Flying Elephant Network NewsOn the eve of the Spring Festival, when the author was playing the newly launched 3A masterpiece "Death Stranding Director's Cut" on his mobile phone, he suddenly received an unknown call**, and the caller assistant showed that it was "Keqing", and after answering it with curiosity, I found out that it was miHoYo calling the new version of "Genshin Impact" to promote**, reminding me to re-launch and return to the annual Lantern Festival.
This undoubtedly reflects the current situation of mobile games from one side, compared to the once small and beautiful creative mobile games, now more than 10GB of masterpieces, so that players have no time to take care of multiple works every day, and can only focus on moving bricks on time in a certain game. Even due to the lack of innovation and the homogenization of game types, many players suffer from the so-called "electronic impotence", and many games are difficult to continue playing.
However, whether it is the emulator gameplay that some Android players are immersed in, or the few triple-A masterpieces that Apple has begun to put on the shelves, or the streaming method provided by Microsoft's XGP, it seems that playing games on mobile phones has come back to life, perhaps not because players are languishing, but because their tastes have improved.
Death and resurrection
Many traditional mobile games are undoubtedly suffering from bottlenecks, and when fans of official social accounts begin to lose fans like crazy and no one cares about the game benefits, even the former leader of open-world mobile games seems to be a bit poor. The bigger hidden danger for the industry is that when old players begin to gradually understand the routines of game developers, they are even reluctant to try new games, for fear of wading through the same river of "part-time jobs" again.
However, smartphones are increasingly having the potential to become a gaming handheld, approaching a 7-inch screen that is only a little behind the handheld in terms of display area, but it has obvious advantages in portability, and it is still a must-have product for every user to go out.
Aside from the current emulator games with copyright disputes on the Android platform, Apple's triple-A masterpiece porting for mobile phone and tablet users has undoubtedly improved players' overall experience of a work. The reason for this is that many users may not have a lot of time to sit on the couch or computer to play, and although the graphics on the phone are not ideal, the cloud storage of the save gives players the opportunity to play cross-platform anytime, anywhere. Previously, Apple cooperated with iPad Pro to launch Divinity Original Sin 2 in the app store, and also realized the function of saving and interworking with Steam accounts.
Cloud gaming services such as XGP provide another way to play cross-platform and synchronize save files. Players can play all kinds of triple-A masterpieces through their mobile phones, and the save can be synchronized with the console, and online battles are no problem. Some players even said that if such a service matures, it doesn't matter whether they buy a game console again, because any terminal can achieve it. Through the author's experience, it was also found that whether you are using a Wi-Fi network or a 5G network when you are on the go, you can play smoothly. However, in terms of image quality, it is indeed slightly inferior to local operation.
Interestingly, behind the death and resurrection of mobile games, it may also reflect the future of electronics.
A portrait of the future of electronics
Behind the mobile phone playing 3A games, it is undoubtedly related to the upgrade of the processor, which is mainly manifested in two levels, on the one hand, the well-known performance upgrade, although the upgrade of the CPU seems to have entered the bottleneck period, but the number of GPU cores is not increasing, whether it is Apple's A series processor, or the Snapdragon mobile platform of the Android camp has also added ray tracing features. The performance upgrade of the NPU also brings a new way to upgrade the graphics performance, taking MetalFX as an example, the technology can achieve a higher resolution display effect by rendering low resolution and processing it by algorithms, thereby reducing the rendering pressure.
On the other hand, the reason seems to be more important, that is, although the chip of the smartphone is the pioneer of the advanced process, its research and development importance seems to have lagged behind the computer processor of the ARM architecture, Apple's A17 Pro and the M3 chip are undoubtedly inextricably linked, and the more traditional game market represented by the M series processor has also brought the same root and origin of the iPhone, iPad platform, 3A game masterpieces that can be migrated faster. "Death Stranding Director's Cut" and "Resident Evil 4 Remake" may become the norm in the future for iPhone, iPad, and Mac at the same time.
Coincidentally, perhaps Android platform users can also be full of expectations for playing 3A masterpieces in the future, last year's Snapdragon X Elite debut, Qualcomm also dedicated a paragraph ** to present the future of this product can run natively in the game, including such as "World of Tanks", "Warframe", "The Sims 4", "Sniper Elite 5" and other well-known game works, and finally the hit "Baldur's Gate 3" as the finale. It is reported that Qualcomm is uniting more than 150 game studios to create a wealth of game entertainment applications.
It is not difficult to imagine that if Snapdragon products also achieve the same root and origin on PC and mobile phones in the future, the Android platform will also have a rich lineup of triple-A games, and backed by the Windows ecosystem, which already has a large number of games, will be more exciting in terms of game content. What's more, this homogeneity can also benefit its own game platform and drive the expansion of the handheld market.
It is certain that in the future, the user's mobile phone storage space will be more tight, and if the content can be exported, the game will be stored locally, unless the player chooses the cloud game mode mentioned above. But maybe hybrid storage will be a more reasonable solution, such as the optimization method of playing while playing in the early stage of "Death Stranding Director's Cut", or the cloud save provided by Steam, which completely relies on the cloud, limiting the scenes that players can play, and perhaps players with limited storage space can choose to play offline in the form of partial cache in the future, just like many people have a few episodes of TV series before boarding.
The advent of triple-A games on the mobile side is likely to break through the existing bottlenecks, perhaps not because people suffer from "electronic impotence", but the games of the ninth art are like movies, and only good works can capture people's hearts, and the era of just trying the "miracles" of the Lumière brothers has passed.