The genesis of mobile gaming was a beautiful time, a traditionally isolated activity combined with the interconnected cloud exploited by mobile devices; to say it changed how we approach gaming would be an understatement. The HTC Dream and the devices that followed opened a whole new world for game developers, using touch control interfaces to explore new angles of game design. True, mobile gaming had been around long before the Play Store, but the 2008 advent of modern mobile games changed the landscape forever.
Remembering this time is quite depressing, considering the state of the Play Store today. Cheap ripoffs, gambling, endless gotcha, and an alarming over-reliance on downgraded ports make up the modern mobile gaming industry’s landscape, and it’s practically unrecognizable. The technology surrounding mobile gaming’s conception has been eclipsed by more conveniently priced PC handhelds, leaving gaming phones in the dust. It’s stunning to realize that the list of games I casually keep on my phone is a pathetic shadow of what it used to be and, even worse, that I have zero motivation to make it any longer.
Is mobile gaming dead with the rise of PC handhelds?
We could one day say goodbye to the Play Store
The root causes of mobile gaming’s downfall
Why is mobile gaming so woeful right now?
The Play Store’s wealth of design problems isn’t helping. It has become such common practice for popular apps to gain a million inferior opportunistic copycats that we no longer consider it abhorrent or even abnormal. Said copies are often cobbled-together, bare-bones experiences that exist as cheap shells to house ads. The Play Store often over-promotes the apps that generate the most revenue, creating a terrible first impression for anyone new to the storefront while making the browsing experience as laborious as possible. You get great games here and there, but these are diamonds in the rough that rarely get a chance to shine.
Everything’s old or ported
A concerning majority of quality products on the Play Store are either absurdly old or ported from somewhere else. Having an app available on multiple platforms is fairly common practice, but when it comes to ports of old games like Final Fantasy being ported to mobile with missing features like controller support, it’s hard to view it as anything other than a downgrade. An inferior version of an existing game that plays better elsewhere is hardly a cause for celebration.
Emulation exists
Emulation apps are also an unfortunate example of this rot. Despite their generally static high standards on the Play Store, emulation apps attained immense popularity by courting nostalgia for older console games, possibly diverting attention away from mobile game development when so many classics are so easily obtained; although Nintendo’s recent legal conflict over Yuzu has brought the future of emulation apps on the Play Store into question.
Touch controls often aren’t good enough
Official ports of classic games also have to deal with in-app touch interfaces that adapt the control layouts of the respective console, which are never as sharp or responsive as their physical counterparts. To be fair, emulators provide useful UI customization options, allowing the user to edit game controls extensively. But ultimately, this can never fully match the split-second feedback of a physical control interface. Why would you pay for an inferior experience? You can’t even say it’s for the best Android gaming phones, which are at risk of becoming redundant thanks to competing handheld devices that run games better.
Not that the traditional safe bets are doing much better; they seem to be getting worse and worse. Call of Duty Warzone Mobile recently dropped on the Play Store, and its reception on Android has been an absolute embarrassment, and even worse on Chromebook. An official Activision-backed entry in the Call of Duty franchise has zero excuse for being this glitchy and shoddy-looking.
Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is a soulless battle royale that isn’t any fun
Poor matchmaking ruins the game immediately, it’s sweat city
It’s not normal for mobile gaming to inspire apathy
Is it?
These days, I struggle to see anything in mobile game development that gets me excited or even interested, and that’s not okay. It’s disturbing to consider that there are people who have never known a mobile gaming landscape other than what it is currently and view its dipping relevance and fading identity as unworthy to note. The Play Store can be a place of innovation and creativity, but only if it stops aggrandizing lazy clones, baiting nostalgia, or peddling glorified slot machines that exist to make as much money as possible off of a free service.
While pretty fed up, I’m not exactly disillusioned with mobile gaming, at least not to the extent that some people are. I do feel for the hard-working developers who work hard to keep the popular apps running and improving with regular patches, as well as the innovative indie devs who are genuinely pushing the boundaries. But I can fully understand why others are completely done with mobile as a gaming platform, given its endless bloat and penchant for monetization. If these sincere developers were given more of a spotlight as opposed to being buried, we may all see gaming on our phones in a new light.
