and then you go through the top paid games just to find… the same top paid games from the last decade. Nothing of value is being created or getting recognition
There could be a vicious cycle where game devs who want to be taken seriously don’t touch mobile games, so as mobile game devs develop skills and experience, they move away from the platform.
Also a lot of the thick frameworks that many devs rely on these days require a lot of computing resources that maybe mobile devices have trouble keeping up with. I could see scenarios where a mobile game is worked on for a while but abandoned due to awful performance in early testing while a similar desktop game doesn’t get killed because it’s being developed on a high end system and later gets optimized to run better on weaker systems.
Though tbh, I have no idea how top phones compare with high end desktops these days and am just assuming that they are way behind, while low end desktops might be more comparable to high end phones for performance.
I suspect that most of it comes down to passive cooling, most phones dont have active cooling systems like fans so even if it has decent specs its gonna bottleneck rather rapidly.
There were brilliant games from the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s that ran on comparatively primitive machines. A decent phone today can very easily emulate a Gameboy an N64 or even a Playstation 1 or Xbox.
I understand that many people think good graphics = good game and vice versa but I think an interesting story, novel puzzles or original concepts are so much more important than how real a game looks. High-end computing power is simply not required to make a great game.
I agree with other people in the thread, people just don’t want to pay £40, £50, £60+ for a mobile game, they want it for free and then complain when the games are a grind unless they pay all the micro transactions. Good games won’t come unless people are willing to pay for them.
I’ve not seen hard numbers but it really seems a high end phone is pretty comparable to a low end laptop performance-wise these days. Both do a great job of displaying webpages, playing web video and can kinda crunch through an optimized enough video game at a low enough resolution