Chapter 561: Mobile MOBA
On forums and discussion boards, there were almost daily posts complaining about being screwed over by some useless teammate, asking when the elementary school kids would go back to school...
Indeed, every weekend or holiday, many people could feel a noticeable increase in the probability of encountering terrible teammates.
Many also said, "Chen Mo, you should hurry up and implement an identity verification mode. Don't let elementary school kids log into the game. It's infuriating!"
To this, Chen Mo always just laughed it off. Are you kidding? Elementary school kids are also one of my important player demographics. Those kids work hard to save up their New Year's money—if I don't take it, am I even human?
When it comes to players, you have to treat everyone equally!
However, although "League of Legends" now had a portion of elementary school-aged players, their numbers were still too small. The true core players of "League of Legends" were still young people between 16 and 26.
While the number of female players and elementary school-aged players in "League of Legends" was higher compared to other games, Chen Mo was clearly still unsatisfied.
In the parallel world, mobile games and VR were both highly developed, and they could shake the position of MOBA games.
Because this type of game inherently had strong exclusivity. Once players got used to one MOBA game, they would find it very uncomfortable to switch to another.
So, the idea of porting MOBA games to mobile platforms emerged.
Indeed, two or three game companies were already working on it, but the finished products weren't good. The experience was inferior to PC, so they never became popular.
For Chen Mo, the timing was about right. If he let these game companies keep fumbling around, there would definitely be some designer who could successfully recreate a relatively polished MOBA work on the mobile platform.
Obviously, Chen Mo wasn't going to give them that chance.
...
Many mobile game designers at Dìcháo Interactive Entertainment and Chányì Interactive Entertainment were studying how to port MOBA games to mobile phones, and they were privately discussing it.
"Have you heard? The concurrent player count for 'League of Legends' has hit another new high. It's now dominating the MOBA genre. The core fun of this type of game shouldn't be hard to replicate."
"But there are a few problems that are hard to solve! We've tried several solutions, but the controls just don't feel right."
...
Many designers were considering how to port MOBA games to the mobile platform, but no perfect solution had been found yet.
These people's design plans were mostly based on the template of "League of Legends." Since "League of Legends" had achieved tremendous success on PC, its game design philosophy and numerical models had already been proven to be very successful designs, so most designers chose to follow them.
However, exactly how to adapt it to suit the characteristics of the mobile platform was still puzzling many designers.
On one hand, there were control issues. For example, how should players move and attack? How should they select the target they want to attack? How does the game determine whether the player wants to hit a hero, a tower, or a jungle monster?
Moreover, casting certain specific skills could also be quite troublesome. For instance, Lee Sin could very smoothly perform an Insec kick on PC, but on the mobile platform, this operation was a bit too masochistic.