It’s always the same story: I come across some freaking good iphone game with a new concept, new kind of controls and new gameplay and I am stunned. I ask myself how can I live without it and I download it. Three days later I end up regretting the impulse purchase.Why?
The iPhone is an excellent game platform: it has a nice screen, multitouch, accelerometer, thousands of games at ridicolous cost. And I always carry it with me, so I can play wherever I am. Sounds like the perfect console.
Problem is, I download a game and quickly become an addicted, but this lasts only a few days and i stop playing it, sometimes I play with it one week or two, but no more. I am pretty young and I was the perfect age when there was the boom of the “first” consoles, the PlayStation 1, for example. I remember I played some games for months, of any kind. I wasn’t an addicted player, but this didn’t stop me from gaming daily
I tried several kind of games: classic arcade, drawing games, FPS, tower defense, strategical, puzzles, music games, and so on. Maybe the one I played more are tower defense, but I no longer play with them because they bore me now. Games like Minigore, EliminatePro, PocketGod, Rolando, Tap Tap Revenge, JellyCar2 don’t make me anxious to play with them despite being huge App Store hits. Yes, I open them but only when I’m waiting for something and have 5 free minutes.
I know there’s a big difference from the longevity of Playstation games and iPhone ones, but this still scares me. Some strategy (RTS) games have hundreds of maps, and this applies to puzzles too. In theory you can play forever without stopping. In theory, because you’ll (probably) won’t. I am speaking for myself and I don’t know if what I am saying can describe your habits, however I do read similar stories on a daily basis.
One of the reason, probably, is the vastness of the market with huge number of games released each day. They cost only few dollars and they attract me too much.
Yesterday I came across a graph by PinchMedia showing that after only one week most apps (and games) are dropped and never opened again. So I can assume this happens to – most – of the iphone gamers. It’s a bit old (February 2009), but I don’t see many reasons of why the trend should have changed in the last ten months. The graph is below:
My question is – why? I didn’t figure out an acceptable answer. This is a nice question and I wonder why nobody else has found out a solution. This trend is kinda scary.
Did you experienced the same? Maybe my considerations are too much focused on my own game experience, so I’d love to hear more from you. Pro gamers and casual ones.
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