It’s not quite as tired as asking if Die Hard is a Christmas movie – few things are – but it is still a regular question posed by industry watchers at this time of year:
Where are the mobile games at all these award shows?
This week, The Game Awards will take place in LA to lavish praise on a load of PC and console games, with a token Best Mobile Game category thrown in. The 2026 BAFTA Games Awards longlist also came out this week – a quick scan of that tells us that just three of those 64 games are playable on mobile. Representation for anything outside PC and console was minimal at the Golden Joysticks awards, too.
The reasons for this are not really a mystery, if you ask me: these award shows are about cultural impact, fandom, storytelling and artistry. They’re not about player retention, monetisation or effective user acquisition. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I am certainly not questioning the artistry involved in creating a great character, environment or mobile game UI. Or indeed the talent, craft and effort that goes into a great gameplay loop, progression system or game economy. It’s just not what The Game Awards, BAFTAs or Golden Joysticks are there to recognise. And that’s fine, by the way.
Yes, many, many mobile games inspire fandoms, Reddit communities and can fill up Discord servers. And that’s great, but let’s not pretend that even a game as big and successful as, say, Monopoly Go can inspire a chin-stroking editorial in The Atlantic. It’s a very cleverly-built game, of course, but it is mainly about pressing a big red ‘Go’ button and accumulating as much virtual wealth as possible.
Mobile games are barely represented at these awards shows for many of the same reasons most games websites don’t cover mobile games, outside of guide content.
As former Polygon and Kotaku editor Maddy Myers explained earlier this year, mobile players are not the kind to seek out writing about their favourite mobile games, even if they are playing them for several hours a day. In fact, any successful mobile game is effectively designed to keep you from leaving it.
As Myers wrote in that article: “Even though I keep on coming back to Pokémon Go, I’m not sure what more there is to write about it as a cultural object…Clair Obscur, on the other hand? I finished it weeks ago, and I’m still reading opinions, stories and analyses of the story.”
Clair Obscur is set to sweep up at The Game Awards because it’s a critical darling, has an emotional story, compelling characters and more than enough meat on its bones to inspire a passionate fandom. Most mobile games simply do not have enough of these elements to realistically be in contention at the Game Awards or elsewhere.
(And those that do have all of these elements are – frankly – likely to fail in today’s uncompromising marketplace, unless they’re on Netflix or Apple Arcade.)
All games are a mix of art and science. In mobile, the science of acquisition, retention and monetisation outweighs everything else most of the time. And that’s completely fine!
Awards are nice, sure. But for me the endlessly creative and innovative minds in the mobile games business don’t need this kind of validation anyway – and they should stop worrying about getting it.
