Playground Games sees benefit in mobile

Forza Horizon 3 studio Playground Games said it considered making games for mobile, but that it won’t be racing to abandon consoles any time soon.

Speaking to MCV, CEO Gavin Raeburn stated that while mobile games have been fantastic” at widening the gaming population, Playground’s been hesitant to enter mobile development because titles are so hard to monetise.

To us, console games are predictable,” he said. We’d go to conferences, and we’d always be told, ‘console is dead. Everyone is going to be playing on mobile,’ and we just thought, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s gonna be the case,’ and it hasn’t been. But what it has done is pull a whole new audience of people into gaming. My daughter plays Minecraft on her iPad. I’m not sure ten years ago my daughter would have necessarily played games, but everyone seems to be playing games, and that’s fantastic.

We would like to have created a game that was for gamers on mobile but they’re really, really hard to sell. Mobile is about ‘How do you make money quickly?’ and that just was not for us. There will always be breakout hits. You’ll always get a Crossy Road. But I wouldn’t want to bet my career and my team on it.”

That said, Raeburn definitely sees the advantages of going into mobile development, adding that developers with mobile experience will become valuable assets when they re-enter triple-A development.

When we’ve seen larger teams go out of business, there’ve been people with redundancy money that have [started] their own small teams, and some of those will go on to be great, and some will not. But those people then come back onto the marketplace and will be going back into the triple-A teams with some good experience.”

To read our full interview with Playground Games, head over to this week’s issue of MCV.