I have been waiting for the worlds of HD and mobile to collide, and to some degree, over the past decade, there has been convergence. Blue Archive and Umamusume Pretty Derby do well on Steam, while titles like Star Trek: Fleet Command and Raid: Shadow Legends appear to be building a stable audience around a PC client.
Of course, there’s the true reflection of this trend in dual-SKU products like Genshin Impact or, for a brief period, Call of Duty: Warzone. It’s also worth noting that dual-SKU titles like Fortnite and Roblox are impressive data points, even though both have a single-platform dominant share.
To the extent that they’ve unified, it has been a result of the model shift, where long-term monetization via service-based mechanics maximizes revenue. Internally, we’ve also seen this reflected in labor profiles. It’s very common for PC and console developers to hire now Directors of Product: roles that didn’t exist 10-15 years ago. Specific monetization and progression designers are also now essential, even for single-player titles.
Mobile also started to become friendlier to strong creatives. If you don’t know the founding force behind Monopoly Go, he falls under this category, so certainly would Second Dinner founder Ben Brode.
All of these cases still seem more like proof of concepts than actual paradigm shifts, though, or any evidence of a convergence moment between the two platforms. The big wedge, the divide that doesn’t seem to be crossed, is user acquisition. The most compelling evidence for this is the difference in the budget shares between the two projects dedicated to acquiring users.
Downfunnel, this doesn’t just translate to budgets and user acquisition specialists. It also forces mobile studios to have their analytics house in order. Mistakenly, mobile gets referred to as a “margin game”. Of course, PC and console is a margin game too. However, in mobile, cohort-level cost-benefit analysis is not only possible, but it’s also the essential ingredient that scales marketing.
I’ve rarely seen PC and console developers primarily focus on metrics on a cohort basis. Instead, load the home page of most PC and console title analytic dashboards, and the first metric will be something like week-over-week retention.
Many startups are working to add cohort-level marketing attribution to PC & console. There’s no reason, for instance, that you couldn’t install the Adjust SDK into a PC or console game. Indeed, I’ve seen some developers do this! However, the results never seem reliable, and the CPIs remain inconsistent. Remember that the funnel challenges for PC/console are much greater than direct on-device links to complete a download on the trusted App Store. If this gets solved, singularity awaits.