"There was an idea - and this was revolutionary at that time - that eventually you'd be able to sell a game on a mobile platform for $10 or even $20" It was a seminal period in the evolution of games as an expressive medium, helping to define and set the expectations of core gamers for years to come. During that period, Smith contributed to System Shock 2, three entries in the Thief series, and he was working for Ion Storm when Deus Ex was first published. His first job in the industry was at Looking Glass Studios, where he stayed for three years, and his second was at Ion Storm Austin, where he stayed for five. That Smith mentions Deus Ex in this context is telling. "It was like Deus Ex or Minesweeper, Quake or Solitaire." "The concepts from traditional games were still basically what defined the medium," Smith recalls. It was the year of Braid, Castle Crashers and World of Goo, the whole industry was on the verge of huge but essentially unknowable changes. When Randy Smith founded Tiger Style Games in 2008, though, what now seems inevitable was still mysterious. In truth, any reasonable doubt that premium priced games would be overwhelmed disappeared years ago - two, three, some might argue even more. But that's only if you trace a line from 2009 to this very moment. If you take the launch of the App Store as a starting point, free-to-play monetisation techniques went from nowhere to ubiquity in the space of just seven years. Free-to-play is now the dominant model in mobile gaming, and to such an extent that it's easy to forget the velocity of its rise.
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