Mobile gaming is an absolutely massive industry representing approximately 49% of all video game revenue in 2023 to a share of 90.5 billion dollars. A decade ago the running joke was that PC gamers and console gamers needed to get together and stand firm against mobile gaming, but with mobile gaming being the largest individual slice of the pie, the days of an unforeseen future for mobile gaming are behind us. As it stands now, not only is mobile gaming valuable, but mobile advertising is rapidly approaching a 400 billion dollar a year industry.
If you take any single PC or console game and stack it up against a mobile game, 9 times out of 10 the PC/Console game will win in terms of revenue. With the exception of outliers like Honor of Kings which brought in 1.2 billion in 2022, the best performing mobile games average in at roughly 200 million dollars, with the statistical majority doing much worse. With that in mind, the production cost of most mobile games is pennies compared to the development cost of a PC or Console Game.
If you compare Diablo Immortal to Diablo IV, Diablo IV brought in a staggering 1 billion dollars on an approximately $100 million budget and crushed Diablo Immortals $525 million take-home. With that said, DI cost approximately 11% the development cost of D4.
Critics of Mobile Games will point out that the monetization of mobile games is often predatory. I would argue that EA’s current pursuit of advertisements in games is predatory no matter how “thoughtful” they attempt to make it.