Niklas Smedberg of Epic Games made an interesting statement during GDC Europe 2012 citing that mobile is now the new PC in terms of gaming. This is a fact we have been saying for the past year and a half at least but that is besides the point. It is interesting in that this is coming from Epic Games and the statement goes as far as saying that right now mobile is “starting to competing with current consoles”.
Crytek recently came out to say pretty much the same thing, gearing it more towards tablets then general mobile devices. The point is still the same, mobile is becoming a very strong force in the gaming industry and companies are either finally accepting it, already have jumped on board, or are very confused in the direction they want to go in like Electronics Arts seems to be.
Development for PC when concerning games is a lot like game development for mobile, especially referring to Android but it does apply to iOS a bit now as well. You have a variety of devices with different hardware, resolutions, and performance. you have high-end quad-core tablets and phones to single-core low-end ones. PC gaming isn’t much different since each PC set up is different. You have high-end gaming PCs and less powerful units, all with different video cards, CPUs, Memory and so on.
Apparently the God Rays, a lighting effect used in Gear of War 3 and Infinity Blade II, actually ended up looking better on mobile than the Xbox 360. Following that little gem of information is that Smedberg believes that next gen chips for mobile will be 20 times more powerful, pointing to product roadmaps from IMGTec and nVidia supporting this opinion.
In some regards, mobile is way better than console. There’s way more memory, which allows for much higher texture resolutions. On console we were doing 720p, on iPad we’re doing crazy resolutions.
This does leave one to wonder though, especially with Epic’s upcoming Unreal Engine 4, if there will be more mobile support for it, especially for Android. As of right now though, there are no such plans for Unreal Engine 4 and mobile right now. As of right now, it has been mostly up to game developers to use Unreal Engine 3 and basically make it work for Android games while iOS still seems to be the main focal point for the engine’s support.
Website Referenced: Gamespot
