“Just was wondering,” said the gamer as he stepped up to the microphone, “is this an out-of-season April Fool’s joke?” Jeers filled the auditorium at the 2018 convention for Blizzard, then one of gaming’s most revered developers. The outrage from the audience and the gamer at the mic was in response to the announcement that the next instalment in the Diablo franchise would be made for mobile phones rather than PC. Game director Wyatt Cheng looked at the crowd, baffled, and quipped: “Do you guys not have phones?”
Cheng had misunderstood the problem: it wasn’t that the attendees didn’t have phones, it was that they believed that turning Diablo into a mobile game would destroy everything they loved about the series. These self-described “true gamers” often dismiss mobile players as “filthy casuals”. To them, phones games are shallow, artless and poisoned by predatory business models. They have a point: app stores overflow with pale imitations of Candy Crush, made to help pass the time rather than deliver a meaningful experience.
Yet mobile players have become a demographic that’s impossible for developers to ignore. They constituted more than 50 per cent of the gaming market in 2021. Remarkably, Apple made more from selling phone games in 2019 than Sony, Nintendo, Activision and Microsoft combined made from selling all games, according to the Wall Street Journal. And if you know where to look, there are excellent mobile games available — after all, the latest smartphones are significantly more powerful than the Nintendo Switch. You can play ports of modern classics such as Dead Cells, Stardew Valley or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, or impressive originals such as Genshin Impact, Monument Valley or Fantasian, from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.