Every once in a while I hear people putting down mobile games. Mobile games aren’t real games, People that play mobile games aren’t real gamers, etc etc. It’s kind of a strange thing to hear given the place I hear this type of commentary is usually on a dedicated mobile gaming site. As a life long resident of the greater Philadelphia area, I cannot help but be reminded of the times I have seen out-of-towners foolishly wearing opposing team merchandise to a sporting event. There are numerous YouTube vids of our home town reactions.
Thankfully, the sites are much more accomodating than my fellow citizens of the city of brotherly love.
Now let me just say that it is ridiculous to suggest mobile games aren’t real games. Maybe this was an ok opinion to espouse in years past, but we are way past the due date on this one. I am an avid PC gamer and as a wee lad I was also known to be fused to an Atari and later a Sega Genesis and Gameboy. If you want to tell me I’m not a gamer, I will laugh and shrug and might throw a snowball at you. But there are still a few things that console and desktop gaming culture have that the mobile side does not. It is a quickly dwindling list that separates us from our cord-bound brethren and just within the last few weeks a major one has been checked off the list: Streaming. Our friends over at Mobcrush extended an invitation to us recently to start streaming directly from mobile devices.
This is a pretty huge landmark when you consider we are already swimming in high quality ports from non mobile platforms. Games like XCOM($4.99), Legend of Grimrock($4.99) and Don’t Starve($4.99) are rolling onto our iPads (and even iPhones) at a staggering rate. Now you would think that this in and of itself would stifle that small vocal minority that wants to proclaim mobile is inferior and a dying medium and the sky is truly falling. To the contrary, they have been evangelizing onward in the name of … I don’t even know. Are they trying to get someone to announce the death of mobile games? Not sure what the end goal is, but good luck with whatever it is.
Up until this point, streaming has been primarily confined to PC based platforms. Mobcrush is catapulting mobile into one of the last bastions of PC/console superiority. When you talk about gamer culture (and manage to not chuckle about how absurd that term might have sounded in the past), one of the pillars it rests on is the landmark games and personalities that are commonly recognized by the massive majority of those who identify. The way many of those games and personalities now surface into our nerd lexicon is via streaming sites. Sure YouTube has a huge stake in it as well, but you don’t get the same level of immediate interaction with it. Just as Twitch had a leg up on YouTube with the live stream focus, so Mobcrush has a leg up on Twitch with their mobile focus. It’s a great niche to be involved with these days, it seems like we can’t help but pick up all the bread crumb news pieces that are showing us just how prevalent and powerful mobile has become.
The cool thing is that it’s already happening. The first day I loaded up Mobcrush, I saw our friend Lonnie was already set up and doing streams. Even as the Mobcrush platform is rolling out feature after feature, we are seeing mobile’s own well known games and people featured and garnering some pretty big view counts. If you haven’t checked it out yet, rest assured it’s going to be the next big thing.
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It is an exciting time to be engulfed in mobile games. I have been loving the easy interface and streaming my own stuff through the TouchArcade account. As they get closer to exiting their beta test, expect more and more to hear about Mobcrush and see it popping up as an exclusively mobile alternative to whats out there for desktop and console. Streaming from a mobile device is fun and a lot more flexible than being anchored to a chair. So maybe you still think mobile games aren’t real games, but thanks to Mobcrush, you have one less reason to be wrong.
