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Comment by monegator | Hacker News Reader

"general" people really play actual games on phones? I thought the general public at most played with time waster freemium games

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I wouldn't consider gachas to be "actual games" (sue me), but yeah, they do tend to have way more complex gameplay and graphics than the timewaster freemium games of yore. Genshin Impact is essentially a single-player MMO, it has an open world and lots of characters and different weapons etc etc.

still wouldn't bet the general phone audience find those games to be the the deciding factor in a phone

I think it would be on par with camera quality— really important to some, bot not a huge deal for most.

Good enough quality screen for solid video media performance, generally, would be an absolute must I imagine.

The "general phone audience" is some 5 billion people. If even 10% of them want to play games, on what is in the current year likely to be their primary if not only computer, that's already a market segment of 500 million. It wouldn't honestly surprise me if the number is closer to 15 or 20%, mobile gaming is extremely popular.

i would be surprised if it was more than 1-2% for those "graphic intensive games"

normies use consoles, sometimes PCs

my personal beef, after a camera that gets decent photos in low light, would be an accurate GPS that doesn't crap out after half an hour

And yet Apple was at some point called one of the largest gaming companies in the world by revenue

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/06/05/apple-one-of-the-biggest...

I think a lot of HN users, living in our own PC-oriented bubble, may not have realised the world has completely passed PCs by and that smartphones are the personal computers of the current generation. While PS5 and Switch each have about 100-150 million in sales, there are an estimated 3 billion mobile game players. Are a majority of those "mobile game players" playing Flappy Bird, sure. But again, even 10% of that number being interested in "real games" would outnumber PS5 and Switch players combined. Fortnite and PUBG each have hundreds of millions of active users, most are on console but around 20% appear to be on mobile from a quick search. Genshin Impact also has tens of of millions MAU, a non-neglible percentage of which are mobile players. There are hundreds of millions of people for whom being able to play 3D games on their phone matters.

Anecdotally,

In public transport I see almost as many people playing games on their phones as those watching videos.

mobile has been the largest gaming market for years now, wdym?

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