It’s been a minute since I called on a friend
Smartphones are one of the defining technologies of our lifetimes: an innovation that didn’t disrupt the status quo so much as redefine it. Their influence on the game industry has been seismic, too. Not just through sheer ubiquity, though that is clearly a factor. Rather, it is in the way they have democratised game development and publishing. In the old days – you know, 20 years ago – you couldn’t make a game for commercial sale without a development licence from a platform holder. And good luck getting it out there without a publisher. The App Store, and later Google Play, changed all that, and the industry had little choice but to follow suit.
In just a decade, smartphones have redefined the game industry, yet they have also given it a host of problems. One is that, as more powerful hardware and operating systems are released, many games are being left behind. Even before the great ‘appocalypse’ of iOS 11 wiped an estimated 200,000 32bit apps from the App Store, a load of the old classics were fading away, as developers weighed up the cost of keeping their old games updated against the likely revenue from doing so, and decided it was no longer worth it. In Knowledge this month we uncover a new company, GameClub, that’s working by hand to restore those old classics and get them back on the App Store where they belong.
Another element to GameClub’s mission is to correct the perception of mobile games as exploitative Skinner boxes – which brings us rather neatly to our cover star. Sky may be free to play, but it’s a game that looks set to disrupt, just as its host hardware has, our expectations of what games can be. Thatgamecompany’s latest game takes the central theme of Journey – pleasant ambient multiplayer with kindly strangers – and expands on it, uniting up to eight players, drawn from all corners of the biggest videogame audience on the planet, in a beautiful shared world that lives in your pocket. Sky looks beautiful, plays wonderfully, and feels thoroughly important. Our story begins on p58.