The hierarchy in games is funny: almost everyone is willing to admit that the platform does not define a person, and almost everyone secretly keeps a sign in their head where their own way of playing is on the top line.
And at the very bottom of this table, below Nintendo consoles, below browser-based strategies, below solitaire on a work laptop, the smartphone traditionally lives.
The next round of this eternal dispute has launched a meme in the PC gamer community with a direct question about whether mobile players are considered their own.
The answer was divided into two camps, and both were right in their own way. One said directly:
You can play real games on your phone. But what the majority actually play is hardly considered a game.
The claim, if you take away the emotions, is technical, not snobbish. Much of the mobile market is driven by retention models, where daily challenges, upgrade timers, gacha mechanics with random character drops, and premium currency to bypass restrictions are built before game design comes into play.
There is a separate story with advertising, where the video shows a mechanic that is not in the game, and the promise of “no advertising in the game” is refuted in the second minute.
On the other hand, in recent years, full-fledged titles have arrived on phones, and there are enough of them to talk about a normal library:
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native ports of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil Village and Death Stranding on iPhone with Apple A17 Pro and M series chips
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Red Dead Redemption, which Rockstar released on mobile via Netflix Games
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Feral Interactive catalog with Tomb Raider 2013, Hitman Blood Money, Saints Row The Third and the Total War series
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indie hits like Balatro, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors
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Warframe, which Digital Extremes brought to phones with cross-platform play and full access to content
Plus emulation from PS1 and GameCube to 3DS, plus layers like GameNative and GameHub, which run PC games on Android through Proton and FEX, plus cloud services. With a connected gamepad and HDMI dongle, the phone turns into a completely working console.
Players are still unhappy that Arthur from the art of Red Dead Redemption 2 does not look like the game version
The economics here leave no room for discussion at all: the mobile segment provides about half of the revenue of the entire industry, and Candy Crush Saga from 2012 to 2023 collected about 20 billion dollars versus about 10 billion for GTA V in ten years.
The famous “Don’t you have phones?” from the 2018 BlizzCon stage was horribly insensitive, but not wrong, because Diablo Immortal still holds the audience as well as a numbered part on PC. And in countries where the minimum wage doesn’t even cover a power supply for a gaming build, a $200 smartphone is the only console, and it’s already in your pocket.
Separately, it’s worth debunking the favorite thesis that microtransactions came from mobile games: horse armor for Oblivion was sold in 2006, a year before the first iPhone, and MMO cash shops and FIFA’s Ultimate Team mode honed monetization long before the peak of the App Store.
The telephone didn’t invent these mechanics, it just happened to be the most convenient way to deliver them to nine billion people at once.
