These tragedies put me off of mobile gaming
For a year or two, I treated my phone as my primary gaming console. It was all fun and games until I picked up on a few gamer-hostile trends that have gradually soiled the experience.
Phones have the potential to make for great gaming platforms—and it's not even their form-factor, performance, or the lack of many AAA-quality titles that's holding them back most. It's the various little things that we just wouldn't accept on our consoles or PCs.
Games can (and do) disappear from App Stores at any time
The Play Store is the largest game store available for Android devices. It's not particularly good at its job , but I've still found ways to discover great games in the Play Store and have curated a lengthy wishlist that would take me years to get through.
Thing is—some of those games have disappeared. Consider Monument Valley 3 , a sequel to one of my favorite mobile games. The first two Monument Valley releases are still available, but the third entry was released as a Netflix exclusive. I have a Netflix subscription, but still, I can't play it. The game is gone. The same is true of Raji: An Ancient Epic and Death's Door , which were among the over 20 mobile games Netflix removed from its catalog over the summer.
This is not a Netflix-exclusive issue. This issue plagues older games in general. Consider how you can currently purchase and play Chaos Rings 3 from Square Enix, but if you never experienced the first two games in the series, you're out of luck. There's no way to download them today. The original Angry Birds was updated and re-released for the Apple App Store, but it's nowhere to be found in Android's largest app marketplace.
Save data isn't preserved when you uninstall a game
My phone may have ample storage, but I don't like to have games in my app drawer that I'm not currently playing or don't intend to play any time soon. That doesn't mean that I'll never want to play them. It just might be later this year or sometime in the next couple of years, when that's the kind of game I'm in the mood for.
Unfortunately, uninstalling an Android game often means having to start from scratch when you re-download the game in the future. The game files and the game save data are all stored together and deleted at the same time. Considering how, over 30 years ago, the original PlayStation had memory cards that kept game saves separate from the physical media that stored the games (and nearly every console has honored this expectation since), this is one of the most egregious aspects of being a mobile gamer.
There are some exceptions. If a game supports Google Play Cloud Saves, then your game save data will be uploaded to your Google account and saved there. Unfortunately, not every game that integrates with Google Play Games supports this feature. So even if you see the Google Play Games image pop up at the start of a game, that doesn't mean your save files are safe. You have to conduct research to find out.
Your safest bet are games that require you to create a separate account in order to play them. I find this particularly off-putting, especially since many of these games are primarily single-player titles like Genshin Impact . Even then, you sometimes still need to check if your game save is being uploaded or only saved locally.
Many games don't transfer data between phones (or tablets)
This complete disregard for game save data doesn't just afflict those of us who delete our games for whatever reason. It's an issue that inevitably impacts every mobile gamer when the time comes to switch to a new phone. Sometimes you get lucky and find that when using Google or Samsung's data transfer tools to migrate everything from your old phone to a new one, your game save data comes along for the ride. That isn't guaranteed.
If you're someone who has multiple devices, then you're in for a headache. Whether you want to switch between phones or if you want to also play your game on a tablet, there often isn't a way to easily migrate your data from one device to the other, let alone keep that data in sync. If it doesn't support some type of cloud save, then you're generally out of luck.
Games often stop working following a major OS update
It's understandable for a game that supports one version of an operating system to stop when a new one comes around. There are often big changes under the hood that a game simply can't predict or be designed for ahead of time. Even Windows, which is the dominant desktop operating system in part because Microsoft tries really hard to keep old software running, faces this issue. It can't be assumed that games designed for Windows 98 or XP will run today. Thing is, those are ancient versions of Windows released decades ago, long before smartphones were even a thing. And even if an upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 does break a game, at least each of those versions will stick around for over a decade.
On Android, games stop working after only a handful of years. Some games stop working in less than one. This is because a new version of Android comes every year. Sometimes those upgrades break existing games, and sometimes they don't. There's no regular cadence to which Android version updates these will be that either developers or gamers can predict. And once a game breaks, unless a developer commits to updating it for every version of Android, the title simply doesn't show up in the Play Store for phones running newer versions of Android.
This is particularly frustrating as an Android gamer, watching with envy the amount of games that come to iPhones but never hit the Play Store. It's bad enough that we don't get to play those titles. It's even worse to read listicles from only a couple of years ago and find that Android doesn't even have many of the titles it used to have. Want to play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles or Final Fantasy IX ? Square Enix brought both of those titles to Android, and neither of them are available if you're running the latest version.
Want to go back and play Shadowgun ? Sorry, but you've missed your shot. Looking for an indie darling like The Almost Gone ? Well, it isn't almost anymore.
When it comes to my gadgets, I'm not someone stuck in my ways. I'm willing to trade in my controller for virtual controls in some of my games. But it's hard to buy or even recommend games if I don't know they'll still be playable in a year. Sadly, it seems, the safest way to build a durable gaming library for your phone is through a cloud gaming service like NVIDIA GeForce NOW .
