With FC, I figured they had that audience by the balls.

Schreier’s added context to this is that FC is far more responsible for the financial underperformance than Dragon Age.

But I get to choose what I think is the right game for the job. The Switch is successful because it serves both masters. Not making the game available just makes me less likely to bother with mobile games at all.

On my Steam Deck, or if you prefer a Switch, any game is a mobile game. You can suspend and resume quite easily, and as long as you can do the same on a phone, it’ll fit that use case just as well. My mobile use case might be killing 15 minutes at the DMV, or it might be an hour long train ride. I’ll pick the right game for the job.

Apple has been making decisions hostile to a thriving gaming scene for decades at this point, so they engineered that lack of overlap. Just because they paid big money for ports of Resident Evil and Death Stranding, it doesn’t mean that any other big games have a reason to follow them.

There’s a lot going on here. I think other devs, Apple, and Google are all going to look at this and say it’s not the type of game people want on their phones, but I’d say that’s the wrong conclusion. If I got an APK included in the purchase of my PC games, I’d play a bunch more games on mobile, but even some of those that have mobile ports are no longer compatible with modern Android. Even some of those that still are compatible do not work with controllers, and many of those have bad touch controls. And if you narrow down that library of great games to the ones that still work and have good controls, it’s always an inferior version of the game by way of being the mobile version of it. There’s no easy standard to dock it like the Switch or to transfer saves like Steam cloud saves.

If you want this type of game to do well on mobile, Apple and Google need to make a standard, quality, easily portable mobile controller. Games need to support that controller more often than not. There needs to be a standard for docking the device and outputting to a larger screen. The device needs to retain compatibility with older software, reliably. This is at a minimum. But there isn’t really an incentive to make premium mobile gaming better, so they’ll stick with manipulative, low barrier to entry games that control well with touches, taps, and swipes.

I’m a Linux user, and I’m at the point where I treat any online component as though it doesn’t exist if there’s no offline alternative like LAN. If GTA VI has a campaign as good as the previous two games, it’s still worth it, because I’m not touching the online mode.

It’s an open world game that takes a lot of inspiration from Monster Hunter. An MMO isn’t a huge stretch of the imagination.

When it comes to controls, the number one thing I’m looking for is controller support, but I don’t see the tag there. I don’t suppose they’re supported and just not listed?

I’ve definitely found games that I thought were worth $100, and they often refuse to even go as high as $70. Probably the only one that I thought was worth $100 and charged that much for it was Street Fighter 6.

Another commenter already gave you the answer, but it truly sucks that we’ve gotten so used to this that you can’t imagine an alternative.

I’ll add, “my government might get pissed off at one of the companies involved” to my list of reasons why always-online games are a terrible idea.