Your phone may well be all the game machinery you’ll ever want or need.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 just came out, and I’m deep into playing it — on my phone.
Sure, the screen on my iPhone 16 Pro is significantly smaller than my 60-inch Vizio TV, which is hooked up to my Xbox Series S, but I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. The flames from car explosions are dazzling, and I can spot enemies from far off despite their miniature stature. And the cinematic cutscenes still look like they’re straight from an action film.
I also feel more connected to the world around me. Playing a game on a console is like watching a film in Imax: bigger, louder, totally absorbing. But as I play on my iPhone, I pause the campaign to check an email or respond to a Slack message — I’m playing the game as, ahem, research for this story — before jumping back into the action. The game is a blast, but it’s not all-consuming.
Consoles, Call of Duty and I go way back, but as I play on my phone with a connected Xbox controller at my desk, I’m wondering if I need my Xbox at all. Not just today, but ever again.
Some people have already made that leap.
Mr. Charley, a moderator for the Xcloud subreddit, tells me in an email that the last console he had was an Xbox 360 before he really got into mobile gaming around 2008 and then cloud gaming in 2020. It wouldn’t bother him if consoles just disappeared.
“I honestly can’t think of anything I’d miss”, he says. “I look at mobile gaming as the ‘gateway drug’ in introducing you to ease of gaming at your fingertips and wherever you are.”
Soon enough, that could be you, too. Your phone may well be all the game machinery you’ll want. The groundwork has been laid: Phones are more powerful every year, more homes are hooked up to broadband (including 5G internet) and game services are partnering with an increasing number of developers to bring games to more platforms and devices.
For those who continue to buy and play on consoles, those machines will be like a Ferrari: expensive but fun to have. Your phone will be the Honda Civic of gaming: affordable, reliable, easy to maintain and capable of pretty much whatever you need.
Yes, I am writing this even as major console upgrades are just hitting the market: Microsoft’s discless Xbox Series X debuted on Oct.15 and Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro on Nov. 5. The thing is, some gaming companies, especially Microsoft — which in addition to making the Xbox owns Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard — are showing signs of focusing on gaming software rather than hardware by bringing more games to cloud gaming and mobile platforms in order to bring their titles to a wider customer base.
What exactly are mobile and cloud gaming?
Who’s playing mobile games?
Rapid advances in mobile hardware
The era of gaming services is now
Cloud gaming brings you games where you are
Consoles are sticking around for now
“It’s not about one device”
Ten days after the discless Xbox Series X came out, Microsoft released Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 both on consoles and on its Xbox Cloud Gaming platform, also known as Xcloud. That allows Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to play the game without an Xbox console as long as they have another compatible device, including, the company noted, “PCs, mobile devices, [and] select Samsung TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Meta Quest devices.”
“This is a first for the Call of Duty franchise, and a win for the community”, Microsoft said in an Oct. 14 post.
That range of increasingly capable devices, combined with greater availability of fast internet connections and the fact that pretty much everyone owns a smartphone, has drawn attention from tech heavyweights outside traditional gaming circles. Chipmaker Nvidia has its GeForce Now cloud streaming service, entertainment streamer Netflix offers mobile gaming too, and Apple offers games through its Apple Arcade service.
Apple’s thinking never strays too far from the iPhone. When it released iOS 18 in September, one of the new features was all about mobile gaming: Game Mode, which minimizes background activity on your iPhone when you play a game.
“Game Mode … improves the responsiveness of wireless game controllers and AirPods by reducing latency”, Apple wrote online. “That’s especially helpful when you’re trying to be the last one standing in a PUBG Mobile match or take the checkered flag in Disney Speedstorm.”
All of these things make it easier than ever to play the latest games — whether AAA or indie titles — on your phone. That’s too bad for the consoles of the world, but not for gamers like Mr. Charley (who asked that we refer to him by his username).
“I firmly believe”, he says, “that if someone has a good cloud experience they will realize the benefits and the ease of use.”What exactly are mobile and cloud gaming?
The cloud experience is one key driver of this new era of gaming. Phones are the other.
Mobile gaming is any kind of gaming done on a mobile phone. That includes match-three games like Candy Crush, word games like Wordle and competitive games like PUBG Mobile. Games can be downloaded to your phone, like other apps, and played locally or online against others.
Cloud gaming, on the other hand, doesn’t require you to download a game, and you can play the same game on a variety of devices (and not necessarily the latest hardware) as long as you sign into the same account. Your saves will carry over from device to device, meaning that if you, say, start a game on console, you can play it on your phone or television later without losing your progress.
It’s been a long time since you needed a disc drive or a cartridge slot to play a game: According to NewZoo, about 95% of all games sold in 2023 were digital. Services like Game Pass and PlayStation Plus make it easy to access those digital games.
“If you’ve got 60 seconds, 30 seconds while you’re waiting for something, you could open your phone and do something useful to progress your game”, Mike McFarland, who’s been playing games since the ’80s and plays mobile games almost daily, tells me. “Console gaming, for the most part, you have to wait a few minutes to boot your console and get into the game, go through loading screens, so you better be sitting there for at least a half hour.”
Cloud gaming is like watching a video on Netflix. The game is streamed over the internet to your device from the server it’s stored on.
So there can be hiccups. Subredditor Mr. Charley thinks that if the industry can resolve them, cloud gaming will really take off.
“Once cloud gaming figures it out fully (no latency, no pixelation, no reduced visual quality regardless of your internet speed) it will be exactly like consoles”, he says.
