Ratchet & Clank and Resistance developer Insomniac Games announced earlier this week that it was opening a new division, Insomniac Click, dedicated to web and mobile games. The company is clearly intent on expanding — it entered a publishing partnership with EA Partners last year, breaking a 16-year run of PlayStation exclusive. CEO Brian Hastings has now explained that its move into the social/mobile space is due in part to the core gaming audience not growing as it needs to.
“I’m not in the doom-and-gloom camp in terms of the health of the console market, but I do think it’s becoming increasingly challenging in that space,” he told CasualGaming.biz. “It’s getting to the point where only the very best triple-A console games are profitable. And, of course, it’s increasingly expensive to make the very best games. So not every developer can survive. But they’re not giving away free money in the social and mobile space either. You still have to compete with the other top teams in the industry.”
So while doing social or mobile games isn’t a guarantee of success, there is a larger audience to be reached with them. “The main reason I believe it’s important — even necessary — to expand into the social sector is that there is simply a bigger audience there. Because triple-A games are necessarily complex they have a fairly predefined audience of core gamers. That core audience isn’t really expanding much and the total dollars each core gamer spends isn’t going up, so as triple-A budgets inflate, each developer has to steal players away from other games in order to simply keep their revenues above their costs. The only long term viable solution for all parties would be to expand the audience.
