Legitimately though, along with Games For Windows Live was the Games For Windows initiative, which did standardize controller support on PC. It standardized it in a way that benefited themselves, but it was an important step toward arriving where we are today, where there’s no longer some weird distinction between “PC games” and “console games”.
I didn’t care for Disco Elysium, and my friends list is full of people who got a few hours into it like I did and then put it down. I can’t say why they did, but maybe while it really landed for some people, it didn’t for plenty of others. In a top 50 of all time, I’m not certain Titanfall 2 would make it for me either, as much as I did enjoy that game.
I don’t think this is a narrative EA is leaning into. Frankly, even if it sold less than they forecast, I’m sure they were happy they sold as much as they did given the troubled production it was converted from.
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.
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.
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.
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’m a Linux user, and I’m at the point where I treat any online component as though it doesn’t exist if there’s no offline alternative like LAN. If GTA VI has a campaign as good as the previous two games, it’s still worth it, because I’m not touching the online mode.