Top Differences Between Mobile and AAA Live Service Games (Scott Hartsman Interview)

Owen Mahoney who used to run Nexon has recently started a blog and he did a post where he talks about it's actually not one games industry there's four think of as a 2x two grid you've got single player casual you've got single player four you have mobile and casual live and then cing live so when you're talking about mobile versus you know core gamer like PC console you really are essentially talking about two different industries you know succeeding on a core gamer game for PC and console gamers these days. Sure, there is advertising of course and yes, there's, you know, there's awareness and yes, there's branding, but it's also so much more word of mouth and influencer driven, you know, whether it's Tik Tok, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Twitch, you know, there's a lot more word of mouth than the core audience. But if you look down in the the other corner where you're talking about mobile and casual, you know, these businesses are so driven by how cheaply they can acquire users and how much lifetime value they can extract from each of

them. It's a math business. the the the ones that tend to top the charts. There is generally some type of gotcha or some type of pulse mechanic where you know you want the latest greatest hero. You need to go spend a 100 tokens, spend a 100 tokens, and you're getting a random shot at do you get the thing or not? And then when you finally get the thing, oh, it's only about an eighth as strong as it could be. I need to repeat that seven more times to try to get that hero to feed it into the other hero. Right? If you did that on a PC uh core gamer game, you would be run out of town. When you look at who's succeeding in core game or PC and console, you have this, it's almost 180 degrees different from that. They are selling cosmetics. And meanwhile, any randomness that they include tends to be in the gameplay itself. And so those two approaches are really really different ways of not just thinking about your game but also how

your company is built.