Console developers need to look at Dungeon Keeper and learn

February 9th, 2014, 22:10 Posted By: wraggster

"We don't have a mobile gaming industry anymore. We have a mobile scamming industry."So said Thomas Baekdal in a column last week, swinging for the head of a nail with a strike so true that I found myself letting out an involuntary splutter of agreement.It wasn't so long ago that mobile gaming - and by extension tablet gaming - was the great white hope. Amidst the stagnation of traditional console and computer games, mobile was a hotbed of imagination and innovation where none of the usual rules applied. As the big old studios and publishers disintegrated, mobile allowed the smartest survivors to land on their feet and make the kind of games they and we really cared about.Nowadays it's a very different picture. There are a few people still doing good work on mobile (Simogo and the guy behind Blek are the first two that spring to mind), but the majority of smart indie developers have moved on to Steam or been signed up by Sony. They leave the mobile app stores to a new breed of business optimisers engaged in what increasingly feels like a pitiable race to the bottom. A few of these people are making a lot of money, but at what cost?The latest example of their output is Dungeon Keeper, which joins Electronic Arts' burgeoning shop of horrors. EA draws more attention than most when it tries this stuff because it uses cherished properties like Ultima to do so, and it should know better, but in many respects it's no worse than the likes of King and Zynga, who exist primarily to behave this way rather than just dabbling in it.

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