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> I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry

- Apple - the perennial "also-ran" name in gaming fundamentally don't get gaming. Never had, never will.

- Google - Stadia will die within the next 2 years. Wager my house on that.

- Epic - Yeah they will be around.

I don't want to sound offensive but you sound like you know close to nothing about the game industry. You've not even mentioned Valve and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions. Anyone with even a brief interest in the market would likely find your prediction nothing short of delusional.

> You've not even mentioned Valve

I did mention Valve (well.. Steam, but it's the same)

Valve have 0 presence on mobile

The mobile gaming market is growing, while the PC market is on the decline [1]

And as i said, the EU is making moves to force both Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for more stores

Epic has a presence with Fortnite and is known with their fights against Google/Apple

Smartphones are getting more and more powerful and are able to play demanding games (Genshin Impact, and recently Diablo Immortal)

We see more and more games that released both on mobile and desktop at the same time (Tower Fantasy is the latest one), but also indie titles that you see on Steam (Dead Cells for example)

> and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions

They bought Desktop/Console studios, that market is on the decline, so it is not a smart investment for them

If they make games for both desktop/mobile, then yeah i'd agree with you, but that's not the case

There is still some hope they change that with Activision purchase

It's like with demography, the effect will be seen in the mid-long term

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-gaming-proves-to-be-a-g...

> Mobile gaming proves to be a gold mine as it racked in more money in 2021 than PC and console gaming combined

Mobile games are timewasters filled with microtransactions for every little thing. (Don't want to wait a week for this task to complete? $5 makes it happen in seconds.) Having one platform out-earn another doesn't mean the others are dying. PC gaming was dying/dead 15 years ago, but it didn't go anywhere.

You are thinking about games the way Apple and Meta think about games - purely about the $$$.

It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.

"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.

The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.

You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.

You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.

A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?

The Steam Deck-- at least among PC gamers-- is an extremely attractive option over Nintendo. Bring your existing game library with you, play much more demanding games, benefit from deep discounts on PC games that almost never make it to Nintendo versions.

I bought a switch to play portable versions of PC indie games but since I got the Deck I haven't touched it.

Production of units has picked up so the order bottleneck is easing up, which is part for the course with Nintendo as well: I couldn't find on OLED model anywhere for months & months after it's release for my kid.

The downside of course is significant bulk. Battery is less of an issue, despite what some people say. If I'm playing a demanding game away from a power source I just tweak the power settings, sometimes lower the resolution and let FSR (which works great) help improve the visuals, and getting 2-3 hours on even the most demanding games is then not an issue. 4-5 hours on less demanding games. And carry a battery pack that will supply an extra charge. But yeah, definitely it doesn't work so well if you have to have something that will fit in a pocket.

I think you're right that Game Pass is a terrible idea.

It reminds me of what happened to cable TV. Back in the 1980s cable channels all had definite brands to uphold. The cable bundle meant, however, that you had to take them all or leave them all. You couldn't pick your favorite news channel, you had to get all of them. Like the Discovery Channel? You pay for the Hallmark Channel.

Cable channels thus don't have any motivation to be any good. They get paid whether or not you like them, whether or not you watch them. So why bother?

The cable industry "thrived" for many years by simply jacking up the price, something that people tolerated for a while but each time they increase the price they lose a few subscribers, every time there is a funeral a cable TV subscriber is gone and they don't get replaced by anyone new.

It irks me that young people who didn't live through this think anything is going to be different with GAME PASS. Each time I see that logo on my Xbox it makes my blood boil -- I am thinking about getting rid of it since it doesn't play music well, doesn't play HEVC videos at all, and there aren't that many games I want to play on it. I still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray.

> still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray

You pay a monthly subscription fee in order to watch your Blu-Ray movies? You know you can pickup a used Blu-Ray player at goodwill and friends for like $20?

I don't pay a subscription to watch Blu-Ray movies, it is just Microsoft advertises GAME PASS so hard it's like they are trying to shove that logo up my nostrils. (Microsoft has a long history of killing products by selling them too hard; for instance everybody thinks that "OneNote has to be awful because Microsoft shoved three links to OneNote in the taskbar" whereas if you'd actually tried OneNote you might have liked it.)

For a while my main use for the XBox has been as a media client for Jellyfin but it's pretty annoying because it doesn't play HEVC files. Microsoft changed something about its music player and it doesn't work with Jellyfin anymore.

I haven't played games on the XBox for a while. It's not like I might not play games on it again but I still have a Nintendo 3DS, Steam, both of which have a considerable backlog for me.

Well except advertising dollars did flow to viewer eyeballs, and it’s cable advertising, not subscription fees, that came to dominate the revenue model.

This doesn't make any sense. Almost all major games available on gamepass are still available for purchase the normal way. You could just buy the game normally.

Not almost, all. There is not a single exclusive

> Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market

Valve? MS will compete that way indirectly. I snagged a SteamDeck - I haven't played games this much in a long time. Since getting it I've played through a bunch of triple A games (God of War, replayed the mass effect trilogy, etc), and a whole host of Nintendo exclusives via emulation.

The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat. They sure didn't seem to work as hard to take down videos showing emulation for other platforms like the Aya Neo.

The mobile market is growing at an insane pace while the desktop gaming is in the down side (including console)

Valve have 0 presence on the mobile market, Steam Deck is an attempt, but it still is desktop titles

They made a mistake imo by going with X86 CPUs, they should have went with ARM and a translation layer for X86 (hw accelerated)

This way they could support Android ecosystem natively, release their store on Android, and start to publish/sell android games as well as universal mobile/desktop titles

That's why i mention Epic, i suspect that'll be their plan, they'll become a store on Android (probably also iOS) and publish premium mobile games

> The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat

Nintendo has strong IPs, they will sell no matter what, wich gives them a strong advantage at selling a lot of devices consistently, every generations

you are forgetting the largest gaming company is tencent.

Those aren't games. Gambling/grinding apps maybe?