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Comment by EpicEng | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if all you care about is candy crush and the random pay to win adventure game. No one is playing "real" games on tablets or phones, nor will they be anytime in the foreseeable future.

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> No one is playing "real" games on tablets or phones, nor will they be anytime in the foreseeable future.

Could you explain that? I've played some pretty great games on my iPhone/iPad over the last few years. There certainly are games that could stand up to the average PC release (remember BattleField 7 and Call of Duty 18 are not average). Many are at least easily comparable to games of the 16 bit era.

A sample from my purchased apps list: Battleheart, Beat Sneak Bandit, Brainsss, Device 6, Fieldrunners, Edge, Game Dev Story, Girls Like Robots, One Tap Hero, Punch Quest, The Room, Slayin, Spider, Spy Mouse, Star Command, Supermagical, Tiny Heroes, Tiny Thief, Waking Marks, and Zenbound.

This doesn't include 'tiny' games, ports, digital version of boardgames, etc.

All of your examples are casual games.

WoW, Rift, Guild Wars, SC, competitive FPS's, Witcher style RPG's, Elder Scrolls, etc. these are not games you will be playing on a tablet. There exists a clear divide between casual and serious gamers.

I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong or inherently inferior about the more casual side of things, just that they really are two very different markets.

You can play WoW and Guild Wars 2 on a Mac. Doesn't that mean they are OpenGL?

Guild Wars 2 uses Wine internally to run the Windows GW2 client (I used to play it, and I'd occasionally get Wine errors).

WoW uses OpenGL and it runs like crap on a mac.

Unfortunately there's no good word for the market your parent is talking about. "real" games, "hardcore" games, all have negative connotations, but your parent is contrasting lightweight games to heavyweight games. Angry Birds to Bioshock.

I think that's the issue here too. I would divide things in three. Casual games are often quick or pick-up-and-play. Angry birds, Bejeweled, even things like Peggle or Plants vs Zombies. Most flash/FaceBook games fit in here.

Then there are the hardcore games. Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Street Fighter 4, etc. These games often require lots of skill or dedication, and are often big budget titles.

But there is a ton of stuff in between. Games that you might be able to play fast but are very difficult (like Spelunky), that the player can choose how to play (Minecraft or Terraria), that just aren't designed to be highly competitive and difficult (Sly Cooper series, maybe Ratchet and Clank series), aren't hardcore ultra-deep sims (SimCity, Game Dev Story), and many sports games (Madden, NBA2k, etc).

Some people go really deep on some games and play them in a 'hardcore' way. The lines aren't easy as I know many people think World of Warcraft has been dumbed-down throughout the expansions to where it may not be 'hardcore' for many people.

But that's my general taxonomy. Casual, 'normal', hardcore.

Sure, there is a lot of overlap too. It's just that one extreme that I don't see being satisfied by mobile devices any time soon (if ever).

Android != tablets or phones.

Thanks to android being open source people can take it and build ...stuff.. with it. I'm sure you have heard of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

And while it's very low-end, there is still stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldwU96PGOyM which might not be a "real" game but it seems pretty close.

Now imagine the next generation of android consoles with OpenGL ES 3.0 and more powerful GPUs.

It might sound like a snide way to put it, but there is a clear dividing line;

OpenGL dominates casual platforms.

DirectX dominates "traditional gaming" platforms.

So the PS2/3/4 are "casual" and not "traditional gaming" platforms?

I believe the parent is concerned with PC games, not Console. It's not like most console producers are concerned with cross platform anyway (at least, not until perhaps now, we'll see).

None of then really support OpenGL though.

While they had OGL implementations, all of them basically require you to write against a low-level proprietary api to be competitive with other games on the platform.

I installed TF2 on my work tablet yesterday, it worked just fine. Civ 5 and X-Com are great on it. Is that "real" enough?

No. Like I have said more than once now, I'm talking about games with complex control schemes that require quick reactions.

iOS XCOM is a great game, is far more expensive than most iOS games, and is has been very successful.

It's not about good and bad, it's the difference between a game like WoW and a game I can play on a touchpad. Very different. The lack of horsepower is an obvious issue, but do you know how many keybinds I have in a game like wow? About 30-40. How about the precision of a mouse and keyboard vs a touchscreen? Screen size (lack of)? Some games are just too complex for these sorts of input devices and there's really no benefit to running them on a portable device. I'm not raiding while outside having a smoke.

Like to put some money on that?

I'd bet money that in two years time 2 out of the top 5 "real" games will be available on iOS and/or Android. (Not entirely sure how we are defining "real" games, though).

I would. It's simply not practical to play games on mobile devices that require more complex input devices which allow for many discrete inputs and more precise control. I don't know, perhaps someone much smarter than I will figure something amazing out, but I doubt it.

And I shouldn't have used the term "real". I'm talking about games like WoW. Many (many) buttons that need to be pressed quickly in response to your opponent (not talking about LFR obviously...).

WoW is a terrible example due to the latency mitigation factors built into the game: you can only cast spells every so often, and then you have a global cool down between spells. You could totally do it on an ipad or some such if the control scheme was a bit better optimized for it.

Those aren't latency mitigation factors, but ok...

So, essentially, your argument is that control schemes should be dumbed down so that they play on mobile? Yeah, that will go over well.

You don't think you are taking your experience of the current control scheme of WoW and projecting it as a limitation of the platform?

I'd note that it's pretty hard to do tilt-control on a PC...

And there are already plenty of actions games on iOS that work well (and need to be more responsive than WoW).

Who needs tilt control? WoW is just an example. Any game that has a complex control scheme and requires quick reactions is simply not suitable to mobile devices. I'm not sure you actually play any of the games I am talking about.

Mobile (or rather touch screens) actually enable richer control schemes than a keyboard. You may not be happy with anything available as yet, but that doesn't make it impossible.

Anyway, iOS controller support means the touch screen isn't the only input device.

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