Modern gamers are spoilt for choice. Though some people believe that gaming was better in the past, it’s hard to argue that view when you look at the current gaming climate. Today’s gamers can play a near-endless number of titles across virtually every device they own and can be confident that there will be even more games they love released at some point in the near future.
Given the sheer number of options available, gamers have the luxury of being selective. To get ahead, developers must meet set criteria, some of which we’ll outline below. While a game doesn’t have to meet all of the factors below, it must meet at least one of them.
A Smooth Experience
Back in the early days of the smartphone, people were understanding if a mobile game crashed on occasion. It was entirely new technology, and the fact that you could play any game on the device was an achievement, even if the game ultimately didn’t provide a great experience.
Today, players not only expect a smooth playing experience — they demand it.
The best gaming websites, apps, and titles invest heavily to ensure that gamers feel confident when playing. Ultimately, a player needs to immerse themselves in the story without worrying that the game will crash and their progress will be lost.
Different Gaming Types
Modern players don’t just want to play a game; they want to play it theirway. There’s usually more than one way to play a game, and that’s especially true when it comes to older games that have multiple variations. A player interested in playing those games will expect to have all options at their disposal. Think of an online backgammon website, which will allow players to choose between playing with the doubling cube option or not, or an online blackjack site, which will offer a number of different variants so that the player can play their preferred way. As such, sites that only offer one experience risk alienating players who are looking for something slightly different.
Innovation and Updates
Modern gamers don’t expect that they’re either playing the final version of a game. They expect that it’ll be updated, either to fix bugs or to enhance the playing experience. In the case of backgammon and blackjack, they might look for sites that continually tweak and improve their offerings.
For mobile games, they look for new playing characters or skins to be added. Gamers recognize that if old games such as Minecraft can still receive regular updates, then the game they’ve just started playing surely should, too.
Affordability
Digital gamers have different expectations from the gamers of the olden days when video console gaming was king. Today, gamers look for affordability — they expect that games, minus the biggest console releases, will be priced at a reasonable level. In the case of mobile games, they even expect that games will be free (at least initially). They may still end up paying for the game through in-app purchases, but they want how much they pay for the game to be entirely their choice.
A Challenge
Finally, perhaps the biggest thing that digital gamers look for is a challenge. Many games, especially modern smartphone games, tend to blend accessible play — meaning they’re easy to learn — with a sense of difficulty, which ensures that the player is continually engaged with the game. Think of Candy Crush Saga, which is exceptionally easy to play yet difficult to master; to become the best player for that game, you’d need to best the 2,147,422,679 points managed by Jose Marcos. This ‘accessible but challenging’ attribute can be seen in the games of the past, too, for instance, in the arcade games of yesteryear, which share a lot of qualities with mobile gaming. Pac-Man might be easy to play, but you’d need to dedicate a lifetime to the game in order to break the top 1% of scores.
