This is a very dumb and transparent twisting of words. I didn't say iPhones don't count as gaming handhelds because they can also run Snapchat, I said they don't count because people buy them primarily to run Snapchat; any gaming usage is almost incidental. Your IT guy who played NFL Blitz on the train, is that why he bought his iPhone? Because that's why somebody would buy a Deck.
Recent adventure with handheld consoles took me back to Apple
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I'll take that bet.
People simply aren't ready, and may never be ready to spend AAA gaming prices ($60-70) for a mobile game. Even if it's the same game. Developers and publishers aren't going to put in the effort simply because there's basically no significant market for what they'd be selling.
Not really swayed by a 6 year old article detailing decades old occurrences.
I have made the supposition, and I stick by it, that the advent of Apple Silicon turns the addressable development market into a conglomeration of Mac / iPad / iPhone rather than them being discrete buckets. There will be a lag time while the tooling and engines are spun up to accommodate this new paradigm, and that's a multi (5? +?) year effort to get the pieces in place, but once that occurs the addressable market becomes "every AS Mac and every iPad and every iPhone" which is a huge user base.
I find the "but that's not why they bought it" argument to carry zero weight. If you have the device, and it can very competently execute the task asked of it, what's the difference? I bought a Switch in no small part to play NES / SNES games. Guess how much use that's going to get now that I can run them via Delta on my iPhone using a little match-box size bluetooth controller? Is that gaming illegitimate because I'm playing it on my phone, a device I bought to do many tasks, one of which is gaming, as opposed to dedicated gaming hardware? I have a Windows gaming tower where I play games that are appropriate for the form factor and horsepower, but the continued evolution of mobile gaming capability has significantly cooled any desire or need that I have to acquire another device for on-the-go entertainment.
And the "incidental" phrasing betrays an incredible myopia for what millions and millions of people buy smartphones for, especially once you step away from the "middle age male" demographic.
See above regarding the significant market piece
. A key difference is that it's not "a mobile game" but rather "a AAA game that you can play on Mac / iPad / iPhone".I guess my larger point boils down to "don't bet against the smartphone". We've seen a number of axis where it started with scoffs of "hah, those little toys, they'll never replace <insert item here>" and then a couple years later, no one buys compact cameras. Ever retreating pockets of "physics is an iron master and I have professional needs".
And in those 6 years, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal both launched day 1 on iPhone. I should totally go back and revise my post to reflect the massive shift in the gaming landscape, and how the iPhone has emerged as a AAA gaming powerhouse that Sony and Nintendo would be fools to ignore.
You missed the point entirely. I posted an ancient article on purpose. All those arguments you are making today, I've heard them all before. 6 years ago. Even 16 years ago. Whether it's PPC or Altivec, or the transition to Intel, or AS, Apple is serious about gaming, and this new technology Apple is pushing will change everything. Seriously guys, this time things will be different I swear. ignore the other 5 times Apple became serious about gaming, but wasn't really. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you showed like an alien from another planet (who spoke English) those Mac vs. PC commercials from the 2000's and said, one of these companies is really big on gaming and the other is completely indifferent, almost anti-gaming. The alien would then tell you, "that's easy, this Mac is the company that loves and supports gaming!" LOL!
Blizzard is another company that always put their games on Mac, up until 2016 or so.
Maybe I'm just old, but I don't like phone games. I think social media or Youtube rules on the phone and if you're a little more intelligent it's a good way to browse through articles or even get in a bit of professional education during downtime.
Blizzard is another company that always put their games on Mac, up until 2016 or so.
Maybe I'm just old, but I don't like phone games. I think social media or Youtube rules on the phone and if you're a little more intelligent it's a good way to browse through articles or even get in a bit of professional education during downtime.
This sounds dangerously close to those "If you plug in a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to a smartphone, you just need one device. Nobody really needs a laptop when you think about it, we could just all use our smartphones and plug it into a dock when you want a desktop" arguments to me. I wonder how many people playing games on their phone using an external controller do it for more than about 15% of their gaming. They might use it a lot that way when they first get their 8bitdo, but then usage dramatically drops off after a while, just like Dex mode or whatever else gimmicky way people have come up to use their smartphone like a desktop over the years.
Those shifts away from Point and shoot cameras, iPods etc all happened a decade ago. Apple even HAD an era when the public and developers were all in on gaming on phones. Games like Flight Control and Angry Birds. The Nintendo DS is very clearly a direct response to the threat Nintendo felt from the iPhone. The Vita even more so: it even had many popular mobile phone games ported to it! Apple didn't care to capitalize because they've always felt gaming is beneath them. If the iPhone was going to replace the PlayStation, Apple could've easily done it 10 years ago. But they didn't. So the game console is here to stay.
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Apple has come up with like a dozen different toolchains, frameworks, and new platform architectures over the years to get "real" AAA gaming on Macs. And they gave up on every single one with almost no notice to developers and publishers. But this time, I'm sure they really mean it, and things will be different.
You seem to think Apple Silicon changes everything. It doesn't change a thing, and anyone who has even casually followed the gaming industry can understand why. Technology has never won a console war, at least not for 30 years. The most powerful hardware means nothing if you don't foster close relationships with developers to get games. The best hardware in the world is meaningless without games to play. Apple is always going to be Apple, and will always Sherlock their best game developers, and stick a giant middle finger to the rest. Nobody wants to invest $100 million to develop a game for a platform partner like that. Even your own damned examples of gaming on the iPhone involve emulating 30 year old ROMs where nobody is making any revenue.
I mean, JFC, the only reason you are even playing games on your iPhone is because Apple is feeling the heat from the EU, so opened up their App Store to a whole class of apps they never allowed before to head off some anti-trust regulation. Apple doesn't like gaming, they don't support it at all on their platforms in any meaningful way. Gaming for Apple is one of those "Ok, let's hold our nose and do this thing, because people expect us to" kind of things.
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LOL...I may do that when my laptop finally dies. Though to be honest, it's 5 years old now and working great. I think it has at least 2 more years in it, if not 5 more.
See above regarding the significant market piece
No really, people absolutely do not see it that way. Because it's not "a AAA that you can play on iPhone," it's "a AAA game that you have to play on iPhone." This is reflected in every discussion about RE4 Remake or RE Village that I've seen, and it's reflected in their performance on the app store. RE4 costs $60, and it has managed a grand total of... 350 reviews since it launched in September. It may not be a fair association, particularly with today's hardware (iPhone Pro Max has a bigger screen than the Switch, after all), but it certainly seems to be a hurdle that's yet to be cleared.
I anticipate more cross-platform (Mac + iPad + iPhone) universal releases; "buy this game for $60 and play it on any of your Apple hardware". I agree that $60 is a hard sell for games on mobile, even for full-fat AAA titles. When the toolchains are fully mature, and it becomes "port once and run on every Mac / iPad / iPhone", and the off-to-college entry model MacBook Air has equivalent grunt of a current gen PlayStation...? The paradigm has changed with the advent of Apple Silicon, with some amount of lag time for the game production toolchains to update. Big ships to steer, 5+ year time horizons, but I am bullish on it happening (and I think the new Assassin's Creed release is a good canary!).
You clearly know virtually nothing about the gaming industry. Microsoft heavily encourages their developers and publishers to allow cross-purchases on Xbox and PC. Buy it once on PC, play it on Xbox One, Series S, Series X and Xbox Two or whatever, Sony doesn't encourage cross-purchase in any real way, but do allow it. Guess which platform requires you to buy and download separate versions for PS4 and PS5 for the vast majority of games?
You can even accidentally buy and even install the PS4 version of a game while browsing the store on a PS5 if you aren't careful. Xbox will automatically download the right version for you regardless of which device you buy it from (aka Smart Delivery). You think game publishers will let you play on iPhone for free if you buy on Mac unless Apple pushes it from the top? Really? What world do you come from, dude.Here's a question for you, if you have one of Apple's own apps that costs literally hundreds of dollars, Logic for Mac, do you get the iPad Pro version for free?
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Nintendo has been mobile gaming for about 15 years before DS even came out. Doubt the iPhone made Nintendo say "hey, we should do gaming on small handheld devices"
The feature set of the DS was unlike any Nintendo handheld before, the focus on casual gaming with titles like Brain Age and Nintendogs, and bite-size experiences like those sold on the DSi store I think were a response to non-hardcore gamers being siphoned away by mobile gaming. Initially, they didn't even mean to replace the prior handhelds with the DS. If you rewatch the initial marketing and messaging from Nintendo, the Game Boy line was supposed to coexist (in the form of the GBA) with the DS. The DS was meant for advanced, experimental games and the Game Boy line for more traditional games/gamers.
Well, this gets back to the response you received earlier from Schpyder about how games designed for a 50" screen played on a controller are not fungible with games that are playable and designed for 6" with a touchscreen as the only guaranteed form of input and sometimes a controller is available. You really don't get gaming if you think someone will just as easily swap one experience for another, and be equally happy playing the same game on both. Some gamers won't even play certain types of games on the same 50" screen using the exact same gaming hardware if they are forced to use a controller instead of kb/m! You really don't get this culture, do you.
They are definitely discrete buckets as far as video games are concerned. I mean, sure, yeah, iPhone is huge for gaming by revenue. But that's a bunch of sales of $3 time waster games whose revenues are artificially inflated by whales who have to own every single costume or sticker. Not $70 AAA games.
For someone who probably pays a 20% premium for a Mac over a PC because there is a qualitative difference in using one compared to a PC, it's really baffling that you just refuse to acknowledge there's a difference between mobile gaming and console gaming. I guess you're being an elitist gatekeeper for thinking a PC with a Mac OS theme applied to Windows "isn't a real Mac!"?
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The DS entered development in 2002. You’re really trying to argue that 2002-era mobile games had any influence whatsoever on Nintendo, arguably the most insular electronics company ever? Remember, this is the company that gave us the Virtual Boy.
I can absolute guarantee you that the DS was an entirely internal project and not influenced by anyone outside of Nintendo whatsoever.
I saw those as also being a test case for having a Switch-like experience by hooking up the Pro to an external monitor and power and using a controller. I certainly would have played them that way, but I had some issues dealing with the cabling; supposedly my monitor should work, but maybe I bought the wrong cable. Once more external monitor capable phones are out there, a Switch Dock-esque iPhone dock that took all the complexity out of the equation could be a boon.
I mean, that's a cute idea of something that may happen in the future, to lure people wholly-ensconced in the Apple Silicon ecosystem into buying AAA games that would play across all 3 devices. Does any game cross-license that way now? And mark my words, nothing about this sort of cross-licensing is a technical issue that AS helps solve. Other storefronts are already way ahead of Apple in this sort of multi-platform licensing. As LDM mentions, you have XBO/XBS/PC cross-licensing (important to note on the PC side that that's only through the PC Xbox store, or possibly the MS Store app). But you also have Steam, where buying a game gives you access to the PC version, and (when available) the Mac version, Linux version, and/or SteamOS version. None of this is hindered by architecture, it's entirely a business decision made by the publisher. Simply having similar silicon doesn't do anything to resolve the main barrier to putting AAA games on the iPhone/iPad, which is somehow making them playable with a touchscreen interface.
What mobile gaming was siphoning away casual gamers when Brain Age and Nintendogs both released in 2005? This is ahistorical nonsense that completely gets the order of events bass-ackwards.
This is how the DS was initially marketed before release, but given its backwards compatibility with GBA titles, it absolutely cratered demand for that system in the first years after release, and quickly became their mainstay portable system.
The concept for the DS changed dramatically over its lifetime. It started out as something dramatically different than the final, DSi XL version. They did a complete reboot of the concept with the DS Lite, and they kept iterating. Those iterations definitely took into account the changing mobile gaming landscape.
Nintendo is indeed very insular, but they do occasionally respond to a changing marketplace. Again, I encourage you to review the early marketing. The DS was meant to coexist with future iterations of Game Boys, but they dropped that idea once they realized how popular the DS was. The initial acronym stood for "Developer System" and was intended to be for experimental video game experiences that wouldn't sell well on a mass market handheld. It eventually got retconned to "Dual Screen" once it became clear that it would replace the Game Boy lineup.
Based on actual inside knowledge? Please do share. I can only go based on observing public statement and actions.
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This might be because most of you are from the US where mobile gaming didn't exist until the iPhone? Mobile gaming was big in other markets on Symbian, Windows Mobile and Java (cross-platform on multiple featurephones). Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, was founded in 2003 for example, and Angry Birds wasn't their first successful title. They had a popular title called Mole War in 2005. King, the company behind Candy Crush, started in 2003 with Java games that were ports of their web-based Flash games. It didn't make much of an impact on sales, but I'm mentioning it because it captures the zeitgeist of the game industry at the time: the Nokia N-Gage was launched in 2003. Java and Symbian games were a big global phenomenon that seems to have passed over North America. But I remember at that time, most Americans and Canadians were paying to receive individual SMS messages, so it's not like the region was exactly at the cutting edge of cellphone technology. Don't forget, Nintendo has always been hyperfocused on the domestic market, and some of their weird decisions make sense when you consider how unique the Japanese market is. Softbank, Docomo et al were selling Java games like hotcakes that you could purchase directly on your phone at the time.
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I find this argument relies on a gross misunderstanding of the challenges in video game development and sales.
Firstly, failing to have one binary that runs on multiple platforms is not a limitation currently for increasing sales. So being able to execute the exact same binary on iPad, iPhone and Mac isn't any sort of advantage.
Saying Apple can kill it in gaming because the same binary for a Mac Pro will also work on an iPhone is like saying my movie will be successful if I release it at AMC theatres, because they use Dolby Vision just like in people's home theatres. The addressable market is huge! Yeah, that's not how any of this works.
The costs in development aren't in compiling the binaries nor is it in distribution for multiple versions of the same platform (so much), so you won't be able to be more profitable or make more sales by only compiling the binary once. Publishers are developing, compiling, packaging, and distributing multiple versions of the game today anyway, because they already need to target Xbox, PS, Switch, PC (multiple stores that need their own distribution format), and maybe iOS/Android (again, maybe multiple stores that require their own distribution format).
The costs are in creating the 2D and 3D assets, scripting the gametime events and writing the story, play testing, audio asset generation, and other stuff that's platform independent. All this doesn't get cheaper just because you are only targeting one CPU architecture for Apple in addition to all the other ones you have to target anyway because MS, Sony, and Nintendo don't use Apple Silicon.
Games aren't Xbox exclusives or PlayStation exclusives because it costs too much to target the Xbox if you are developing for Playstation, or it costs too much to develop for PlayStation if you are developing for Xbox. When you are talking about $100 million budgets to develop a AAA game, it's virtually free to target other consoles. Games are exclusives to a platform because the developer is owned by MS or Sony, or MS or Sony showed up with a wheelbarrow of money to the developer's offices. Which 1st party developer does Apple own? I think they've only ever paid for one or two exclusives for Apple Arcade... and even that I'm not sure about. They don't do gaming, they don't care about gaming, they don't want to spend money on games, so their platform will never have enough games that gamers care about. That's what I meant by any gaming that happens on iPhone is incidental.
We've had cross-platform games that are almost functionally identical to each other since at least the 6th gen (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast). And that was across 4 different ISAs (MIPS, x86, PPC, SH-4) during that generation. CPU ISA has been a virtual non-issue for a VERY long time when it comes to developing games, because almost everyone uses middleware, and processor architecture is handled for you by the middleware vendor. Most of the noticeable differences in cross-platform games in the first true cross-platform generation were usually because the GameCube's optical media had way less storage capacity than its competitors: not because 4 different CPU architectures were in use.
But those 4 consoles all used a controller with analog sticks. Now you need to completely redesign your game for iPhone because that is not a given. That takes A LOT more custom development work than checking one extra CPU target when building your game (obviously, yes, I know it's not as easy as that either to target different CPUs). The iPhone/iPad version will ALWAYS be different than the PC/Mac/Linux version, and require a lot more development and testing to make sure it plays ok, because games are designed for controller first, kb/m second, and touchscreen third if at all.
When it comes to coding challenges, using the GPU effectively requires more development time, unless you have a very exotic CPU like the Cell Broadband Engine. But Cell is a once in every few generations types of roadblock to cross-platform development. GPU though, is always different between every console or even gaming PC. iPhone, Mac and iPad all have different enough GPU profiles that you would still need to do some bespoke optimizations for each platform. So the same CPU ISA across tablet, laptop, and smartphone isn't really an advantage if you have to optimize for an iPhone GPU compared to a MacBook Air GPU compared to a Mac Studio GPU anyway. In fact, for this very reason, it can potentially be way harder and more expensive to target for Series S and X than it is to target PlayStation 5 or Switch. The CPU isn't that far off in power between the two, but the GPU is severely neutered in the lower cost machine.
Number two, you look at 10 million iPhones sold a quarter (or whatever), and you think "whoa, that's a really huge market". But it's really not. What percentage of those users will buy Assassin's Creed on iPhone instead of Xbox or PlayStation? Or even buy it at all, because most of those users don't even play AAA games, and don't want to waste $70 on software they aren't even interested in? Looking at the number of iPhones in the wild, comparing it to the number of consoles, and concluding it could replace consoles is as shortsighted as looking at the number of iPhones in the wild, and deciding that iPhones will replace every grand piano that concert pianists use. The hardware's just not built for that, and the platform owner doesn't even really care to do that. But yeah, there's probably a lot of people who are trying out concepts for a new song using a $5 keyboard app on their iPhone that they may perform in one day in concert, and they may even use their iPhone to perform professionally every once in a while if they are in a pinch. Sales of keyboard apps definitely outstrip sales of grand pianos, but sure as hell no one serious is replacing their grand piano with an iPhone.
Saying that a virtual soft keyboard is not the same as a real piano keyboard, "it's not real piano", is not elitism, it's just stating the reality for people who play piano enthusiastically. For people who play casually, it's whatever, sure, a virtual keyboard could work for you. But not for a person who is passionate about piano.
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Honor of Kings pulled down $1.5B in sales last year which beat any title on PS5 or Xbox or Steam, with over 200 million daily players.
You reference that the US market isn't like the global one, but you seem to think the only market other than the US is Japan, as if China doesn't exist at all. Yeah, Honor of Kings may not be the primary reason why you own an iPhone, but it might be the primary reason you upsold to your particular model of phone. Gaming phones are a complete mystery to people in the west, but there are a LOT of people, not just in China, that spend the majority of their phone time playing HoK, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc. all of which are GPU pushing games designed around soft controls (rather than being adaptation from hard control games). These are all games that get ported from mobile to console/PC, but are overwhelmingly played on mobile. Same for a category of rhythm games and a few others.
This doesn't look like a casual game esport event to me.
Honestly, this is at best a rehashing of the 2008 arguments that iPhone would never succeed because it didn't have a physical keyboard, which was taken as gospel for years until users got accustomed to the virtual keyboard and the software figured out the problems users were having and compensated for it.
Sure, Candy Crush has made, what $20B? And yeah, it's a casual game, but a lot of players aren't interested in GTA. My 77 year old dad isn't going to play GTA or buy a PS5, but casual mobile games are pretty much perfect for him, and my Disney obsessed mom will play Dreamlight Valley on her iPad. I suspect just as gamers got pissed when women demanded a seat at the table, a lot of this gatekeeping is just people being pissed that all the dollars aren't going into their preferred FPS and are taking publishers interests into other directions, and demand that gaming maintain a certain purity. This is endemic in the gaming community.
And this is what I bristle with in your posts because you're working very hard to defend a certain ideological definition of games and gaming that isn't congruent with the industry data. I enter this discussion as someone who has been gaming for over 4 decades. I've seen the gaming industry go through phases which included typing in code from the back of magazines, playing over 1200 baud modem, shareware floppy exchange at the computer store 2 cities over, all the way to today. It's never been what you define it as. It was always much broader. Your insistence on AAA titles may capture the revenue sweet spot for PC/Consoles (and miss it completely for mobile) but it also misses the sweet spot for players. We have a PS5, I've NG+ UH HFW. I'm not a shit gamer. But AAA games are rarely what anyone in my family plays - at least for long, mostly because they are kind of hype pretty garbage. It's a great 40 hours of gameplay, and then what? I guess we'll crack open Minecraft again - because that's got that kind of replay value which most AAA titles really don't have. Go check Steam's most played by hours: For last year it's CS:GO, CS2, Dota, BG3, Apex Legends, PUBG, Lethal Company, GTA V, TF2, and Rust. 2 AAA titles, one of which is 11 years old, and most run on Mac. The PS5 list by most users has Minecraft and Roblox in the top 10. Rocket League, Fortnite, Rainbow 6 Siege (from 9 years ago) and again, GTA V from 11 years ago. There's more AAA on there - but not many. Nothing that you've said speaks to this phenomenon at all. And I think we can say that Steam is pretty much on point for where the PC gaming market is. It sure as shit is for the SteamDeck. It doesn't reflect revenue, but it does reflect time. And if iPhone beats all other platforms on game revenue, just imagine what it must look like on time. There's a lot of fucking Candy Crush being played out there. May not be real gamers to you, but it is to a lot of people. As is HoK and Star Rail.
Wow, sorry. I was going to give you a thought out response because you made some unique points that weren't addressed in this thread yet, but then you decided to equate "you disagree with me on how to analyze a business case study" with "you're probably sexist too because you are one of those gamers". No thanks, you and your opinions are not worth my time.
These attitudes might be endemic to "the gaming community", I don't know because I don't really know who you are talking about, but you are not talking to the "gaming community", you are talking to individuals who belong to the Ars community. If you are a regular, long-standing contributor to the Ars community as I am, you almost definitely do not base your opinions on sexism and other forms of bigotry and ignorance. You should know a lot better than that. This type of attitude towards other posters has no place outside of the frontpage comments. A lot of people are making a lot of guarantees about all kinds of things, but one thing I can probably guarantee you is nobody participating in this thread has any sympathy for GamerGate. It's demonstrates severe intellectual poverty that you are painting people who believe in a distinction between hardcore and casual gaming audience with a "they're probably a sexist GamerGate" brush. I don't even get it, your post would have been way more effective if you simply left out "gamers are sexist, hurr durr, it's endemic to their community".
The condescension towards other people who are taking time they could be spending doing literally anything else to respond to your ideas is sickening. You are literally not worth my time.
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Uh huh. Some select quotes:
You leaned into that one for 2 more posts you were so smitten with it.
And yet it has a pretty capable GPU... up to and including ray tracing support, which is super important for Snapchat I hear.
Most iPhone (and Android) gamers don't have a dedicated gaming device, so no, they don't need to. You can do the math pretty simply on that one.
The first action Apple took in response to the EU happened this week. RetroArch showed up today. iPhone was the largest gaming platform by revenue all of last year, and many years prior as well.
But yeah, I'm the condescending one. Your spirit is now so broken you couldn't muster a response. How convenient.
Sure. There are fixed costs irrespective of the number of platforms you target. And yes those costs predominate. But when you’re targeting platform A and platform B comes along that requires little to no effort because it’s the same thing under the hood as platform A , that’s a win.
The other thing we know is that while targeting lots of similar platforms you can treat the art and basic game engine as a one time cost, that doesn’t hold true when targeting too underpowered platforms. When you need to heroically optimize your engine just to get it running on a platform that’s a real cost. When you need to rethink artistic decisions because the art you used on your main platforms is too costly to run on the underpowered target, that too is a real cost. So having iPhone within shooting range of consoles power so that game makers don’t have to rearchitect code and redo art is important.
So on balance I’d argue that having iOS/iPadOS/macOS/tvOS as a singular development target is an asset to Apple even if it’s not a sufficient asset to turn the tide on AAA.
On a separate note my suspicion is that emulators are going to be a shot in the arm for Apple gaming. I know of three people just in my circle of friends who bought or are buying controllers or controller cases just for SNES emulation. Emulation has the potential to break the chicken and the egg situation of no one having controllers because there are no games that make good use of them and no games making good use of them because there are no controllers.
The main problem with mobile gaming like iPhone/Android is the pricing expectations are completely different to conventional AAA titles. You don't buy a $70 iPhone game, you get it free and you plow $70 into it through microtransactions. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on microtransactions (I personally hate the majority of them) but a lot of people are perfectly content with them. People have weird psychological expectations for how things ought to be paid for, even when in the end everyone is forking over $70.
And so making a title that works for the pricing structure of AAA and mobile is nigh impossible. And the criticism around adapting a hard control game to a soft control platform is 100% valid. The platform exclusive titles often go one further and lean into specific hard control features like the PS5 adaptive triggers, which puts them even further from reach. My argument in these situations is that you don't need to develop in this way. Sure, if you're a Sony launch partner you do, but nobody else does. You can make games that don't require having 10 buttons and 2 triggers with 2 shoulders. Most of the games I spend most of my time in require more than that - where porting back from KB+M to controller is a real step down. So you can totally design your game around a touch screen in the same way that we had pre-controller games, controllers with fewer buttons, all the way back to my day where it was a joystick and one button. I remember pre-WASD gaming (first WSAD + mouse aim game was Dark Castle on the Mac). We've been all over the place on controls and there's nothing sacred about the modern control scheme. I'm not sure emulators will change all that much.
I think Assassins Creed Shadows being a direct Mac title is worth watching. Apple renewed their push for games only a year ago. A year is about the minimum you can expect to get a return on that effort. There's a lot they still need to do though. The difficulty of integrating Xcode into a traditional devops environment is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
Off the top of my head, both Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4 can be played across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac with a single purchase.
This argument is finally heating up the platform wars again which is I guess nice...for the battlefront.
I only jump in to say, the only person I know with a steamdeck bought it to play PC titles, because it was more efficient than trying to upgrade a standard PC. especially when he has an extremely capable work laptop that obviates the need for his own capable PC for general computing tasks.
He also has an iPad that is mostly used for graphic design purposes, but he occasionally plays games on, but 90% of his game time is on the Steamdeck. the other 10% is almost all spent on the switch for platform specific games.
He has an android phone too, I don't think it even has one game on it.
So he's clearly not any kind of average, but the point is, his iPad and he phone were never considered to be relevant to his gaming choices.
I only jump in to say, the only person I know with a steamdeck bought it to play PC titles, because it was more efficient than trying to upgrade a standard PC. especially when he has an extremely capable work laptop that obviates the need for his own capable PC for general computing tasks.
He also has an iPad that is mostly used for graphic design purposes, but he occasionally plays games on, but 90% of his game time is on the Steamdeck. the other 10% is almost all spent on the switch for platform specific games.
He has an android phone too, I don't think it even has one game on it.
So he's clearly not any kind of average, but the point is, his iPad and he phone were never considered to be relevant to his gaming choices.
When we were going into Covid lockdowns, I was still working in education and had to routinely remind people that in a LOT of communities in the US, you have families that have one or two internet connected devices and that's the parents cell phone through their data plan. They have no in-house Internet, they may have an old laptop or desktop that they bridge to the phone, and for those households the kids ability to do something like Zoom may be dependent on the parent's ability to not use their phone for however many hours that will take. These households have next to no capability to have a traditional gaming console. They might be able to swing an old PC for Steam games, but not actively networked ones - offline only. They probably do most of their gaming on their phone, because it's probably where most of their discretionary income is going.
I did admissions analysis and policy (among other things). The fraction of college students that have household incomes under $30K would shock you - over a quarter. This expectation that everyone has the income to have a phone and a PC and a Playstation comes from only interacting with a certain subset of society. Willing to bet none of the people with incomes that low ever bother to burn their data plan to post on Ars.
It may seem stupid that these individuals would upgrade to anything other than basic phones, but consider that adding even a $300 PC or console means getting a proper internet plan, which is what $50/mo? $600/yr? Upgrading a phone to a nicer model is a flat outlay and probably a lot cheaper than that internet plan. We dismiss this because the cost of the internet plan is just assumed for most of us. About 15% of the US population don't have internet access other than through their phone. That's about the same number of people just in the US as global gaming PC sales. Probably 10x the number of SteamDeck total global sales.
Not everyone has the same opportunity of choice, is all.
I don't know about that. In my experience using the "native" control scheme for a platform is almost a requirement and the native control for an i* device is the touchscreen. Even within the PC ecosystem how many games require a controller rather than support a keyboard and mouse? I'll grant there are certainly games that play better with a controller but how many actually require one? Not many in my experience. Similarly how many games on consoles require a keyboard and mouse to play? If you look at it from that perspective, I'd argue that for the great majority of games you are just not going to see much uptake since you are by nature of the platform going to have to rely on the touchscreen. You might get away with a simulated controller on the touchscreen for original NES games or other older systems, but as soon as you get into the era of shoulder buttons, implementing them on a touchscreen becomes challenging to the point that a separate controller is almost required and then uptake drops off FAST and the benefit of the mobile device (always in your pocket and with you while on the plane, train, etc.) goes away even faster.
I forgot about those. It's like those tiger electronics games. Everyone at a certain age had one and everyone remembers them fondly. Try one now and it's ugghh, this is just primitive garbage
To further your point. Android had emulators since forever and never really created a huge controller market. In fact, every single emulator goes out of it's way to support touchscreens.
Here's retroarch default "retropad",
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Is a Nintendo handheld "Mobile Gaming" in the same sense as an Smartphone/tablet? I always see the DS, Switch, SteamDeck, and PSPs as Portable gaming. Primarily because they don't do much if anything else (or if they do, they do it extremely poorly.)
I would suggest that they have two different target users and two different things.
I would suggest that they have two different target users and two different things.
You may see them as different demographics, but Nintendo and other gaming companies certainly don't. Pretty much every decision regarding the development of the 3DS forward, and developers of games on handheld are made with smartphone as competition in mind. Even bosses at Nintendo owned/invested companies like The Pokémon Company believed the 3DS would utterly fail in the face of smartphones.
The CEO of The Pokémon Company, Tsunekazu Ishihara, actually did say that to Nintendo during the Switch's development not the 3DS.
"I told Nintendo that Switch wouldn't be a success before it went on sale, because I thought in the age of the smartphone, no one would carry around a game console"
(source)
That was totally wrong, but people were questioning Nintendo after the Wii U failing internationally; I will always feel compelled to point out that it was #1 in Japan until the Switch was officially announced.
"I told Nintendo that Switch wouldn't be a success before it went on sale, because I thought in the age of the smartphone, no one would carry around a game console"
(source)
That was totally wrong, but people were questioning Nintendo after the Wii U failing internationally; I will always feel compelled to point out that it was #1 in Japan until the Switch was officially announced.
I guess they blamed smartphones for the Wii U, other then the bad way Nintendo handled everything.
Brazil loved the master system so much that they still sold them and produced games well into the time of 4th gen era and even into the middle of the 5th gen.
Sometimes a region has a drastically different take on a console than anywhere else.