>>44038470The mobile market is a trap. It's very lucrative if you happen to make the right kind of game, at the right time, for the right sorts of people.
Go is one of these sorts of games. Sure, Niantic had previously made a similar game, but applying Pokemon to the idea was a once in a lifetime opportunity. An opportunity to bring a little more realism to a concept that already had tens of millions of fans waiting to feel like they could be real trainers. Though it continues to be a success itself, it's a gambit that will likely never be repeated as anyone looking for Pokemon on their phones can just play Go or, to a lesser extent, Masters which fills the generic gacha niche that's so popular on phones.
Mainline Pokemon will not be able to survive on mobile. Traditional games, period, cannot survive there. The entire appeal of the market is luring people in to play for free, then conditioning them to dump real money on in-game perks and items. This can't work with mainline, not without fundamentally changing what "mainline" is to the point that it's almost unrecognizable. You can't do releases on a one year, two year, three year, or even a five year basis as mobile games require a semi-constant stream of small, but new content updates to keep the playerbase invested, and when they get invested in the longterm they'll be far less willing to move on to the next iteration and leave everything they've built up in the old game behind. It's almost paradoxical, how a market of what's by and large considered extremely casual games tends to live and die by its most hardcore players.
And you're just fucking delusional if you think anyone in the mobile market is willing to shell out $40 - $60 upfront for a fucking phone game. It's just not happening with all that free to play competition.
