> There are kinds of games you can't play on a phone
Actually, I'm curious; what are those games?
I guess "GTA 5" is an acceptable answer. But if you're satisfied with 2fps, even that should run through Rosetta/Box86 and GPT/Proton. Both modern Android and modern iOS devices should have the API coverage to enable DirectX12 via-translation, even if their hardware isn't particularly amicable to it.
You can play Resident Evil 4 natively on an iPhone. You can play Half Life and Fallout: New Vegas locally on Android. It's not really a contradiction of your claim, but I don't think anything really stops iPhones and Android phones from providing PC or console-quality game APIs anymore.
Apart from being an atrocious experience, in an interface and usage context that is wildly different from the UX “hot oaths” our phones are (rightfully) designed for.
I want a different experience when I sit down to my big PC or a PS5. I want to play the games designed for that device and that experience (at the desk, back on the couch). With enough finagling, you can replicate a shallow version of this experience on a phone, but it sucks, the things runs out of power and/or gets super hot, and if push comes to shove, the games are the first thing getting ejected from my phone if I need to make space.
I can play games on my phone, but the whole experience is nowhere near replacing what I get on, say, Steam.
Sure, I agree. It's the old "watching movies on your iPhone isn't watching movies at the theater" argument again, I get it.
From a technical perspective though, disregarding the UX side (because frankly that's a personal decision), phones can game. Not just some games either, most modern Android phones will support Vulkan 1.2 which will run a whole host of DXVK games. The limit is how fast you can translate x86 code into ARM, really.
So... in the interest of hacking (fancy that), I want to enable people to do the "movie night on iPhone" equivalent for PC games. The limitations of phone gaming will be subjective just like the limitations of console gaming are, but at this point it's an inevitability.
This is not "runs" in a practical sense. It has to be a reasonable substitute for the console.
Here's the money question: If you're the developer of this game, can you reasonably stop selling it for consoles and paying the vig to the console makers by telling people to play it on their phone instead?
> can you reasonably stop selling it for consoles and paying the vig to the console makers by telling people to play it on their phone instead?
Didn't people do this a ton? It started with a trickle of poor but sellable ports of stuff like Call of Duty to the Wii and Grand Theft Auto for iPhone. All of that stuff was signed-off by publishers. The ports came through even faster on Nintendo Switch, despite it being both less powerful than most phones and a different architecture from most consoles at the time. Then there's even the Steam Deck, which crossed the rubicon of running Windows games without Windows. At no point during any of that history did publishers tell people to stop playing the "inferior" ported version. Some might even say they didn't care, as long as you bought a full-price copy of the game and enjoyed it.
So... yeah. Consoles will exist, and people will port games to them because gamers will buy and own them. But smartphones are simply more popular, and the software pipeline required to get PC games running on the hardware you already own and use exists and is usable today. Console releases haven't correlated with quality since forever, the majority of people I know would rather play Fallout: New Vegas on a phone than Fallout: 76 on a PS5.
Old or low-resource games are a different market, which phones can participate in. But if there wasn't a separate market for console games then consoles wouldn't exist -- people would just use their phones instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a separate device. That people will pay money for a console when they already have a phone is a simple proof that the phone can't replace the console.
If consoles were required to be open then they'd likely merge with PCs, since a console is basically a PC but closed. This is another aspect of the anti-competitive nature of the industry -- if consoles were "basically a PC" and open then a non-Microsoft console would be a Linux PC sitting in a hundred million living rooms, which is a threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, and a major reason they created the Xbox. By subsidizing the sale price of the Xbox and making it back by shaking down game developers, they make an open console an uphill battle because it would have to charge more for hardware and less for games, which reduces initial adoption and the network effect, pressuring its primary competitors to do the same thing and be closed.
And then you get game developers targeting PlayStation instead of SteamOS, the latter of which would have made the games also run on any other desktop Linux, and general purpose software developers targeting Windows but not Linux because there aren't a hundred million general purpose Linux "consoles" in living rooms.
Actually, I'm curious; what are those games?
I guess "GTA 5" is an acceptable answer. But if you're satisfied with 2fps, even that should run through Rosetta/Box86 and GPT/Proton. Both modern Android and modern iOS devices should have the API coverage to enable DirectX12 via-translation, even if their hardware isn't particularly amicable to it.
You can play Resident Evil 4 natively on an iPhone. You can play Half Life and Fallout: New Vegas locally on Android. It's not really a contradiction of your claim, but I don't think anything really stops iPhones and Android phones from providing PC or console-quality game APIs anymore.