Old gamers often misunderstand the quality of mobile games.
I realized this a couple of weeks ago when I asked my 12-year-old daughter whether she wanted to bring her Nintendo Switch or her Android tablet on our two-week vacation. She chose the tablet.
Why? Because her Android has Genshin Impact, Fortnite, Roblox, Candy Crush, Wuthering Waves, and Sky: Children of Light. She simply prefers those over her Switch library — which is decent but doesn’t compare to what she’s got on the tablet.
Adults tend to dismiss mobile gaming by saying things like, “There’s no 1:1 equivalent to Super Mario Odyssey, Tears of the Kingdom, or Cyberpunk 2077 on mobile.”
Fine. My daughter has access to all those games. Our family owns over 8,000 games across PC and consoles. She can play Super Mario Odyssey any time she wants, but she doesn’t. She’d rather play Genshin Impact.
And she’s not alone. Most of her friends are on their tablets or phones. It makes sense — gaming is as much about socializing as playing, and iOS and Android dominate for a reason.
Sure, we can scoff and say, “Kids these days don’t recognize a good game when it hits them in the face.”
But I remember feeling that way about Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. They’re still thriving today, with now-grown adults still playing.
I also think back to my own childhood. My mom hated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yet, I snuck a TMNT Game Boy game into the house and played it behind her back. TMNT never disappeared — it’s still around.
With the original Switch’s price rising (at least here in Canada), it just makes sense to consider Android tablets — especially for kids. Sure, you can’t play Black Myth: Wukong on Android, but that’s why I have PCs ready for that. Kids? They just want to have fun and connect with friends.
Mobile is so thoroughly dominated by gacha that any game that tries to have an ethical business model has almost no hope of succeeding on the platform, no hope of competing with the endless sea of gacha.
And I'm sure you're about to cherry-pick like two counterexamples, but I know you know that those exceptions are so scarce that I have every reason to decide that it simply isn't worth my time to go out of my way looking for them.
Have you ever considered that many people make games not just for some arbitrary measure of “success,” but because they genuinely love the craft of creating video games?
Some of these creators simply want to share their creativity with the world—no gimmicks, no exploitative business models.
There’s an entire universe of these passionate developers out there. We call them “indie” devs. You’ll find them on platforms like itch.io, and they’re far more common than most realize.
Many make games for PC, some for the web, and plenty for mobile as well.
If you want to play truly good games—without being at the mercy of marketing machines, no matter the platform—it’s on each of us to seek them out and discover what’s really worth playing.
If they want to share that creativity, share it on a platform where the people who would most appreciate it will actually play it.
Plenty of devs continue to make games for the Commodore 64. Should they stop just because most people don’t have one?