Video gaming is more popular than it has ever been. These days, in some capacity, essentially everyone has played a video game before, and we’ve mostly got the advent of smartphones to thank for that. Now anyone can play Candy Crush in a moment’s notice, and although it doesn’t fit into the general idea of “gaming”, it’s still a game.
However, casual games are only one side of the gaming you can do on your smartphone. There are thousands of high-end games that your smartphone can run, whether you’re looking for sports, racing, adventure, or fighters. With how intense smartphone gaming gets, it makes you wonder whether it is a complement or a competitor to game consoles.
Mobile Gaming Spans From Basic Puzzles To High-Octane Action
When you hear someone mention “mobile gaming”, what exactly do you think of? Ten years ago, the kind of things that would come to mind would be things along the lines of Angry Birds and Candy Crush. These were relatively casual games that took advantage of your device’s touchscreen and were conservative enough to run on the relatively modest hardware of the time.
However, if that’s what your idea of mobile gaming is in 2024, you couldn’t be more off. As mobile SoCs get more powerful, so do their GPUs. Today’s flagship smartphones can very easily handle 3D titles which I’d say have a graphical fidelity on a similar level to the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation. They look really good, honestly.
For instance, some of the most popular games on smartphones these days include titles like Call of Duty: Mobile, Real Racing 3, and EA Sports FC Mobile. You wouldn’t think games like this could work on a mobile platform without physical controls, but touch and gyroscopic controls do the job pretty well. The point is that there’s a surprising amount of variety available in the palm of your hand.
Mobile Gaming Has Its Limits Though
We’ve reached a point where our smartphones provide as many options as we can get on dedicated gaming hardware, whether that’s a computer or a console. However, when you really look at it, mobile gaming has its limitations.
Here’s the thing, a touch keyboard will never beat a physical keyboard in terms of precision and speed. That same thing applies to a video game controller. Touch controls make the most of the form factor, but they simply aren’t as precise. That’s why most serious mobile gamers get themselves those Bluetooth controllers to play with. That’s one thing that makes mobile gaming somewhat incomparable.
After that, I have to point to the limits of the platform; particularly with processing power, screen size, and a lack of physical controls. A smartphone is limited in the graphical fidelity it can push out and the screen you can enjoy that on, and relatively limited storage means you hardly ever see games larger than a few gigabytes. For story-based games, this limits how much game developers can actually cram into a single title.
In My Opinion, Mobile Gaming Will Never Overtake A Dedicated Gaming Machine
Look, nobody is going to buy a PlayStation 5 specifically to play Candy Crush or some other casual puzzle game — at least not the average individual. The average person looks towards gaming consoles for sports, action, adventure, and so on.
However, you could make an argument that console gaming doesn’t have as much variety as you can get on mobile platforms and that argument would likely be right.
Smartphones don’t have the platform required to compete directly with console gaming, but they certainly have some features that make them a good complement. They allow hardcore gamers to play a few titles on the go (with the magic of gaming phones), and once you’re back at home, you can boot up your console or PC. I think both can continue to coexist without the threat of ending each other.
