 or 70$$ become extinct for the normal income people.
For Touch Arcade to completely miss out on Golf Clash (top 10/20 grossing worldwide, small indie developer, genuinely great/fresh concept game), it is inexcusable, it is like missing out coverage on Player Unknown Battlegrounds if you are covering PC games. Their staff is clearly not paying attention to the charts. It is clear TA is a team torn internally. The sooner they clean up their identity, the better.
While I respect your writing ability and enjoyed your articles, you are Tom Cruise in "Last Samurai", and freemium, top grossing games are the rifles/cannons against your samurai swords. Gaming industry as a whole has changed forever. It is sad to see you clinging to the past, wasting a tremendous IP/brand name that deserves better leadership, holding back your own potential and leading your team to certain death. You can still change the course of your destiny, it is not too late. Embrace the dark side, save the ones you work with and love. Instead of doing RPG Reload on some indie game nobody plays, why not do a Reload on Clash of Clans, five years after its release? Do you honestly think a game that stayed on top grossing chart for this long is not one of the greatest games ever created on any platform? Why do you deny the fact it takes tremendous innovation and content creation to keep players invested in the game, when competitors are releasing huge number of games every day of the week for attention? You insist on your own perception of "quality", when the majority of the world moved on. I have been gaming since NES days and have played every single gaming milestone in history. From Mario to Street Fighter 2 to Doom to Final Fantasy to World of Warcraft to Witcher 3, and I rank Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Puzzles and Dragons, every bit as great as any of these games. The era is different, the players are different, the taste is different, the competition is different. The industry moved on to be bigger/better than it ever was. You just have to keep an open mind. Kids growing up today have their own iconic games in their own era, and I will not tell them the pinnacle of gaming is jumping over platform gaps, performing a shoryuken or kill Ragnaros with 39 other friends. To them, winning a clan war, defeating a tough boss with a 10 hit combo in Puzzles and Dragons, clearing a tough board in Candy Crush is just as memorable. If anything, mobile gaming brought in people who would have never gamed otherwise and to me they are every bit as much of a gamer as people who play FPS/MOBA's in 2017.
"What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?", for any other heathens like me.
Same here. Its always Im right. His top 10 games list was dire If the post was from someone else I might take it more seriously
Hitman, I totally agree with you, and of all the people who have ideas for what we should do yours are by far the most grounded in reality with what we should do if our singular goal was to grow a profitable media platform. I also thought you were spot on when you posted something very similar before. I think there's a middle ground, and we're (somewhat awkwardly) trying to find it using Patreon as a band-aid without completely selling out to only covering massive free to play titles. I've got some cool plans I'm not really ready to discuss publicly just yet until I get more partnerships in place, but I think I figured out a way to provide substantial value through a reader subscription model which we may continue to run through Patreon just because they make all the payment back-end stuff and subscription management real easy. No real sense in reinventing the wheel. Anyway, just stick with us for a little while longer for the site to re-launch early next year. I think (and hope) everyone will be happy. Thanks for the thoughts, as always.
Thanks! You are still bigger than any other site on mobile gaming and have far and away the best search engine ranking, the industry will eclipse both PC and console, you have a chance to grow into the next Gamespot/IGN. Don't be discouraged! Pocket Gamer may be able to get ads on tier 2-3 games like Phantom Chaser and Shadow Fight 3, your real estate is worth way more to the real giants of mobile gaming. The "Honor of Kings" mobile game originally had a different name and was pulled off app store by Tencent because of low metrics against other games from competing Tencent teams, they went back to the drawing board, removed PVE contents, a year later they have world's highest grossing mobile game ever, the lead developer purchased a 12 million dollars penthouse in Hong Kong. You and your staff need to watch "Last Samurai" together, and you are the Japanese emperor (to me, the real hero of the movie).
I was very annoyed about Golf Clash. (and why I cancelled my patreon) It's incredibly lame that the only way I found out about that game was via an advertisement in the middle of a game. But credit to TA on flipping legend. They pointed that out some time ago and I've been enjoying that recently.
hitmantb: The point of TA being the way it is, is so the overwhelming popularity of fidget-spinner freemiums doesn’t end up with them being the only games that exist. Because that is the scary reality that places like TA exist to push back against. Casino slots have lots of pretty things too, and somebody had to create them, but it all comes down to pulling the same lever over and over. Games that are like them will always make money, because ultimately they appeal to the addict within us all. People usually get paid for pushing buttons all day. But there will always be huge swaths of people who will pay $$$ to push buttons. So the game devs that design pretty gems and candies and amazing physics will always do well. *Somebody* out there has to look out for the rest of us. For the indies and bigger companies that make games for the love of creating something with substance, and the people who won’t know about them without TA. Thanks, Shaun. There are reasons why Tom Cruise is the hero of Last Samurai. Somebody out there has to live by Matt 16:26. The world would be lifeless without them. Eli: I believe in you, and the team, and I hope the changes and compromises you make will help. The subscription model looks good. hitmantb may be right, about who makes the money. I’m just glad for the people who know that the gaming world, like the rest of thr world, is about more than that.
Yep, that's a big part of the reason when I see trolls on Reddit and other places going wild on how we've been bought by pay to win games and all this other stuff I can't help but laugh. We could totally do that, the money is there, and it would be real easy, but we've spent the last decade avoiding that path because I totally agree that there's more to life than money.
Please TA ignore this guy and keep doing what you do Which is covering all games free and premium More candy crush articles, why who the hell still cares about candy crush smh Weekly now we are getting one great port after another from steam and console why candy crush Fork candy crush
I wouldnt mind an article on Candy Crush or anything else. Why not honor the devs? Someone had to go through the effort of making them. An article on how theyve affected the gaming marketplace for better or worse. I would love to see an in depth article on how people complaining about the price of games has led to the pay to play phenomenon, where people who wouldnt put down $5 or $20 for a good game can be led to pay $100s or more in increments, for little more than an endless clicker with pretty mechanics. Ive actually played alongside people who brag about dropping $300 a week on a free game, and thr psychology of it fascinates me.
