Sony is ready to admit that mobile gaming is too big to ignore | Hacker News Reader

Sony is ready to admit that mobile gaming is too big to ignore

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49 pointsisaacfrond55 comments

Sony had one of the best selling handhelds of all time with the PSP, and then they abandoned its successor (the Vita) almost immediately after launching it because they were scared of mobile gaming. They even hedged their bets by releasing the Xperia Play around the same time, which was a hybrid handheld/Android phone. They abandoned that too very quickly. So logically, in order to avoid throwing money away by creating niche handheld devices that nobody will buy they...make extremely niche and expensive handhelds that nobody buys (https://electronics.sony.com/c/mobile)

I miss the Xperia Play, it is best phone I ever had, I only stopped using it because the GPU broke :(

All newer Android phones disappointed me, specially with everything glued, the Xperia Play was possible to disassemble and service myself (and the battery was super easy to change).

Also many games were awesome on it.

What baffles me is that Sony abandoned it right off the bat, for example my Xperia Play was imported from Italy, it couldn't download the official Wipeout version for it, because that was only available in Japan for some reason, and Sony never bothering even releasing their first party titles outside of Japan, I find that mind boggling. Also never got a single update for the OS.

And now that many metros have near gigabit low-ish latency 5G networks, you don't even need to have a lot of games running locally. You could just stream games from the cloud our your console/PC at home if you're on the go. Having a phone that can easily be a game pad is such a fun concept.

I often get <25ms pings on OpenVPN to devices at my home when I'm out and about on my 5G phone. That's enough for a lot of games to be streamed.

That's a terrible idea. It just pushes us further into the realm of no software ownership. It also makes gaming harder.

The best implementation of Diablo 3 is the Switch version. Works offline. I can play it anywhere, any time without waiting for some network connection. And it supports local multiplayer with other Switch owners who own the game.

> It just pushes us further into the realm of no software ownership

This is why I included the statement "our your console/PC at home" as well, for those who want to own the software but still want to stream. The software running remotely can still be on a machine you own running software you own.

I often have a cheap laptop with me. It's trash for gaming but gets great battery life and is lightweight. Paired with my 5G phone or a decent internet connection, I can connect to my large gaming PC at home and stream any game I can play on that anywhere I go.

I was recently on a trip 1,000 miles from home. I could stream my games with very little noticeable lag on the hotel's WiFi. Pings to home were ~40ms.

While you're 100% right, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Streaming my own games from my PC to my own device with the Steam Link is great (network latency notwithstanding). I believe NVIDIA has an open-source equivalent too? I definitely want this to be a thing going forward - but as long as I still get to own everything.

It also supports shared screen multiplayer, a feature nobody on PC was allowed to enjoy.

Back around the time when Metal Gear Solid V:GZ launched, I downloaded it on my PS4 at home and was able to stream it to my Vita over wifi while I was at university. It was fully playable and responsive, and the only real issue was that the PS4 controller had more physical inputs than the Vita, so some of them had to be emulated with the rear touchpad. Other than that, it was fully responsive and playable.

So Sony were very much ahead of everyone back in ~2014. Not only did they implement game streaming, they even let you stream games that you physically own. They clearly have some extremely talented engineers working for them, but it seems like to save a buck they got their execs from the bargain bin.

Xperia Play was a magical device. I played so many emulated retro games on mine! Good times.

Plus with PSP and Vita they had second screen, remote play, output to TV, OLED. A similar journey that Nintendo have taken with the Switch.

I bought the Vita, it was an excellent console. Too bad no one made any games for it.

Mobile games are so terrible I don't even bother shopping for them anymore. Now that phones are powerful enough to emulate the PS2 and Switch I can spend the rest of my life playing games that were designed as games.

I think monument valley, Prune and Mario Run were great games.

It’s a shame people were so against Mario Runs monetization model. I thought it was very fair. First world free as a demo, the rest of the game for a one time payment.

Apparently mobile gamers wanted it to be free to play/ pay to win.

+ "Part Time UFO", another great mobile game (without micro transactions or ads at all) by HAL, the makers of the Kirby games. Costs less than 5 bucks, a fair price IMO.

From the movie on Google Play i see that you only need to lift some stuff. A bit expensive for 5 bucks.

When I first bought a smartphone, I made up all sorts of reasons why I wanted one, but the real reason was that I wanted to experience this new gaming form-factor. Surely there would be new, innovative, and exciting games to be played with swipes and taps and a little gyro.

I haven't opened a mobile game in years. I'm sure there are good ones out there but:

1) you have to wade through so much crap.

2) every game I've tried has just sucked down battery, and I need power to do phone stuff.

3) I never found a game that had the sort of progression I enjoy from console and PC games. Everything is designed to be played in 5-minute bursts. Sometimes I really want to just sink my teeth into a game, and it seems the only way to do that is play ports or emulated versions of console games.

4) I had trouble finding games that really took advantage of the form factor. So many games are in the style of console or PC games, but in some way compromised to fit on a phone, be it an on-screen controller, watered-down gameplay, etc.

I know there will be rebuttals to points 2-4, but to that I say, see point 1. At some point it wasn't worth wading through the games I didn't enjoy to find one that I might.

I wholly agree with your point 3. Mobile isn't a "classic" gaming experience imho because the games are designed to be played as distractions for a few minutes, then put away. Its the same experience on tablets too, really any app store games are just not an in-depth fun experience.

it’s so weird to me that mobile gaming is so big while the games are by and large complete and utter garbage.

is it the micro-transaction, loot box, gambling-lite style that sucks susceptible people in and milks them?

I don't think I've ever even played a game on my phone except for playing Pokemon Go long enough to "catch" the first pokemon and then put it away.

Mobile games are good for nothing except wasting people's time and brain energy and getting people addicted to microtransactions.

Microtransactions have got to regulated away, because they're destroying people's attention spans. We waged wars against drugs and profanity in music, but yet because microtransactions makes people a shit ton of "clean" money, they're allowed. Microtransactions are incredibly addicting, and research shows that this type of gaming is harmful to the brain.

I’ve spent more than I’m willing to admit on Clash Royale back when it launched. I was in a bad place mentally to resist the lootbox dopamine cycle and I’m lucky it didn’t damage me financially.

Now I don’t touch micro transactions which means most mobile games are off limits. Apple Arcade has some decent mobile games because it doesn’t allow micro transactions.

The GUI space is one of those areas that Microsoft has done pretty poorly on, in my opinion. What they've created is so convoluted. They have Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, .NET MAUI, and Xamarin Forms, and then there's third party toolkits like Uno Platform and Avalonia. It's all over the place, and it's somewhat frustrating, because I think Microsoft is poised to be one of the only companies that has the ability to "solve" cross-platform GUI development.

People just want something mindless to pass the time. If it also triggers the gambling dopamine response, all the better.

Lichess/chess.com are doing pretty well! (For that matter, Wordle.)

“Mobile games“ is so broad as to be meaningless as an umbrella term now.

I wouldn't classify Wordle as a "mobile game", but a puzzle game, like a sudoku or mini crossword puzzle.

It's just a different audience. Mobile gaming is huge in places like India where phones are more available than desktops or consoles.

And unlike console and pc gaming, there's very little overlap in audience and games. You cannot convince someone who has a pc or console that their phone is the device they should be pulling out to play games on. So even if they are say on a bus or a train, you cannot get them to buy a full-priced game on their phone, because they'd rather wait and play it at home. Instead it's free, short, time-waster games.

Also unlike consoles, phone manufacturers aren't very interested in investing in their device with stuff like exclusives, because no one is buying a phone based on the games on it.

Yeah, phones are capable of games probably around the gamecube era right? It's so weird no one even tries.

Yep. Been following this for a while. Mobile games are basically built for "hunting whales": people with deep pockets and nothing else to spend on other than games, so they'll happily drop tens of thousands of dollars on gacha gambling crap. https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4

I think the problem is ultimately discoverability. You make it big and then rake in money with microtransactions or your game fades away and you try again with the next one. It doesn't seem like there's much room for an "average" game that does average.

Where's the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 of mobile gaming?

Slay the Spire, LoL: Wild Rift and Civilization 6 come to mind as the best games I've seen on mobile with endless replayability.

Slay the Spire is just an absolutely fantastic game—but I wouldn't call it a "mobile" game. It's on every gaming platform, and very much an exception to the rule.

It just happens to translate extremely well to mobile due to the super simple interface.

That's been avaialbe on iPad and Android tablets for a while now

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-au/game/heroes-of-might-and-magic...

I don't mean actual Homm3, I mean its equivalent types of games for mobile devices.

Good games exist, but they are few and far between, like most good things.

For instance, I see Monument Valley (both 1 and 2) as a true masterpiece. Of course, it has no loot boxes, no online play, and no competitive multiplayer mode.

I'm sure children make up a significant portion of downloads/views.

There are plenty of good mobile games if you know where to find them. Case in point, the two I play currently:

- Call Of Duty Mobile

The microtransactions are strictly cosmetic only, and even then there are ways to obtain otherwise paid skins through free currency by just playing the game.

- Soul Knight

Less than half the characters are paid, the rest can be obtained through free currency. And considering the amount of content they put in the game and that it's updated regularly, I daresay it's a fair ask.

Go and find some good implementations of board games. It will cost you more than your average game, but you will get a complete working game that you can play over and over.

Through the Ages, Brass, Race for the Galaxy, Slay the Spire. There's plenty.

Why can't a company just do what makes them money already? Why do they have to "admit" that X is "too big to ignore"?

Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch which is just a return to their bread and butter (albeit with a physically mobile twist), I wonder how much of the "pivots" are driven by over eager MBA new grads who are just chasing headlines from equally delusional gaming media writers, and these two classes somehow feedback into each other, leading to ill ventures by companies that waste money and time eventually.

Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search).

For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing.

If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.

Yeah, well I wouldn't have canceled by Dropbox subscription if they hadn't been so eager to turn it into some broad all-encompassing enterprise app.

I get that they have an audience, and the stakeholders have every inventive to try to leverage that attention into perpetual growth to stroke their own egos (and satisfy Wall Street), but this is why we can't have nice things.

Dropbox was plenty big enough to just be really good at file syncing in a platform agnostic way, this was literally better than Apple (despite Steve Jobs arrogant prognostication about "that's not a company that's a feature"), Microsoft or Google can ever achieve, because they always have the VP over their head making sure it serves their larger world-dominance agenda. This is the same reason Twitter had to measure itself against Facebook instead of recognizing that it had unique value as a protocol which Facebook never could have achieved regardless of DAUs or ad revenue numbers. The fact that "market rate" for software engineers is established by advertising/big data monopolies and everything of slightly lesser scale is deemed a failure is one of the saddest realities of our modern economy. The wonders we could have if the Berkeley tech hippies vision has been 20% closer to reality are truly astounding. As software engineers we live with an embarrassment of financial opportunity, juxtaposed against a dearth of technological vision and value delivered to the people.

Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities.

Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand.

Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.

Or you end up like Nintendo, who isn't going anywhere any time soon.

The problem for Kodak and Dropbox is that they made easily replicated products; whereas every great video game is unique in its own right.

That narrative about Nintendo's forays into mobile misses Fire Emblem Heroes which is a cash cow that has generated $1B[1] so far and Pokemon Go. Unfortunately, I think we'll see more mobile titles from Nintendo in the future.

[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/fire-emblem-heroes...

> Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch

They made almost 10 billion in revenue between Pokémon go, Mario kart tour, animal crossing pocket camp, and fire emblem heroes.

Hardly a doomed venture.

They may not have made as much as the Switch + its total game sales, but as individual games Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokemon Go have done pretty darn well (hundreds of millions of USD in microtransactions each).

https://sensortower.com/blog/nintendo-revenue-one-billion

Granted, I would not personally consider them amazing works of art as games but they are financially bringing in a good amount of profit for Nintendo.

What's profitable today isn't typically profitable in the future. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P500 is 18 years. The companies that survive long term often reinvent themselves repeatedly.

https://www.scrum.org/resources/how-predict-lifespan-company...

You may not be aware of just how much money the mobile market is worth. Nintendo's entire annual revenue for recent years is around 12-15 billion. The single mobile game Genshin Impact made 2 billion in one year. Tencent, which owns a lot of mobile games, has an annual revenue of around 30 billion. Also remember that this is revenue, not profit.

Would you work 40 hours a week for $100k or 5 hours a week for $200k?

And bill gates is worth more then 100B, I should just go and be bill gates #2?

The mobile space is swamped with people trying to be the next fate or the next genshin or the next etc etc. Again, as I said in another comment, it's fine to get your feet wet and diversify, but just because one (1) company can make it big with anime girls doesn't mean you will or that it's a sure bet. If anything, the gacha space is way to saturated at this point and the whales by their nature of being whales, there just aren't that many to go around.

My argument really isn't Sony should ignore mobile but their small footprint isn't the crime for shareholders that game media people like OP make it out to be.

They are. But their job is to make as much money as they can, not to be content with the amount they’re making now.

Sony isn't new to mobile gaming. They publish Fate/Grand Order, easily one of the top 10 grossing mobile games.

It's by subsidiary of SME (Aniplex). Actually they have some experiene for mobile games (primary in Japan) but it's not SIE (now HQ'd in the US). OP title should say SIE rather than Sony.

Japanese businesses often are like this. Every major decision requires 100% consensus and agreement before it is accepted and things move on with the full force of the organization. One person disagreeing can hold things up and especially if it's a senior member of the team.

I worked with a Japanese division of Hewlett-Packard and it was just like this. But sometimes sillier/stupider.

Title should really say mobile phone gaming.

I would say that there are 4 categories of games, with some overlap: PC, console, portable, and mobile. The title is unambiguous in my opinion.

There is a lot of consolidation going on the big gaming companies. There needs to be some monopoly busting, or we'll be doomed to replay the same games every year for $70-100.

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