Is a new Game of Thrones game likely to come out for mobile?

It's a question you might have asked yourself a few times. Why isn't there a brilliant Game of Thrones game for mobile? After all, it's one of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of recent times, not just commercially but critically.

So how come we've only got three GoT games on the App Store, and how come only one of them could even be called “pretty good”? Well, that's the question we're going to be asking in this here article. Mainly because I'm re-watching Game of Thrones and I've been wondering it myself.

What do we have?

Right now there are three games bearing the Game of Thrones moniker on the App Store. There's the pretty good Game of Thrones - A Telltale Game Series, which is entertaining, but definitely isn't Telltale's best work by any means.

Then there's a couple of free to play experiences - Game of Thrones Conquest and Game of Thrones Ascension. In all honesty, neither of these is really worth talking about. They're in the deep end of the casual genre, and hardly representative of the series as a whole.

But what they are representative of is the sheer popularity of the program that they're based on. After all, if you want to make bags of money on the App Store, you do it with casual free to play games that snag the most downloads and the most money. And that's definitely the strategy these two go for.

What do we want?

Cards on the table here, I don't think that an action RPG is going to do Game of Thrones justice. Sure there's action in the series, but that's hardly what it's about. It's about intrigue and skullduggery, it's about backstabbing and making deals. It's about getting in a place before a battle where you're 99% sure you're going to win.

So there definitely needs to be some RPG elements here. There definitely need to be some very hard choices that the player needs to make. And there need to be battles, assassinations, and plots that are trying to ruin all of your best laid plans.

It needs some of the Telltale narrative, but it needs much more than that. There's a part of me that's pretty sure a game like The Banner Saga is the sort of template that develops should be looking at. It's got almost everything that a Game of Thrones game needs.

What will we get?

Well, it's hard to see anyone trying to make another Game of Thrones game for a while. And it's especially difficult to see them making a game set in that universe that gets enough things right to make it worthy of the name.

And since there isn't a new series of Game of Thrones scheduled to land for a good long while, it's possible we're going to have to wait until then for, well, anything new really. The question is whether or not any potential developer is going to use that time wisely.

Will we get the Game of Thrones game that fans of the series are clamouring for? I'll be honest, I don't think it's going to happen. However, there are games out there that might scratch that itch. It's just a shame that they're not going to carry the right name. After all, Game of Thrones does seem to be all about having the right name.