This article was written by John Gargiulo, SVP, Business Development + Marketing at BlueStacks.
When I was a kid, the most famous video games in the world were Super Mario Brothers, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, and Legend of Zelda. Today, they are Angry Birds, Candy Crush, and Subway Surfers. These are the games that 10 year-olds today will remember nostalgically when they are 34. The major distinction between these groups of games, of course, is that the former were all played on TVs, while the latter are, for the most part, played on screens no more than 4.5 inches big. There are several reasons why this line in the sand will be washed away over the next two years.
First, there is a perfect storm of technology that has hit just this past year that will serve as a huge enabler. We have reached a point where the pixel density on a smartphone is actually higher than on a 60-inch TV. This has never happened before. This means that games built for mobile phones look fantastic on TVs. With the right code in place to trick portrait apps into displaying in landscape (where possible), almost any mobile game looks like it was graphically designed to be played on the big screen. Android has also taken off both in numbers and in the imagination of the Amazons and Xiaomis of the world to fork it and march forward. For the first time, we are seeing extremely low-cost Android devices like Raspberry Pi and GameStick emerge. The hardware these are built on is getting commoditized very quickly. It is getting easier to bring Android to bigger screens beyond mobile.
Second is the promotion this past year by Amazon, Apple, and (more quietly) by Google of a controller standard for apps. By putting this forward, developers have been encouraged to keep physical controller schematics in mind when designing their games. I have spoken with several developers large and small who have been doing this for some time already. By the time a real vehicle for controller-based mobile-on-TV distribution becomes available, developers will be ready.
Third is the pure demand for this gaming content that has gone from zero to the moon in just five years. The people who are obsessed with Candy Crush Saga or Deer Hunter 2014 want this IP however they can get it. Why not on their flatscreen TV? So what’s holding things back? Why hasn’t this happened already?
One thing that’s important to remember is how fast all of this has been happening. The iPad only came out in 2010. The AppStore was born not long before that. Growth and innovation in the content and technologies making up the mobile gaming space has been epic (though some argue the content side is slowing down). It is only now that all the players have caught their breath and, concurrent with the technical perfect storm mentioned above, begun realizing they can work together to massively expand the screens on which we play “mobile-first” games.
There is also the matter of the Microconsoles, an apt term coined by Friend of the Casual Connect Community Tadhg Kelly. The introduction of Ouya, GamePop (full disclosure: our company BlueStacks has launched this one), Gamestick, and others represents the opening act of a larger show that will play out larger and larger over the coming years. While I won’t pretend to predict the winner of this race – and there very well might be more than one, it seems apparent that this is a category that is coming. In five years, that fact that mobile-first IP is on our TVs will seem as obvious a development as in-app purchases were a few years back (they were not).
In conclusion, there are a myriad of reasons why the white-hot content developers are building for mobile will be headed to your TV soon. How it gets there, who brings it, and the timing are anyone’s guess. However it happens, like the rapid development of the smartphone gaming ecosystem itself, it will certainly be fun to watch.
John will be at Casual Connect Europe next week discussing user acquisition secrets with people from some of the most popular games on iOS and Google Play. Find out more on the conference website.
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