Mobile gaming has come a long way in the last few years, with a number of popular PC and console franchises releasing versions that preserve most of the experience in a small screen. And with more money spent on smartphone and tablet games than traditional platforms year over year, mobile gaming is ascendant. But will it outright replace gaming consoles in the long run?
Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida believes that 5G will empower mobile gaming enough to “herald the long-term demise” of game consoles, he said in an interview with Financial Times. He makes a compelling argument that, unlike console gaming – sedentary and reliant on local hardware with long boot times – it will be much more appealing to stream games over blindingly-fast 5G connections on phones you can take anywhere.
Over a long enough period, Yoshida could accurately predict the curve of the industry: analyst group App Annie reported that mobile gaming raked in around $100 billion in revenue last year, outstripping PC and console revenue of just over $88 billion, per GameDaily.biz. Gamers aren’t averse to playing on their phones (and tablets, but mostly phones), so transitioning to streaming games could become more of a norm.
Not that you’d know by today’s game services that let you stream AAA games on mobile: Google Stadia persists but has a limited library, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming (formerly xCloud) is still struggling to get on iOS, and Nvidia GeForce Now and Amazon Luna…
