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.
I’m not parroting anything. I’ve looked. Sure, sometimes you get a port of XCOM or Slay the Spire, but then it’s not going to carry over progress back to my PC, where I’m more comfortable playing at home, and my reluctance to buy a version of the game like that explains why there isn’t enough money in trying to port the kinds of games that I like to mobile. Sometimes a game has a port, but it fell out of compatibility with modern Android and never got updated; and let me tell you, that’s a great way to convince me to stop looking. Even crazier is when something like Fire Emblem Heroes happens, because it’s adapting a traditional handheld/console game into an interface that makes way more sense for controlling the game, but it’s not a proper version of that series; it’s a gacha game. If I have any kind of extended anticipated desire to game on the go, my Steam Deck is just a better answer than trying to find the few games I would like that also got Android versions, because I’m going to spend more time playing them at home anyway.