The anti-mobile gaming bias is strong, and if you mention anything about mobile being the obvious future for gaming, since pretty much all the growth in gaming is coming from mobile, it sets people into a tizzy. It’s like they’re all secret Russian spies, and you said the codeword to turn them into killing machines when you point out that kids are primarily playing mobile games. And mainstream gaming sites exhibit this bias by only begrudgingly covering mobile when something is too big to ignore, or the rare “good game" crosses their path. But so rarely does it happen where someone at a mainstream outlet just comes out and says that they’re afraid of change and that mobile gaming delenda est. Well, Brian Altano of IGN’s Up at Noon Live has gone and done just that in this unhinged rant!
Seriously, there’s no irony, no doublespeak, nothing but a gaming journalist pointing his finger at the camera, sternly saying “We need to watch our backs, ’cause those mobile babies and those 2 year-olds with their phones? They’re coming for our games!" It eventually leads to him literally screaming “I don’t want a mobile device taking over my damn video games!"
I at least applaud Mr. Altano for finally coming out and just saying what every painfully-unaware critic of mobile gaming is actually thinking: that mobile is for babies and that it’s inferior trash that should be thrown in the sewers. Well, we can certainly look back on this and laugh at how wrong-headed people like him were five to ten years from now when Nintendo’s printing money from their mobile games, Sony’s pushing streaming games through PS Now on the Apple TV, and Xbox is the new Games for Windows.
But seriously, thank you IGN. You’ve finally provided the perfect video, the link I can drop whenever I want to encapsulate just how console and PC gamers feel about mobile, and why maybe I think they’re out of touch with the coming reality that is mobile gaming’s future dominance. I can just link to that video.
Oh, and parents? Watch your back around gaming journalists, they might throw your kid’s phone in the sewer if you aren’t careful.
