Our 2024 awards continue with a look at the big tech companies that didn’t quite get it right this year.
For a more cheerful slant on the two best mobile games of 2024 – in my opinion – read this bit on Balatro and Minute Cryptic.
No-shows of the year: Xbox and PlayStation
Neither of these console platform holders turned up on mobile in any significant way in 2024, despite saying they would several times.
Okay – technically, Xbox is here already, as it obviously now owns King. But let’s be honest, King runs King. Xbox is fighting so many fires in its console business that, happily, King has been left alone.
More broadly, Xbox hasn’t done a single thing it said it would do in mobile this year. In February, it said was prepping a ‘gamer-first app store’; by May, it was a web store launching in July; by August, it was MIA. In October, it said store functionality would be live in the existing Xbox app by November – it’s now December, and it’s all TBC again.
Mobile is the gigantic missing piece in Microsoft’s new cross-platform ‘this is an Xbox’ ethos. The existing mobile stuff Xbox bought in through the Activision Blizzard deal is doing fine, of course – there just doesn’t appear to be any sort of plan or clear vision of what’s next, or how it can all fit together into a coherent cross-platform games business. Maybe it doesn’t, and never will.
It’s kind of the same deal with PlayStation. Former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan spent years shifting the business towards live service games and talking about appealing to new audiences, including mobile players. He told investors in mid-2022 that first party PlayStation mobile games would be arriving by March 2023, even.
We once profiled the new ‘superteam’ assembled to make those mobile games happen within PlayStation. Then Ryan retired, and the coCEOs who took over PlayStation after him appear to have different ideas. Today, I’m not sure that mobile team is still intact, and its one major acquisition in mobile was rebranded then closed down in October, without ever having shipped a game.
Now PlayStation owns Bungie, a mobile edition of Destiny could have been a spectacular opening gambit for its mobile push. But that game was announced in October, and very deliberately pitched as a NetEase joint without a PlayStation logo in sight. Has it given up completely? I hope not.
Mobile needs a little of PlayStation and Xbox’s glamour and stardust, I think. And each console platform needs mobile if they are to reach outside the very insular, saturated core gamer audience. Xbox might well turn up properly in 2025, perhaps, but I don’t fancy PlayStation’s chances any more. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Hardware flop of 2024: Apple Vision Pro
Everyone reading this desperately wants an exciting new hardware platform, particularly one closely linked to the existing mobile ecosystem. But Apple Vision Pro clearly isn’t going to be it. The money spent on researching, developing and producing this new device must have been astronomical; a flop on this scale would bankrupt most mid-sized tech companies. But not Apple.
Vision Pro is a weird kind of disaster, one with apparently minimal consequences. Apple can absorb expensive mistakes like this, no problem. It is wildly over-priced, and perhaps would have only made sense four or five years ago, when there was hype and optimism around VR/AR. But this is 2024, and having scrapped work on a car – a thing people might actually want – Apple released its AR/VR headset to a baffled game developer community that was given zero incentive to develop things for the device. And those who did got appalling support, as we reported earlier this year.
Games, despite being one of the few consumer-facing use cases for VR and AR tech, were ignored right from the start. Yes, Apple made a lot of its own Arcade titles compatible with the device, but there was very little bespoke or meaningful use of this dazzling new tech.
Once again, Apple seems to have forgotten that it can make all the flashy hardware it wants, but it really needs to get developers onside to make its devices truly sing. And now it’s too late: RIP Vision Pro.
Worst use of AI: LinkedIn
Several years ago, LinkedIn was a useful website for keeping up to speed with company news and job updates. Particularly if you happen to run a mobile games industry website – a good chunk of mobilegamer.biz traffic once came from LinkedIn, because it was good at putting relevant content in front of the right audience. That is no longer the case.
Thanks to AI, LinkedIn is now the home of humblebrags dressed up as meaningful personal anecdotes and current affairs commentary that also teaches us something profound about the tech business.
Please, in 2025, don’t:
- Use ChatGPT to write shitty engagement-bait posts about the VC/marketing/mobile game landscape.
- Use an AI image generator to illustrate the above shitty post.
Algorithmic social media feeds do not work if they’re not smart enough to figure out when they’re being played. Enshittification is real – I would like to simply see posts written by actual humans again, please.
