Sorry this is long, but it explains well why I’m interested in this topic.
Say you’re making a game of a well known genre and you need to determine which platforms (PC, Mobile, Console, etc.) your game will support. The first thing you consider is how many players use each platform on Roblox as a whole. Now I don’t know what this distribution is, but I’ve heard many users are on mobile, so you may consider supporting mobile as you won’t limit the vast majority of players from playing your game. This is a good start, but that decision is based on a global distribution while your game will attract some sample distribution. This is where the discussion becomes interesting. What you really want to know is if your game genre attracts more or less users from a platform because this would help you understand whether it is actually worth supporting a particular platform.
Here’s an example. Let’s suppose that the average game attracts players from 20% PC, 70% mobile, and 10% console. That’s a baseline. Now suppose your game genre would attract 50% PC, 20% mobile, 30% console. If you knew this was true, you may consider tailoring your game towards higher-end hardware such as PC and console and accept a 20% player loss for mobile. Conversely, if the distributions were 18% PC, 80% mobile, and 2% console, you might drop support for console to save yourself time and effort.
The question becomes this: How do we learn these distribution of platforms for each genre?
The answer involves mining the developer statistics for all games in each genre, but no user has this capability, so Can ROBLOX engineers do this analysis to provide more insight for game developers?
What are your thoughts? Should all games support all platforms? Are there any game genres that mobile users play the least? Someone write a paper on this please!