The League of Legends x Apple announcement is bigger than people might think. I 100 % believe that this is the start of a massive shift from pc/console to mobile which we have seen before in China. In fact, it is clear from this announcement that iPhone IS considered a console now for Riot. Huge stuff.
I think you might have it reversed. I think the LoL announcement is mostly catering to the LoL playerbase (which is mostly located in China) rather than a great ploy to steal PC gaming share.
Separately from that, its pretty interesting how obviously faked the "playing" of LoL in the video was, in an presentation that is otherwise so focused on attention to detail.
It's not the start of a massive shift. You'd be surprised what the gaming spending per platform breakdown looks like - phones are a MASSIVE chunk, and growing by far the fastest.
I don't have the numbers on me to back this up but maybe someone else can fetch them.
The rule of thumb when it comes to sizing gaming audiences is:
- Mobile: Billions
- Console: 100s of millions
- PC: 10s of millions
In other words, a decent mobile game (not Fortnite or LoL, but something like Among Us) can get 100s of millions of users, a good console game can sells 10s of millions of copies and a PC game can sell millions of copies.
According to one source[1], steam alone has 95 million monthly active users. Not every pc gamer has steam running, so actual PC gamers are definitely in excess of 100 million. By comparison, ps plus and xbox live have 103 and 90 million monthly active users respectively. I'd say that PC and console gaming are within the same order of magnitude.
10's of millions of PC gamers? I think you're off by a huge margin. I believe DFC reported that there's over a billion PC gamers in the world in 2020. It's a billion dollar market in itself.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is partly why Epic made such a big move trying to put an Epic store on IOS (to the point of sueing Apple).
They managed to get Fortnite to run at 120FPS on Ipad Pro just this March and probably realized that high performance gaming on IOS is here and will only get better as CPU\GPUs improve on mobile, and sued Apple by August.
What better way to monetize your immersive, high performance, addictive game when it's in everyone's pocket all the time ie no need to sit at your console or PC.
