There’s a lot going on here. I think other devs, Apple, and Google are all going to look at this and say it’s not the type of game people want on their phones, but I’d say that’s the wrong conclusion. If I got an APK included in the purchase of my PC games, I’d play a bunch more games on mobile, but even some of those that have mobile ports are no longer compatible with modern Android. Even some of those that still are compatible do not work with controllers, and many of those have bad touch controls. And if you narrow down that library of great games to the ones that still work and have good controls, it’s always an inferior version of the game by way of being the mobile version of it. There’s no easy standard to dock it like the Switch or to transfer saves like Steam cloud saves.
If you want this type of game to do well on mobile, Apple and Google need to make a standard, quality, easily portable mobile controller. Games need to support that controller more often than not. There needs to be a standard for docking the device and outputting to a larger screen. The device needs to retain compatibility with older software, reliably. This is at a minimum. But there isn’t really an incentive to make premium mobile gaming better, so they’ll stick with manipulative, low barrier to entry games that control well with touches, taps, and swipes.
I fully agree and just wand to add my suspicion that people in the Apple ecosystem are a pretty tough crowd to sell a Resident Evil title to begin with. Most gamers I know would never buy an Apple PC if they have a choice, and the overlap between “serious” gaming and Android is probably a lot stronger.
(I hear a faint echo of “Don’t you guys have phones?” in this.)
Apple has been making decisions hostile to a thriving gaming scene for decades at this point, so they engineered that lack of overlap. Just because they paid big money for ports of Resident Evil and Death Stranding, it doesn’t mean that any other big games have a reason to follow them.
So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.
When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.
These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.
So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.
There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.
The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.
On my Steam Deck, or if you prefer a Switch, any game is a mobile game. You can suspend and resume quite easily, and as long as you can do the same on a phone, it’ll fit that use case just as well. My mobile use case might be killing 15 minutes at the DMV, or it might be an hour long train ride. I’ll pick the right game for the job.
My experience on the Deck and Switch is the opposite: different games lend themselves to different form factors. And both of those (along with other handhelds like the Logitech G Cloud, PlayStation Portal, AYN Odin series, etc) are not really in the mobile space. I can’t imagine a middle schooler taking their Deck or Switch to school. I can’t imagine breaking one of those out on a 15 minute break while working retail or food service. I would not have lugged those devices around campus to play between college classes. The Switch is an exception because it’s a home console too, but the rest of those devices are incredibly niche products that sell orders of magnitude less than either consoles, gaming PC’s, or phones.
And you said yourself: you pick the right game for the job. I could totally emulate Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 on the Deck, maybe even 4. But I would inevitably get stuck in a 30 minute long cutscene from Kojima. It may be possible to either use a save states or just hit the power button to suspend, but that’s still a bad experience. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good. I do keep a selection of games on the Deck for different situations.
My wife and I love Skyrim and have almost every version of it. I probably have 1,000 hours in, she is probably close to 10,000 at this point. We always joke about how one of the worst things you can do for yourself is save and stop playing mid-dungeon. You get in a groove and reserve some of the RAM in your brain for keeping track of the in-game space, and if you stop and come back to it a day, week, month, or year later it takes some work to mentally recover. We always try to go back to a house, or at least a town, to save.
For something like Candy Crush or Sudoku? No problem, I can get right in. For a big AAA action game? I need to remember the controls, the map layout, what’s going on with the plot, what my items or build or whatever is, what the enemies are like and how to deal with them, etc. If I’m sitting down for a 2 hour gaming session it’s no problem if I take 3 minutes to get up to speed again, but for a 15 minute break that’s 20% of my time.
Another factor is how long it takes to get in game. I recently played through Subnautica (streaming with Steam Link to either my Deck or Shield), and while it was a great time I was annoyed at just how long it takes to get into the game. Even on an SSD it simply takes forever to load, sometimes close to 2 whole minutes. And I know of plenty of other games that are even worse with all the splash screens and BS before the start menu- the Crash N Sane Trilogy is a big offender for example. If I’m on a 15 minute break I don’t want to spend 20% of that time waiting for the game to start.
It’s exit points and entry points. Most console or PC games are designed with play sessions of at least 30 minutes, usually more like an hour. If you don’t take the exit points, you’re starting a new dungeon or new quest line or whatever and are locking in for the next 30-60 minutes. (You could argue games like Civ might have intended play sessions more like 8-16 hours). Successful mobile games have much more frequent entry and exit points.
RE2 would certainly work fine on the Deck and Switch, but not in those “mobile” contexts. And I don’t think there is enough demand to add Android and IOS support on top of that.
But I get to choose what I think is the right game for the job. The Switch is successful because it serves both masters. Not making the game available just makes me less likely to bother with mobile games at all.
So the market and ecosystem would have to substantially change before these kinds of ports could ever become viable. I doubt any of that is likely to happen.
Yeah I’ve had this problem recently. I bought limbo on steam to play on my steam deck. Recently realised there’s an android version but it seems like to use it on my phone I would have to buy the game again on Google play. Maybe I’m wrong about this, it seems to me that once you’ve bought a game in one format you should be able to download it in any format.
In an ideal world, every game should be fully cross-buy IMO, but that tends to never be the case.
PlayStation used to have PS3/PS4/PSVita cross-buy games for a while, but they didn’t keep it going for their recent PC porting efforts (that clearly wouldn’t help their bottom line).
Xbox has Play Anywhere, and that’s likely the closest to a functional cross-buy (and cross-play) we have today - that’s the main draw for me if (when) I ever buy games digitally on Xbox.
I’d like a more Mario sunshine/64 style game. The movement mechanics were sublime in sunshine. That itch hasn’t been scratched since, even by odyssey, which came closer than the galaxy games.
Makes sense, when Sunshine was made the only other 3D Mario was 64, so it used the same formula on a larger and more elaborate scale.
But then something unexpected happened, they made bonus levels that were capsule worlds that looked a lot like classic Mario games. And players wanted more of that so the Galaxys were basically that, fleshed out into full games.
Odyssey is a natural progression of Galaxy’s formula. But 3D World is not a natural progression of Sunshine, its New Super Mario Bros. in 3D.
It would be nice to get more 64/Sunshine-type games.
I want more Animal Crossing 🤞 I’m hoping with it’s success for New Horizons that we don’t have to wait 12 years again for the next one. A new Mario would be good too though, Odyssey was a lot of fun.
If you didn’t try it, “Bowser’s Fury” was a lot of fun. It’s annoyingly packaged with “3D World”, although if you haven’t played that it’s also a good 3D Mario.
They are steaming ahead towards becoming another Sega at full power - or in other words, as their consoles are failing to attract customers, they are transforming themselves - intentionally or not - into just another third party publisher in the gaming sector.
i think you’re right, but I think they’re kind of just facing reality. Games cost too much to make, and they aren’t making enough on hardware sales to justify exclusivity. Although, I think the door is still open for them to stay in the console space, and maybe even overtake Sony in the next gen if some weird stuff happens between now and then. More likely, I think they just become another Sega like you said, except they still sell a small batch of hardware on the side, for people that want a Game Pass console.
Steam deck emulator specifically. Nintendo tends to not care about old gen stuff being emulated. If Yuzu was released after the switch 2 comes out, then I wouldn’t imagine Nintendo going that hard after it
Nintendo cares a lot about killing off emulation and ROM hosting wherever they can, actually. They send out cease and desist letters all the time and many projects and websites have been killed because of it. Thousands, I think, from single-person projects like “Another Metroid 2 Remake” all the way up to Team Xecuter. I think one of the Switch emulators that was in progress a couple years ago got killed off by the lawyers.
The catch is that reverse-engineered emulators being made without any Nintendo code, and made without the intention of profit, are not a violation of copyright law or Nintendo licensing and Nintendo has no grounds to sue the makers. But they’re always keeping an eye on such projects waiting for something actionable.
This is why any given Nintendo emulator website or Github repository you can find will have zero links to any ROMs or any sources for them – because anything like that will get an immediate letter and possible lawsuit.
Yeah the folks behind Yuzu made some really bad calls as the emu got more popular.
Do these devs ABSOLUTELY deserve to get paid for their incredible work, allowing me to play BOTW at 4k60? Of course!
Adding in code that allows a new, UNRELEASED, Zelda game to run, then paywalling the latest version of the emulator with this code, puts you directly in a lawsuit’s crosshairs.
Then on top of that they didn’t cover their tracks of discussing their testing of TotK in dev discord (might have been a different platform, can’t remember) chats, providing a clear paper trail that they were breaking the law to Nintendo the second they could get a subpoena.
Honestly, I kind of learned to like not having my headphones randomly yanked out of my ears by clothing, door handles, tree branches and other random objects, as well as random movement. Or maybe I’m just a little clumsy.
The only real problem I have with Bluetooth headphones is that they are fairly prone to interference in my experience, especially in busy areas. Battery life is pretty much a solved issue at this point (even for those tiny things that barely stick out of your ear), as are size, comfort and ease of use.
You can tuck wired headphones under your shirt if it’s a problem, I still do that if I only have wired earbuds on me. Also Bluetooth headphones add a bit of lag which I find noticeable when playing games.
Nintendo are trying to avoid a shortage and scalpers at launch, which is why they are producing the device in large numbers before having officially unveiled it. Given how highly anticipated this console has been for years and how many people have seen it or at least parts of it by sheer necessity, the leaks are unsurprising.
They were also wise to not have revealed the Switch 2 any earlier, because it would have jeopardized sales of the Switch 1. Enough companies have made this mistake in the past. Leaks - which the vast majority of their overwhelmingly non-techie customer base will barely even hear about - are a small price to pay for the obvious economic advantages of this approach.
I’m not listening to any podcasts. I think these are pretty obvious conclusions that anyone can easily reach on their own with the available information.
i heard very similar remarks on Jeff Gerstmann’s podcast on Tuesday. He’s an old GameSpot/Giant Bomb dude. Sorry if my original reply came off as snarky in any way, reading back i can see how maybe it comes off like i’m accusing your response of being not your own.
I’m actually super curious how easy/hard it’ll be to grab a console at launch. I’m also very curious if the switch 2 will have a stable launch without any weird launchday bugs like the original had.
What kind of bugs did the console have at launch? I must admit, I wasn’t taking it particularly seriously when it came out and didn’t pay much attention to it.
I actually don’t know how widespread the issues were or if they were overblown, but I remember seeing them pop up for the first couple of months after release. I didn’t really hear about any problems after that, so I don’t really know.
My assumption is that the likelihood of these issues repeating is very slim. They probably based the software and hardware off of the existing switch, so I would think it would be less buggy and more refined, but I guess we’ll have to see.
They were also wise to not have revealed the Switch 2 any earlier, because it would have jeopardized sales of the Switch 1. Enough companies have made this mistake in the past.
you’re definitely on to something. I think they got scared by the surge of unions and strikes post-COVID, and now they’re trying to push us into a recession to make us desparate again.
Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. It was over two years ago that economists were already crowing about how soon people would be running out of their “pandemic savings” and would have to buckle under pressure again. They never hide this stuff, if you pay attention to the right people, they’re right out there being super honest about what they’re doing and what they want.
They want to starve the citizens out, which is crazy when you consider the old statement “No society is more than three meals away from revolution.” They’d rather risk pushing us to revolution by turning the screws rather than give up any amount of power, control, or wealth.
the article is mostly reporting on “a Q&A on the InstalBase forums” with “business journalist Christopher Dring”. The headline kind of makes the 80% figure sound like a bad thing, but I think it’s more meant to share info with the public that industry insiders already know about. No producer working at EA is shocked by this figure, but the headline is not for them. This info is still helpful for many groups, like maybe new devs who aren’t yet industry insiders, but need to know what they are getting into before they sign a shitty Game Pass deal with Microsoft.
videogameschronicle.com
Najnowsze