O estado da prática dos jogos multiplayer offline para smartphones: um app review na playstore

Abstract

In 2017, the digital gaming industry recorded revenue of US$ 108.4 billion, in which mobile games accounted for more than half of this value ( US$ 59.2 billion). Furthermore the economic relevance, the digital games also have great cultural relevance and they started to entertain, every year, a larger and diversified public.Games that two or more players participate in the same game session, also called multiplayer, are one of the most attractive because competing with people is considered more interesting and challenging than playing against a computer. Games have the ability to bring people together for leisure time. With the use of mobile devices, these moments can happen anywhere. Although, connection between players makes difficult playing multiplayer games, which is usually established using the Internet. Places where there was no network infrastructure available, the online multiplayer games do not work. One mode of games that can resolve this scenario (i.e., more than one player and without of Internet access) is offline multiplayer games. However, this game mode does not yet have much expression in the gaming market. The same happens in the availability of content on this modality of game, mainly in academic environment. Within this context, a research was done on the state of the practice of multiplayer offline games for mobile devices. The main goal of this research is to characterize them, providing an overview on this game mode. To this end, the App Review methodology was adopted, in which research questions were specified and a review protocol was developed. Subsequently, the selection and extraction of game data was done, as planned in the review protocol. Finally, the data were organized and analyzed in order to answer the initially specified questions. It is concluded that the games investigated have about 92% of monetization related to in-game ad serving. The way players connect is via Bluetooth, or through local networks or sharing the same device. The highlights categories are action, board and sports. Most of the multiplayer offline games have the dynamics of competing in a sport to win, to plan and execute a tactic, and to solve problems that require logic, reasoning, or analytical thinking. The multiplayer offline games have mostly free indicative rating and the interaction between players is predominantly competitive.