MV games on Mobiles - worth it?

[Matseb2611]

Heya all.

Was very curious if anyone here on the forum has made a commercial game with MV and exported it to mobiles, and if yes, then what are your experiences? Is it worth the hassle (considering it's a bit of a lengthy process to convert it all)? What are the sales and exposure like? Is it easy to market?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kes]

This isn't a direct response to your question, but you might like to consider this post and the 3 after it.
Long story short, you need to make a different version of your game for mobile, because of its limitations, and you need to plan for mobile from the very beginning.

 

[Matseb2611]

Thanks for the link. Yeah, I was hoping to export it to mobiles from the start, so I kept the overall project very modest in length. Though it sounds like perhaps I'll have to use smaller file formats for bigger files. Still curious though if anyone from this community has had a successful commercial launch on mobiles and what kind of game they made.

 

[bgillisp]

I dunno about RPGMaker and mobiles, but I read a long time ago that the average mobile game makes a whopping $1000 in sales. And that's a total of $1000, not $1000 in profit. So if that is true, then I'd say it is not worth it myself.

 

[Matseb2611]

What if those earnings are also combined with the earnings you make on Steam and other PC outlets?

I also wonder if someone perhaps does the mobile conversion for a price. I imagine someone with a coding experience will have a much easier time. Plus also it seems it can only be done on Mac computer.

 

[Kes]

As far as I am aware, the Mac computer is only needed if you want to be able to sell on Apple phones because of the way Apple have set things up. It's not needed for Android.

 

[jkweath]

Heya all.

Was very curious if anyone here on the forum has made a commercial game with MV and exported it to mobiles, and if yes, then what are your experiences? Is it worth the hassle (considering it's a bit of a lengthy process to convert it all)? What are the sales and exposure like? Is it easy to market?

Thanks in advance.

I may be able to give you an accurate answer here in a couple months. I am releasing and will be marketing an MV game for Android this upcoming weekend. I designed (or at least attempted to) design it with mobile in mind from the ground up, so we'll see what happens.

I personally noticed from the commercial game releases board that there are (I believe) 2 MV games on the google play store at the moment. I won't name them, but one of them was released around January and had less than 500 downloads (looked like a good game, but many reviews stated the game just couldn't run on their device, so the game probably wasn't optimized).

The other was released a bit more recently this year and has few or no downloads. As for the quality of that game... No comment!

I think Undefeated is on the app store as well? Don't remember its details.

One game I've brought up like five times now is Doom and Destiny, which appears to have been made in VXAce, but is on the Android app store. The free version with ads has 500,000 downloads, the $4.99 version has 50,000. It's definitely a financial success, so it's certainly not impossible.

IMO, the contrast between the first two games I mentioned and Doom and Destiny is that D&D was a genuinely great game (I played it and loved it, and it has many positive reviews) while the others were most likely a combination of poor marketing and failure to optimize the game for mobile deployment.

But to try to answer your question, A) you'll have to do a lot of work optimizing your mobile deployment (trust me, I've spent many, many hours on it, I may even write about it in the future) and I -think- you'll need to do some damn good marketing.

I read somewhere from someone with experience in Android development that Google won't really promote your game unless it has around 50,000 downloads. Not completely sure the number's accurate, as I've seen games promoted to me that had 10,000 downloads, but I'd keep that in mind. I'll try to find that post and link it to you if you're interested.

Edit: Assuming the above is true, it means that, at least for the beginning of your game's life cycle, you'll need to market the game (i.e. submit it to review websites/youtubers/etc) and get them to write reviews and promote your game first--then, if that works, Google will help you out with promotion; if not, you're dead in the water.

But like I said above, I don't personally have experience yet, so I don't know 100% if the above is true or not.

 

[Matseb2611]

Thank you very much for all the details, Jkweath. That's certainly a lot to think about. It's something I really want to go for, at least with this project, and to see how the mobile market compares with the PC market and whether any further games are worthwhile converting to mobiles as well. I might have to find a coder though who will help on the optimization part, since that stuff isn't my strong suit at all. Would definitely be interested to hear how your game fares on there.

@Kes: I noticed the procedure for iOS and for Androids is totally different. I don't even know if it's worth going for both, considering how much work it will take to convert the game onto both of them.

 

[Kes]

@jkweath mentioned that Undefeated is on Android. It is, but it is a total red herring. It is a VX Ace game that Degica tried converting for Android. Getting it to run on more than a handfull of devices was almost impossible. It is my theory that it was with that experience that Kadokawa decided to ditch Ruby and write MV in JavaScript.

 

[jkweath]

Thank you very much for all the details, Jkweath. That's certainly a lot to think about. It's something I really want to go for, at least with this project, and to see how the mobile market compares with the PC market and whether any further games are worthwhile converting to mobiles as well. I might have to find a coder though who will help on the optimization part, since that stuff isn't my strong suit at all. Would definitely be interested to hear how your game

I actually have little coding knowledge, which has hurt me a lot in terms of mobile optimization. After this project is released I will probably spend a lot of time studying Javascript and Android deployment instead of game development.

Right now MV mobile games have two big hurdles to overcome:

1, performance. MV games -will not- run well on low end devices. This might sound reasonable, but there are still hundreds of low end devices being sold on the market today and millions of low end device users. They're usually much, much cheaper than a high-end device too.

Sadly there is no amount of optimization anyone can do to rectify this, aside from rewriting the entire game engine, in which case you may as well not use RPG maker. My optimizations have, unfortunately, been more tuned for smoother game play for mid-high end devices (like the Galaxy S6, which can run MV games but still experiences frame rate drops quite often)

This will undoubtedly hurt my sales as I had to put thousands of devices on my games Device Exclusion List, and a recommended device specifications in my sale page to warn anyone with a device on the low-mid end spectrum.

2, UI and controls. The one-tap two-tap controls for mobile are awkward and just won't work for a general audience. Thankfully a huge part of this can be fixed by adding UI controls with Yanfly's Picture Common Events.

Still that leaves the issue of scroll bars (when going through commands, skills, items, etc) which are absurdly small and borderline impossible to tap. I've been trying to get help with this but to no avail; I'm strongly considering putting out a classified ad to try and fix this.

@Kes that's very interesting. I was wondering how Undefeated made its way to mobile when it was a VXACE game. I might buy it and try it out just to see how it works!

 

[Matseb2611]

Good points, Jkweath. Thanks for bringing them to attention. Phone screen is a lot smaller, so the issues with UI are going to be pretty real, and I suppose same goes for text size and the like.

 

[jkweath]

I've actually found the text size to be pretty decent. Overall the UI is okay, just that I think Degica really weren't thinking about good touch screen controls when they added mobile deployment functionality. And from what I've seen, they've got other things on their radar, so it looks like it'll be up to the developers to figure out how to improve these things.

 

[ACECORP]

Yes. MV Games on iPhone rock. I am in the process of making one. I cannot speak to android export, but for iPhone MV is a truly superior platform. Combined with Cordova you can do unimaginable things very fast and easy. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask. I can step you through the entire process of getting your game in the AppStore if you need some guidance and info.

 

[jkweath]

Yes. MV Games on iPhone rock. I am in the process of making one. I cannot speak to android export, but for iPhone MV is a truly superior platform. Combined with Cordova you can do unimaginable things very fast and easy. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask. I can step you through the entire process of getting your game in the AppStore if you need some guidance and info.

That's interesting to know. For some reason I was under the impression that it wasn't worth it to bother trying to export MV games to iPhone. Do you use the deployment method that's in the MV tutorial? Also how do MV games do performance-wise on iPhones?

 

[Rukiri]

No, personally it's a waste of time.
It doesn't have native android export and you need a workaround, iOS is solid

MV focused to much on mobile which is where it's not even that strong, and web where it is doing better. Desktop should have been the only focus unless they really went all out for mobile "which they did not".

I've tested MV stuff on the iphone 8+ and my new LG V30 and performance is meh compared to Desktop

I've done basic tests, so if you have a lot of objects/events and scripts behind the scenes it could be worse... I was barely managing 45fps and to me that is not acceptable at all... If I'm getting 45fps I either lower settings or upgrade my PC to maintain a level of performance I desire. On PC I want over 100fps... Even my own game is designed around 240fps.

What's the average FPS you guys are getting? I'm trying on new hardware with barely anything and only getting 45fps...

 

[Failivrin]

I have a cheap Android phone, and I can't get a lot of highly popular, free apps to work, to say nothing of commercial MV games.
Personally, I think it's best for a developer to focus on iOS and just forget about Android deployment. Saves time, money and peace of mind.

 

[jkweath]

I have a cheap Android phone, and I can't get a lot of highly popular, free apps to work, to say nothing of commercial MV games.
Personally, I think it's best for a developer to focus on iOS and just forget about Android deployment. Saves time, money and peace of mind.

My problem is that, while ive read quite a few discussions on Android deployment, i havent been able to find a single one on iOS deployment. And since i dont have an iphone im reluctant to try doing any iphone game since i wouldnt be able to test it.

I will say on android development though that MV games will run smoothly on any phone with specs at or better than the Samsung Galaxy S6. S5 should be fine too but ive never tested it. But yeah, i did plenty of testing on low end phones like yours and it didnt turn out well.

At the moment im developing my 2nd game for android, if anyone is interested ill do a write up of my experience with my first MV game and what to expect if you do decide to develop an MV game for android.

 

[Matseb2611]

Yes. MV Games on iPhone rock. I am in the process of making one. I cannot speak to android export, but for iPhone MV is a truly superior platform. Combined with Cordova you can do unimaginable things very fast and easy. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask. I can step you through the entire process of getting your game in the AppStore if you need some guidance and info.

Thanks. Well, I know there's this lengthy process as detailed on this help page, but since I'm no programmer, it's a little tricky and I was looking to hire someone to do it, but so far not found anyone.

 

[ACECORP]

I can help you. You can hire me. We can discuss via phone or Skype call, write up an sow and get you a quote. I can help you do what you need to do easily.

Thanks. Well, I know there's this lengthy process as detailed on this help page, but since I'm no programmer, it's a little tricky and I was looking to hire someone to do it, but so far not found anyone.

 

[Failivrin]

My problem is that, while ive read quite a few discussions on Android deployment, i havent been able to find a single one on iOS deployment.

I've noticed that too! Just guessing here... It's possible there are no discussions because iOS is so much less complicated. It's also possible those discussions have been buried. I try to use the terms "Apple" and "mobile" when discussing iOS, because ever since the forum updates, the term "iOS" is too short to yield search results.