A dedicated device has the benefit of having a sole purpose: gaming. If I kill the battery, I just can't play anymore games. I can still take calls, browse the web, and text my partner.

Every once in a while I do, but it's usually a really basic game that uses hardly any resources to run, like a simple board game app.

Even people who wanted to play during Covid couldn't because it would just eat the battery to death.

I’m super curious to see what they’ve done with this current–gen, mainline Assassin‘s Creed game coming to iPhone: there is no way the core gameplay of that franchise could translate to touch controls, so either Apple dropped the requirement, some poor team had the doomed project of building an abysmal fallback touch control scheme, or they implemented some kind of semi-automated scheme for touch that makes traversal and combat less interactive.

To my knowledge you've always been allowed to provide optional game controller support, as long as you supported a touch interface too.

I mean.....millions of people play proper console games on their phones now using various streaming services and touch controls.....turns out playing games using shitty touch controls is preferable to not playing them at all I guess. So yeah, I imagine it's just a simple touch overlay, like the one used for XCloud.

With my Steam catalog I can download something I bought in 2004 and still be confident I can play it. I spent $20 on Monster Hunter for iPhone and one day iOS updated and it just didn’t work anymore.

My Switch games will assumably work until the console dies.

Another reason I completely stopped buying games on iOS was when The Binding of Isaac was suddenly delisted from the App Store. I never got a refund or anything, and because of this new versions of Binding of Isaac aren’t compatible with Macs either. I have hundreds of hours played in that game and it’s ridiculous that Apple censored it as “depicting child abuse”.

I'm not really a gamer but I get Arcade as part of a bundle and it doesn't really wow me. I sometimes look at "Best of..." lists and try a few out on a plane flight and I'm mostly meh.