The Best Gaming Console Could Be Already in Your Pocket
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.
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. "For some it already feels that way but it needs to hit the masses and on a consistent basis."
Who's playing mobile games?
Cloud gaming is still in its infancy, and in many cases still in beta, but it's already projected to be highly profitable. According to the marketing research firm Mordor Intelligence , cloud gaming's market size this year is about $4 billion, and it's predicted to grow to about $25 billion in 2029. A big part of that growth will come from mobile gaming.
The audience for mobile gaming is significant. According to a NewZoo report from May, there were about 3.38 billion gamers in 2023, and mobile gaming generated about $90 billion that year — about half of all gaming revenue. According to YouGov , 46% of gamers worldwide are mobile gamers, while 40% are console or PC gamers.
Meanwhile, the gaming audience isn't as homogeneous as it once was, and gaming as a hobby is now a mainstream form of entertainment, says Joost van Dreunen. He teaches a course at the NYU Stern School of Business called the Business of Video Games, co-founded a gaming data intelligence firm called Aldora and wrote the book One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games .
"Games has grown, not just in dollar numbers," van Dreunen tells me, "but also in the breadth and diversity of the audience that they cater to."
It all adds up to boom times for alternatives to console gaming.
"The growing number of internet users and the tendency to play games on mobile devices with storage issues in many devices are major drivers for the market," the Mordor Intelligence report says. "Smartphone-based gaming solutions enable gamers to enjoy mobile games by streaming them through the cloud, eliminating the need for powerful mobile hardware and storage space needed to download."
Rapid advances in mobile hardware
Cloud gaming can offer a console-level gaming experience on a mobile phone, but you need a good internet connection for it to work. It doesn't matter what the quality of the game is if your ping is in the triple digits.
Luckily, phone hardware has advanced enough that you can play many newly released games right on your phone itself — no cloud gaming required. And phones get upgrades pretty much annually, a much faster pace than with consoles.
Major gaming companies usually release a new console about every six or seven years. Microsoft and Sony released the Series X/S and PlayStation 5, respectively, in 2020, and before that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 in 2013. Nintendo released the original Wii in 2006, the Wii U in 2012 and the Switch in 2017.
Apple released the iPhone 16 lineup in September on its annual upgrade cycle. Google released the Pixel 9 in August, earlier than the October releases of past Pixel phones. Samsung brings out new Galaxy phones around the beginning of the calendar year — so we'll likely see the next models in January or February.
Those timelines mean phones are regularly getting upgrades to their processors and other internal systems. When Microsoft and Sony released their latest consoles in 2020, Apple was at the iPhone 12. At the time, the iPhone wasn't built to handle the requirements of many modern games, but that changed in three years.
In 2023, Apple released the iPhone 15 Pro and highlighted how it could play Resident Evil Village locally, no cloud streaming required. My colleague Oscar Gonzalez tried out the game on Apple's devices and said he forgot he was playing on a mobile device.
"From the details of the close-up shots of the lycans to seeing footprints in the snow as I walked around, there wasn't anything I could see that would make it clear that I was playing a mobile version of the game," he wrote at the time. "It's a spot-on mobile version of Resident Evil Village."
Since then, Apple has ported Death Stranding, Zenless Zone Zero and other blockbuster games to iOS. If you'd told me a decade ago that the iPhone in my pocket would be able to play these major games locally, I'd have called you a liar.
There are even gaming-specific phones, like the Asus ROG Phone 8 , that are powerful enough to give you a whole day's worth of gaming. In his review of that phone earlier this year, my colleague Michael Sorrentino noted that it not only takes decent photos and handles other everyday tasks, it's also a "media-focused powerhouse, thanks to its high refresh display, connectivity options, fast charging and headphone jack."
The era of gaming services is now
While advances in mobile hardware are making it easy to bring games from consoles to mobile devices, companies are also introducing more mobile-first gaming services.
Case in point: Apple Arcade , which debuted in 2019. A subscription service that costs $7 a month, it's geared toward the company's mobile devices. It has featured exclusive games attached to popular franchises like James Bond, Hello Kitty and Lego, and over time has added popular console and PC games like Dead Cells , Slay the Spire and the cult card game Balatro . According to Reuters , Arcade is expected to pull in about $1.2 billion for Apple by 2025.
"The mobile gaming subscription model is an exciting new direction for us," Matt Fischer, Apple's vice president of the App Store, said to my colleague Shelby Brown in 2022 .
Bradley Jones, a moderator for a subreddit dedicated to Apple Arcade, told me he's been gaming for about 24 years, and he's always leaned toward mobile gaming.
"I love playing a quick, simple puzzle game and having the option to always have it on me," Jones said. "Mobile is just more practical and fits better into my day."
At the same time, he feels like Apple Arcade needs bigger and more popular AAA games to draw more people to it.
"It might be worth Apple's time to partner with or acquire a major game studio to bring in high-demand titles and elevate the service," he says. "There's a lot of talk about this on r/AppleArcade , with some users even switching to Netflix Gaming for a broader selection."
That's right, Netflix. The place you go to watch Squid Game, Stranger Things and Outer Banks. In 2021, it launched its own mobile gaming service that's included with every subscription. Since then, it's added the award-winning game Hades , remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto and more to its library. It's also worked with game makers like Night School Studio to bring award-winning mobile games to the platform, like Oxenfree.
"One of the really smart things [Netflix] did is they brought game studios internal to start churning out their own content," McFarland says. "They bought [Night School] ... and they bought Spry Fox who made Cozy Grove so that they could get Cozy Grove 2."
Netflix has also focused on turning some of its popular series into games. It's released a plethora of games under its Netflix Stories umbrella that connect to series like Too Hot to Handle .
While Netflix doesn't disclose numbers to gauge the performance of its game business, the data firm AppFigures said in May that Too Hot to Handle was Netflix's fourth most popular game as of 2023. And Netflix continues to transform its own series into games.
"They're getting more skilled at making a decent game," McFarland says, citing the new Outer Banks game .
Cloud gaming brings you games where you are
While cloud gaming may seem new, the technology has been around for years. A startup company called G-cluster worked on it in the early 2000s, and Sony purchased the cloud gaming company Gaikai in 2012 . But the infrastructure wasn't ready to support it.
A few years later, Nvidia launched GeForce Now. Andrew Fear, Nvidia's director of product marketing for GeForce Now, tells me the idea for the service was born out of a workflow issue.
In the late 2000s, Nvidia's hardware and software engineers were in separate buildings. A hardware engineer would ask a software engineer to come to their building to look at a problem, and the software engineer would then go back to their building to fix the issue, and this went on for a while. That got old fast.
"You have to run out the building, go look at it, and then go, 'Oh I see the problem,'" Fear says. "He'd run back to his desk, fix it, email the driver over ... the hardware engineer would install it, say, 'Come back and look at it again.'"
So the software engineer built a streamer that let him see what issue the hardware engineers were running into without having to go to the other building, saving him the time and hassle.
Since then, Nvidia has made it easy to stream over 1,500 games to compatible devices with a GeForce Now subscription.
One of the main draws of cloud gaming is it brings a high-end console or PC gaming experience to whatever device you have. So if you have a mobile device, a Mac or a compatible TV, you can still play demanding games without lowering any of the settings.
Fear says cloud gaming is about giving people the option to play how they want to play. He said his kids' generation just want to play with their friends, and sometimes that means Fortnite on an Xbox or Roblox on a Mac.
"We're about choices," Fear says. "We want to enable people that don't necessarily have those gaming PCs to play on GeForce Now."
Consoles are sticking around for now
Despite Microsoft making big pushes in cloud gaming, especially with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Day 1 and letting subscribers play games on devices like Fire TVs, the company says that Xbox consoles are still where gamers get the best gaming experience.
"[The Xbox console is] where you get the most flagship, seminal experience of Xbox," Sarah Bond, the president of Xbox, said on the Official Xbox podcast in February. "We're also invested in the next-generation roadmap. And what we're really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation."
Microsoft seems to be saying that while it hopes cloud gaming can meet players where they are on whatever devices they already own, consoles aren't going anywhere — like how vinyl records haven't disappeared despite the omnipresence of digital music.
Consoles may even be a necessity in some cases. Owning a console or PC may be a requirement to access some game services, even if you're not using that device.
While Microsoft is more forgiving if you don't own an Xbox as long as you buy a $20 a month subscription to access Xcloud, Sony is more restrictive. PlayStation Plus Premium is $18 a month and subscribers can use cloud streaming, but it only works with PlayStation consoles or PCs. So while Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can play the latest Call of Duty on their phones, tablets or TVs, no console required, PS Plus Premium subscribers are still tethered to a console or PC .
It feels to me like Sony's leaving money on the table. If I could buy a PS Plus Premium subscription and play The Last of Us or Ghost of Tsushima on my iPhone or MacBook, I would. But I don't want to spend the money on a new console or PC.
'It's not about one device'
While mobile and cloud gaming are making it easy to ditch consoles and play high-quality games, they still do have their own issues. Cloud gaming is heavily reliant on a good internet connection. Many AAA game studios usually release their games on consoles first, and only a few AAA games from the current generation of consoles can be played on mobile devices.
Then there's the screen size. McFarland said he doesn't play consoles all that often, but if consoles went away he'd miss how good games look on a bigger screen.
"The kind of graphics you can get on a big TV ... it's just on another level," he says.
But as mobile hardware becomes more powerful and more games are ported over, or can be played on them via cloud gaming and other mobile services, many people will find that mobile gaming is all they need to play their favorite games.
You can already play the latest Call of Duty on any device you want via cloud gaming, and you can play recent Resident Evil games locally on the latest iPhones. In the future, this will be the norm, and many of the people who've already made the transition to mobile and cloud gaming are liking what they're playing.
There's also the element of freedom and portability.
"It's not about one device," Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft gaming, said in February on the Official Xbox Podcast . "It's not about games in service of a device, but rather the devices people want to play on should be in service of making the games as big and popular as they possibly could be."
Consoles and gaming PCs aren't going away anytime soon. But Mr. Charley thinks the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Xbox Cloud Gaming is a good signal.
"You read on forums that people are having issues installing [Black Ops 6] on their console or PC, or the game's crashing on PC. Let alone the huge storage size of the game," he says. "I don't have to worry about any of that."
So before you buy another gaming console, consider your phone. You could already have your next favorite gaming console in the palm of your hand.
Visual Designer | Zooey Liao
Senior Motion Designer | Jeffrey Hazelwood
Creative Director | Viva Tung
Video Producer | Sean Booker
Video Executive Producer | Andy Altman
Project Manager | Danielle Ramirez
