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Modding of PC games, although subject to legal and contractual issues in the early years, ultimately proved to be a positive thing for the games industry. It leads to the elongation of sales for boxed products, consumers created content for free, it gave budding artists and developers the means to showcase their ideas and talent and for developers to test ideas and tools.
The mobile gaming market is exploding in size and, with <20% of the world's current mobile phones being smartphones, it still has a long way to go. The rate of adoption of tablet devices is also growing very fast with predictions of there being 600million tablet devices in the market within a few years from now.
EVIL27 Games (my company) is investigating the potential for bringing modding/user-generated content to the mobile gaming space. We believe that aside from the advantages that modding brought to PC gaming, it can also help to overcome the massive challenges of discovery that are faced by small to medium-sized developers/publishers. We believe that if players are motivated to create custom challenges, levels and/or content for mobile games and to then share that with friends via social networks, then this can massively help to overcome the problems of acquiring new users and building a loyal fan base of players.
We are conducting market research to test this idea and would very much appreciate your input as a games industry professional/student.
We have a short (<5mins) survey online at the link below to gather initial data. We will be also conducting consumer research.
We would very much appreciate your time/thoughts. The results of this survey will be made available in due course on www.evil27games.com
Link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/evil27-mobile-modding
Please feel free to shoot any comments, ideas, information of suggestions about this to me directly at mobilemodding@evil27games.com
Many thanks,
Kevin Corti
Chief Evil Officer
EVIL27 Games
@evil27games
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The real snag is how users generate that content. On a PC, it is a lot easier to get at the file system, rip things out of the install folders to edit them and swap in your own custom files, art assets etc. Not so easy on mobile.
If the game is cross platform, the providing modding tools or tools for player created content on the PC, that then also shows up in the mobile version could be a good compromise. Equally, the really hardcore fans who love the game, will probably have a PC and probably be willing to jump through a few hoops to get content into their favourite game
And the monetisation angles for allowing the 'whales' to actually give something back to the game that is their hobby will surely produce impressive sales stats if handled correctly