PlayStation, MiHoYo to XBox, Storage On Phones Is the New Battle Game Makers Are Waging
From Tokyo to San Francisco, mobile game studios have sparred for years to captivate a fickle audience, fostering an overlooked problem -- the average title has become so huge that players can no longer fit more than a few on their phones.
Japanese games publisher Gree Inc. expects an impending reckoning over escalating costs and ballooning file sizes, as developers pack their games with increasingly intricate graphics, voice acting and larger storylines, all to get players spending. That's creating a winner-takes-all situation that could winnow out smaller studios in coming years, Gree Senior Vice President Yuta Maeda said in an interview. The situation will only get worse as console veteran Sony -- no stranger to space-hogging hits -- prepares to invade the mobile arena.
“Production of mobile games can't avoid becoming more complex, time-consuming and larger-scale, which will inevitably result in bigger app sizes,” Maeda said. “Companies that survive in the market will only be the ones that can keep up with that trend.”
The spending poured into today's A-list mobile titles -- MiHoYo Co.'s Genshin Impact, for instance, started with a $100 million budget -- rivals Hollywood blockbusters and is yielding better production values than ever, but also an outsized footprint. That game can occupy upwards of 20 gigabytes of storage, which is a huge chunk of what most people have available on their phones. With memory upgrades not keeping pace, the result is fewer games can vie for attention.
“Even if gamers show interest in our games, we have found some of them are giving up on installing the apps because their phones are already full,” said Gree's Yoshihide Koizumi, who leads marketing for the company's latest game, Heaven Burns
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