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Comment by d7e7eyeudi | Hacker News Reader

Personally I find a lot of these devices backwards minded. I'd much rather just shell out for a service like Stadia (if the catalogue was larger) and turn my actual mobile device into something capable of playing pc titles. Especially if the implementation is platform agnostic like Stadia. Gaming devices of all stripes have become expensive enough that I'm more than happy to see cloud gaming takeover and leave hardware for the activists and bitcoin miners.

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Your phone lacks the controller interfaces these devices have though. I guess it depends on if you can hook up a controller to your phone, or if you're able to play the games you like without to much fuss on your phone screen.

> I guess it depends on if you can hook up a controller to your phone

ps4 controllers are generic bluetooth gamepads that I've been able to connect to a surprising range of devices.

Matter of taste. A pc gamer will hate a mobile control scheme but I can play Cyberpunk fine on my S10 with the touch controller and if it had even the level of customization that CoD Mobile or Pubg Mobile offer the player I'd go so far as to say I could be happily comfortable. Imo, people underestimate both how poor the quality offerings are on mobile and how far ui control design has come (in the few top tier offerings that exist). Cloud gaming kills two birds with one stone in that it suddenly adds a plethora of games to mobile that are good in the real way while simultaneously mitigating the mounting costs of being a pc gamer (maybe consoles too but I can't speak to them) by letting me run high-end games on average hardware so long as I have a good internet connection.

I tried pubg mobile and a few other mobile FPS games. There's one major flaw with using a touchscreen for those kinds of games, you need to be able to aim, move and shoot at the same time. In my experience, touchscreens only allow you to do two of those things at the same time.

Apple had a solution to this problem years ago but made the very very very stupid decision of removing 3D Touch from recent iPhone models.

On phones with the feature, you can use your left thumb to walk, right thumb to aim, and 3D touch (press down hard on the screen to shoot). I know at least call of duty mobile supports it, and when I tried it out it felt revolutionary.

But rather than add new input methods, they’re removing them at the same time they’re trying to push harder into mobile gaming (with Apple Arcade).

It’s baffling as an outsider to see such obviously bad/stupid decisions like that from such a massive company.

I don't game on mobile, but wouldn't back-side tap be the obvious solution? I've never tried but I'd expect the accelerometer to be able to detect something like a middle finger tapping on the back of the phone with sufficient precision and latency (just the binary event, not the location)

I do remember a game that did something like that many years ago (posted on reddit I think?). It was an endless runner type game with a fox character IIRC, and you had to alternate taps on the back of the device to get it to move. I do remember that I couldn't get it to work reliably though.

Tapping the back of my phone now, I can see it maybe working for some types of games/shooters where you don't have to hold down the fire button, if implemented well (which probably isn't easy to do for all hardware). The tactile feedback of smacking the phone could help provide a good experience if paired with appropriate audio/visuals.

This isn't quite the same thing, but the Playstation Vita has a rear touchpad, and not a ton of games managed to use it well, even with the much higher precision (Tearaway[1] is the only good one I can remember).

Tearaway gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw5LD4B-3DI

Rear touchpad is that one feature that amazes me every year by not being introduced by any of those very many manufacturers desperate to have a USP.

Rear touchpad means you can't put it in a protective case. Unless you can figure out a way to make one that protects it from most of the kinds of drops a phone would take in normal daily use and still exposes the rear pad.

3D Touch was the stupidest idea apple had in the last decade and I don’t say this lightly given there’s also the Touch Bar, the trash can Mac Pro and canceling of the apple display.

Why?

It's not perfect but this, speaking as a casual observer, is something I think will improve with time. It took far too long to move away from fixed d-pads and now more games are experimenting with on-screen zones you tap to fire. There's still a lot of unwieldyness exactly as you noted but I think this is a surmountable challenge.

I'm not sure how this could really be surmountable. With a controller you have access to at least 6 simultaneous inputs, more if you do some finger claw tricks or have back buttons or something. A keyboard and mouse gives you around the same or more simultaneous inputs. On a touchscreen you can make 2 simultaneous inputs.

Most action games require at least 3 simultaneous inputs to be played effectively.

There's definitely workarounds like the ones you mention, but unless a game is actually made for touchscreen controls, as in optimized for no more than 2 simultaneous inputs, it's not going to be as playable on a touchscreen as it would be with anything else.

Unfortunately, some genres of game just aren't as suited to only 2 simultaneous inputs.

There's lots of fun touchscreen based games, but they're always better with game mechanics specifically suited to touchscreens.

You can attach your phone to a Stadia controller.

Disc: Googler.

Playing PC games on a cell phone is painful. You can't even see half the game because your thumbs always obscure the screen to operate the touch controls.

Why couldn't you use this with Stadia?

The price isn't out of line even if you consider it as a "thin client" gaming device.

It's not that I couldn't it's that I wouldn't want to with an agnostic service like Stadia. That's money I could put towards a nicer smartphone or into nicer non-internal pc components like the monitor instead. But I also say this as someone who doesn't mind touch controls when they're done well so having physical things to press isn't as big a draw for me as I imagine it is to their target audience.

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