A crash course in porting your game to mobile
Porting successful PC and console games to mobile has become common practice.
Vampire Survivors is the latest example in a long line of PC hits triumphantly making the jump to smart devices. Poncle's title was downloaded one million times in just a week when it launched in December.
Soon after, the studio revealed that it had planned to port Vampire Survivors to mobile sooner, but couldn't find a business partner who agreed with its monetisation approach, so eventually decided to do it all in-house.
While this particular story has a happy ending, it does illustrate the challenges of successfully porting a game to mobile, which Poncle has been vocal about.
This happened to be the topic of a Pocket Gamer Connects talk in London last week, from Playdigious CEO Xavier Liard. His company is behind the ports of successful mobile titles including Dead Cells, Cultist Simulator, and Mini Metro.
In his talk, Liard looked into the different routes available to developers wishing to port their game to mobile, and addressed the questions they should ask themselves before making the jump.
Looking at opportunities on mobile for a successful PC or console game, Liard identified three options:
He particularly looked into the "new opportunity" presented by subscription services and third-party stores, with a quick focus on releasing in China as well.
Liard said there are roughly three categories that every game falls into on Apple Arcade: original, great, or classic.
Understanding these categories is key to understanding whether your title could fit on Apple's subscription service. The 'originals' are new games that are launching on console/PC and Arcade at the same time. The 'greats' are games that have already been successful
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