On Mobile Game Longevity and Detachment - M3CH Interview

Talking to ambitious, talented, indie developers is always a humbling experience: It takes a lot of love, skill, luck, and other impossibly complex factors to complete and produce a successful game – whether that’s defined as “millions in sales,” or, in the case of M3CH developer Small Impact, “just enough to eat.”

The five-person team at Small Impact aims to produce some of the first high-quality, “traditional” gaming content for mobile devices; “I think it’s an untapped niche,” Mitch “Exp” – a veteran of AAA titles – from the team told us, “We’ve seen a lot of ‘social’ games, but not a lot of ‘gamer’ games, Infinity Blade aside.” He has a good point: In our ventures at PAX East and other recent conventions, we’ve heard a lot of discussion on “what can traditional games take from social games,” but very little in the other direction. Gamers have phones, as anyone else, and we’re still waiting for “real” content, battery genocide ignored.

“All these AAA companies ship games like a factory line – they have no attachment to them. There’s a massive detachment from games. I want to see more teams of our size – not quite someone working out of their bedroom, but not a massive studio.”

We’ve seen the problem with mobile game longevity, though, which is perhaps part of the backing reason for a supposed lack of love in the mobile market. When games like Temple Run, Angry Birds, and other toilet-playable games only stay in the eyes of the market for a month, maybe only a week, it becomes apparent how heavily-saturated the market is. The solution to this, Small Impact thinks, is a Minecraftian-styled approach to perpetual content; the plan is to put out “ongoing, changing content,” where the team will add new weapons, game modes, outfits, maps, and whatever else the community wants every month (ideally). This is why I was taken aback when I was told that much of this content would be released for free.

“Let’s be honest – there’ll be in-app purchasing, but we’ll be putting out lots of free content to focus on mech customization.”

Alongside constant content for their game, the team suggests that building entire universes, rather than releases completely independent games, is the key to mobile game longevity – “We’ve had mixed [input] from this, but we’ve even considered doing an RPG, a strategy game, more shooters… we’ve built a story that can spread. We’re pushing M3CH across all channels. It won’t just be a game, we’ve got a soundtrack, comic book, and full story. We’re building a universe.”

Here's the team's idea of where mobile gaming should go, graphics-wise [pre-alpha footage]:

As with a triple-A series or book series, the goal with an ever-growing playspace is to encourage story-investment with players; if gamers are interested in more than just mechanics, the chances of returning for future gaming is far greater (the TES series has proven this, albeit on a much larger scale).

Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and other crowdsourcing mediums are a great way to achieve such objectives; that said, they’re also prone to poor planning and failure on the side of campaign creators. When asked if crowdsourcing had reached its peak or was still growing, Mitch told us that he “[thinks] it’s still growing, but there’s a real danger of professionalism with crowdsourcing [i.e. Kickstarter] – a lot of people are ill-prepared or too niche. We’ve got experience in the AAA industry, we know what it takes.”

If we want the mobile games market to adapt to something that traditional gamers can really enjoy – and I don’t just mean whipping out the phone and playing a game in a failed attempt to not look awkward at a party – we’re going to have to invest ourselves in stories and games that can produce content on a predictable basis.

A Bit About M3CH

The industry’s pretty tough to shake up, but with M3CH’s push onto mobile devices, Small Impact hopes they can alter some of the preconceptions enough to open some eyes. M3CH isn’t your run-of-the-mill “social” game, though; with a focus on one-versus-one combat (or singleplayer campaign), the devs are bringing the action we’ve come to love from shooters to mobile devices.

Here’s a snip from the game’s Indiegogo page:

Make war on your oppressors face to face in the M3CH arena and pilot your way to freedom and super-stardom in a nightmare vision of the future. Fight your way out of the slums. Enter the Tournament. Customise your salvaged M3CH and decimate the mighty pinnacles of M3CH technology in savage M3CH Combat. Own the M3CH arena with a devastating array of Class types, weapons, add-ons and pimp your ride with customisable paint-jobs.

Customization’s big, of course, but it means nothing if the controls are crap. Mobile devices are generally clunky for control schematics due to their inherently small screen space, so to combat this, the team noted that mech combat is generally slower than, for example, Unreal Tournament-esque games, but still faster than most non-hardcore mobile games. In this game, watching the mechs walk around is reminiscent of the way AT-STs lumber through the woods, but map sizes are arena-like and small to keep the game as action-intensive as possible, without sacrificing strategic positioning.

The game currently has six small-scale maps and one multiplayer arena, but we’ll see more as the game progresses.

I’ll let the video tell you all about the story and gameplay:

You can donate to the game’s Indiegogo campaign here. Have questions for the devs? Ask below and we’ll get you answers.

The game is currently being developed for iOS, but there are plans of development for PC or other devices if things go well.