> The vast majority of gamers game on smartphones and tablets with ARM processors.

Those are clearly not the gamers I am talking about. The gamers I am referring too are not switching to playing on mobile phones. If they are switching to handheld devices they are going with x86 devices like the Steam Deck.

There is a massive market out there of games that do not support those platforms. That are only just now scratching the surface with games like Death Stranding releasing on iPhone and Mac.

Except for Nintendo the 2 main AAA consoles are x86 based, and I have seen no rumors of that changing.

So great, there are large mobile games but lets not pretend that there is not a huge market that the future is not already here for and shows very little signs of actually changing anytime soon.

https://steamcharts.com/ that is what I am talking about. Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

> There are also gaming hits like Fate/Grand Order that don't have an x86/Windows release at all due to not even considering desktops/laptops.

That is nothing new, Pokemon GO came out in 2016. That isnt a sign that gaming is changing but that gaming is expanding to include new types of players. But the "hardcore" AAA gaming market still very much exists, and is firmly on x86 right now.

> Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

Even in that case it's "kind of but not really". PUBG Mobile is a distinct game from regular PUBG, they have similar core gameplay but they are developed independently of each other.

Good to know, thank you. I figured they went the Fortnite route and it was the same game.

But I don't play PUBG, so my main point stands. None of the top steam games support ARM.

Fortnite is the outlier there, being the exact same game across every platform. COD Mobile and Apex Mobile are/were also officially sanctioned clones of the original game, similar to PUBG Mobile.

Porting a game from x86 Windows to ARM Windows may take some effort, but for most games, nowhere near as much as porting to a different operating system. There just isn’t that much assembly code or even SIMD intrinsic use in your average game. And thanks to Microsoft’s Arm64EC ABI, the conversion from x86 to ARM can be done piecemeal. If, say, the game depends on some proprietary third-party library that isn’t willing to offer an ARM version, that library can be run in emulation while the rest of the game is compiled natively for ARM.

The AAA game world is very conservative, so I can’t guarantee that PC game developers will port their codebases to ARM. It really depends on the size of the audience and how well the x86 emulator works as a substitute. Even if ARM takes over on Windows laptops, I’m not sure laptops are enough, when laptop users are already accustomed to not being able to run AAA games well.

But if the audience gets large enough, it’s hard to believe that developers won’t try recompiling. It’s just not the same level of effort as a port to Mac or Linux.

> The AAA game world is very conservative, so I can’t guarantee that PC game developers will port their codebases to ARM.

Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and Godot all support ARM, so - testing and third-party binary libraries aside - there shouldn't be any reason to not have an ARM port.

Indeed – though many AAA games use in-house engines.

>Those are clearly not the gamers I am talking about.

You specified gamers, you should have explicitly specified PC gamers if they are who you referred to.

Note that PC gamers are, as much as they deny it, a minority of out of all gamers as a whole. The vast majority of gamers play on mobile or consoles, and of those mobile far outnumbers consoles too.

Consoles can also switch processor architectures with the changing forces of the wind, they don't have to support backwards compatibility unlike x86 and Windows. If Windows ends up becoming more ARM dominant than x86, consoles will likely follow suit to make subsequent Windows ports (and then also mobile ports?) easier.

Going on a tangent, I find it very annoying that PC gamers despite being the minority somehow want to claim gamers aren't gamers. PC Master Race is a meme, not reality.

>Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

Stardew Valley at #10 also has mobile ports.[1][2]

>But the "hardcore" AAA gaming market still very much exists, and is firmly on x86 right now.

The games I cited are AAA games, FSVO AAA; they are developed and/or published by big, established studios and/or publishers. Frankly, I find the AAA moniker worthless these days, but I digress.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800

[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chucklefis...

> mobile far outnumbers consoles too

That didn't sound correct to me, and I found an article [0] that says the numbers are pretty similar.

I play some games on PC+PS5 and some on mobile, so I'd probably count as both a mobile and "legacy" gamer, but if I had to choose one gaming market to immediately disappear from the face of the earth, it would be mobile gaming for me, absolutely.

[0] https://business.yougov.com/content/48108-console-vs-mobile-...

The graph is misleading because they group PC and consoles together against mobile. That implies mobile would slaughter both of those segments individually.

It's also missing some very important markets like Japan and South Korea, presumably included in "48 markets multi-market average" but not explicitly shown individually. Makes one wonder, eh? :V