Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox’s portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.
There are some proper games for the phones. Most of them are ports like disco elysium, octopath traveller or balatro, but because the dont get a lot of downloads in app store and google play, the platforms tend to push free games over them. And that makes sense for them, because they also profit from every transaction and ad that those games show. Quality single pay games just have one purchase per player and the audience for them is way smaller.
I personally as a consumer see so much wasted potential with mobile games. I remember when i had one hand held machine for tetris and another machine with shmup while my tamagotchi was dying somewhere. When i got gameboy it was crazy how i could take multible games with me when going on a long trip. Now we have almost always in our pocket a machine with multitudes more power than anything back then, but because how apple and google have build their enviroments devs dont have incentive to make quality single purchase products because they wont get the visibility they need.
Sites like itch.io are too small to make a difference. It would need some big player like Steam to add mobile game category in to their app, but apple and google are making it really tedious to install and update anything outside their own controlled enviroments that understandably serve for their biggest audience, who are children.
I broadly agree with what you are saying here, but, I think you are overlooking or perhaps unaware of something.
The Steam Frame.
It has its own internal ARM chip, is capable of running smaller games entirely self contained within itself.
And… as Proton is a translation layer that makes Windows games run on Linux… Valve has been massively either themselves aiding development of, or funding development of a similarish kind of translation layer (FeX) that converts x86 calls to ARM.
Which can also work in tandem with, layered with Proton.
So that means that a Steam Frame is technically capable of running many .APK (Android) games.
So… while things are tumultuous right now with the RAMpocalypse… Valve is laying the groundwork, in technical capacity, for mobile games to be broadly playable on its hardware, so its much less of a stretch to imagine that they could at some point open up an APK section on Steam’s storefront.
In what world is Sony a monopoly when Nintendo exists?
The Switch 2 is not a dedicated home console but it is a console
Don’t get me wrong, consoles are dying too, memory prices have gone up and Sony is already shifting from making money from consoles to making money from subscriptions
Nintendo is just doing their thing and becoming the Apple of the videogame industry
Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox’s portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.
Ah fuck I forgot about mobile and I hate to consider it.
Yeah. That old lady spending £3000 a month on gems for “Royal Candy Blaster Treasure Blitz Origins” is the gaming industry now. :(
There are some proper games for the phones. Most of them are ports like disco elysium, octopath traveller or balatro, but because the dont get a lot of downloads in app store and google play, the platforms tend to push free games over them. And that makes sense for them, because they also profit from every transaction and ad that those games show. Quality single pay games just have one purchase per player and the audience for them is way smaller.
I personally as a consumer see so much wasted potential with mobile games. I remember when i had one hand held machine for tetris and another machine with shmup while my tamagotchi was dying somewhere. When i got gameboy it was crazy how i could take multible games with me when going on a long trip. Now we have almost always in our pocket a machine with multitudes more power than anything back then, but because how apple and google have build their enviroments devs dont have incentive to make quality single purchase products because they wont get the visibility they need.
Sites like itch.io are too small to make a difference. It would need some big player like Steam to add mobile game category in to their app, but apple and google are making it really tedious to install and update anything outside their own controlled enviroments that understandably serve for their biggest audience, who are children.
I broadly agree with what you are saying here, but, I think you are overlooking or perhaps unaware of something.
The Steam Frame.
It has its own internal ARM chip, is capable of running smaller games entirely self contained within itself.
And… as Proton is a translation layer that makes Windows games run on Linux… Valve has been massively either themselves aiding development of, or funding development of a similarish kind of translation layer (FeX) that converts x86 calls to ARM.
Which can also work in tandem with, layered with Proton.
So that means that a Steam Frame is technically capable of running many .APK (Android) games.
So… while things are tumultuous right now with the RAMpocalypse… Valve is laying the groundwork, in technical capacity, for mobile games to be broadly playable on its hardware, so its much less of a stretch to imagine that they could at some point open up an APK section on Steam’s storefront.
In what world is Sony a monopoly when Nintendo exists?
The Switch 2 is not a dedicated home console but it is a console
Don’t get me wrong, consoles are dying too, memory prices have gone up and Sony is already shifting from making money from consoles to making money from subscriptions
Nintendo is just doing their thing and becoming the Apple of the videogame industry
No, many of them will go to PCs or Sony over giving up
One can only hope