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Android gaming is having a renaissance
Good morning! Today I’m mourning the loss of Patrick Stewart by rewatching First Contact, my favorite Trek movie; beginning a marathon listen of at least one great Star Trek podcast; and replaying Elite Force and Armada, both wonderful Trek games released in 2000.
Inbox is the tech newsletter that goes beyond the news cycle. We cover the most important 9to5Google stories from the last couple of days along with a few highlights from around the web. We publish every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like what you read, please subscribe.
Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.
I’m starting this edition of Inbox a bit later than I’d like, but for a good reason: I got swept up by the subject I was researching. See, I wanted to write about the seeming renaissance of gaming on Android, which has always had clear advantages and disadvantages compared to iOS. On the plus side, its openness bred experimentation and a healthy indie gaming scene, along with a thriving emulation ecosystem born of its ability to sideload apps and gain access to Android’s underlying file system. On the downside, its device and OS version fragmentation has kept some developers from attempting challenging console and PC ports, and led others to abandon their titles to bugs and time.
But thanks to a confluence of factors, as well as form factors, Android gaming is in a very good place right now. Despite Google’s continued ambivalence towards paid and premium games, the platform has received official ports of console hits like Dredge and Sifu, with others like Replaced, Absolum, and Dispatch coming soon. (One could argue things have been good for a while with Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Balatro, Slay the Spire, and Vampire Crawlers available already, but I digress.)
Most of these games are embracing a try-before-you-buy model to avoid the upfront cost that so many mobile users resist, while others, like Dispatch, are getting a mobile optimization that reorients the experience for a portrait display.
And while traditional emulation has existed since Android was young, recent months have seen considerable improvement in breadth and performance, aided by AI coding tools and a community that wants to play its library of Steam, Windows, and Switch games on phones. This rabbit hole is extensive and varied: WinNative combines work from Winlator Bionic and Pluvia to run Windows games on Android and connect PC storefront libraries. DroidDeck aims for a SteamOS-like experience, putting Steam’s Big Picture interface on supported Android hardware with Windows games running through ARM64 Proton, which debuted recently with the Steam Frame.
It’s via DroidDeck that I whiled away a couple of glorious hours on my Galaxy Z Fold 8 playing Lumines Arise, a game perfectly suited to the pick-up-and-play nature of smartphones (though it’s best with a controller). The latest Qualcomm chips have long outpaced the mobile games they’ve been asked to power, but few knew just how well they’d run demanding PC and console titles, even through compatibility layers like Proton.
Similarly, an Android branch of the increasingly popular nxnative, which compiles Switch and Switch 2 games for iOS and macOS, has been making it easy to play games like Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Metroid Dread at 60fps on many recent Qualcomm-powered devices. There’s even a Switch 2 version in the works for Android.
The big question is whether all of this works well: will people spend more time arguing with the software than playing the games themselves? And on the legal side of the business, will publishers find success selling discounted versions of AAA titles on Android now that the translation tools are better and the device compatibility much broader?