In an overcrowded mobile game market, why aren’t more developers making digital playt

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...umsy-Ninja.jpgClumsy Ninja is the App Store hit which turns the titular assassin into a kind of physics-powered virtual pet.

With so many studios lamenting the current state of the mobile games market, it’s a little surprising to find so few actively trying something different. Many millions of new iOS and Android devices were unwrapped and eagerly filled with new apps this Christmas, and yet, compared to the great flood of infinite runners, free-to-play town builders and other familiar mobile fare, apps like Clumsy Ninja and Toca Hair Salon represent the tiniest trickle.They’re digital toys rather than videogames, and their chart performance suggests that creating interactive entertainment for tablets and mobile needn’t rely on traditional videogame structures. If anything, breaking free of familiar game ideas – of challenge, testing player skill, progression and failstates – opens up a broader, more freeform and ultimately more accessible kind of play.The studios behind these games, NaturalMotion and Toca Boca, appear to have have understood this more than most. Clumsy Ninja, Toca Lab and Toca Hair Salon 2 have been fixtures near the top of the App Store charts for weeks, and for good reason – they are all smartly designed apps with high production values and cheery playfulness at their heart. And yet compared to the number of games going live on the App Store every week, there’s a surprising lack of these playthings. Or at least, there’s a surprising lack of digital toys this good.“There are so many blue oceans – unexplored genres that are ready to be invented or re-invented,” says NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil. “We’ve never understood why so many studios just clone other games. You end up competing for the same audience and spending more and more cash on user acquisition. The only way to get off that hamster wheel is to create something new and fresh; and preferably something that can’t be easily copied.”

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