Hello, I am making a game that I am planning to publish around September/October 2025. Also GTA6 might come around the same time. Although my game is nowhere anything close to something AAA like GTA, but I was still wondering if there could be any market influence on overall game markets (including small phone games) because of big title games. My game will have in-app purchase.
Anyone has any experience on how another big game influenced the game market before for small phone games?
No personal experience, but I can recommend checking out this article, a part of it in the second half is answering a similar question. Although this article (and the blog in general) is first and foremost dedicated to PC games, I believe it won’t matter that much in the context of your question, assuming you’ll consider the general idea behind the answer reasonable enough.
You don’t say what kind of game you’re making, which would have a lot to do with the impact a GTA launch might have on your game.
If you’re planning a game with immersive content where you expect players to have hour-long play sessions and your target audience has a lot of crossover with GTA players, you might be in trouble, but if you’re working on a hyper-casual game that people dip into for a few minutes when they’re killing time, then you shouldn’t have any problem at all.
You also don’t say what kind of pre-launch marketing you’re doing, which is critical if you want to make a big splash on launch day. My observation is that this is waaaay more important on Steam where everyone is trying to get wishlists and preorders. Indie Game Business has a lot of interesting information, but it is heavily weighted towards medium-sized teams making PC games for Steam.
I believe Michael Jackson -may God rest his soul in peace- deserved his fame, iPhone or smart phone invention in general deserved the success, Hot Dogs, Burgers, Pizzas, Dubai Chocolate deserve eternal success, and many people, products, inventions out there deserve the level of success they reached …
And why is that? because simply people liked and loved them
Same thing in Gaming World, even if your game is a few lines of code like Tetris or Flappy Bird, or looks simple but addictive like Candy Crush then if it deserves success then it will succeed, but people have to know about it…
People knowing about it could cost you from 0 to millions of marketing Dollars based on your luck, but a game with a billion dollar marketing campaign would not succeed if it is not good enough
Roveo and angry birds story is a good example
ID Software with Doom changed the entire world of gaming, undergrad geniuses with no finance.
In this domain (Gaming Domain) there are no limits, but similar to any other market or domain, there are always big players and small players, and most big players used to be small
Good luck with your game
Thank you all for all the information, the articles were helpful, I will keep in mind when I publish the game.