The next generation of mobile computing platform Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen1 was officially released a month ago, and smartphones equipped with 8Gen1 have recently mushroomed. But unlike in previous years, as mobile phone brands pay more and more attention to hardware cooling and software optimization, gaming phones that were once considered the "performance benchmark" of mobile phones seem to have lost the heat of discussion, and it was not until January 10 that we heard about game phones in the New Year.
However, it is not the same as everyone thinks: on January 10, 2021, after 36Kr integrated multiple independent sources, it exposed the news that Tencent is preparing to acquire the game mobile phone company Black Shark Technology. According to reports, after the acquisition is completed, Black Shark Technology will also usher in business transformation, shifting its business focus from game phones to VR devices.
Although the news that Black Shark will be acquired by Tencent is still in the rumor stage, Tencent and Black Shark have not responded positively to the acquisition, but from the media revelations and Tencent's moves in the meta-universe field, the "acquisition" also has a certain rationality: Tencent can obtain excellent hardware manufacturing capabilities, like Facebook to lay the foundation of its VR and meta-universe content; Black Shark can get out of the fierce mobile phone market and enter a new "track".
However, the acquisition rumors have also left a question for the majority of mobile game enthusiasts: Black Shark was bought by Tencent, so are other game mobile phone brands far from being acquired?
The selling point of "gaming phones" has never been performance
Although I think of myself as a gamer and have the habit of playing games on mobile phones, in my opinion, game phones have always been a concept that is destined to be "short-lived", and the end time of its life is not even completely controlled by the manufacturers themselves, which can be seen from the birth of game phones.
The birth of gaming phones was very early, even earlier than the Android mobile operating system. The first gaming phone in the modern sense was Nokia's Nokia N-Gage, released in 2002. Considering the level of technology at the time, the "gameplay" of the N-Gage certainly could not be what the 2K120 screen or active heat dissipation. The "Hongmeng" in the field of game mobile phones has only done one thing: the shape of N-Gage is relatively close to the gamepad of that year, and users no longer "thumb fight" when playing games, and it is more convenient to play.
Such a design concept also appeared on the Xperia Play launched in 2011 by Sony (Sony Ericsson), which mastered half of the game, and the shape of the phone was designed to refer to the PSP Go released in 2009: the side-sliding fuselage leaked out not the full keyboard, but the so-called "full-size" game buttons: In order to emphasize the phone's game label, Sony Ericsson even set up two touch sticks and triggers for a touchscreen phone. But because the game failed to keep up, the phone's life can be said to be "high and not go", and it was quickly forgotten under the influence of multiple factors such as configuration, weight and price.
Although there is a gap of nearly 10 years between N-Gage and Xperia Play, in my opinion, the goals of gaming phones in this decade are very clear: because the performance of mobile phones has not yet been "feverish", the "gameplay" or core competitiveness of these game phones is based on "appearance", and making players more comfortable is the biggest pursuit of game phones in this decade. But what these brands don't think about is that if consumers are no longer sensitive to "feel", gaming phones will lose their foothold.
In 2013, the global mobile Internet developed rapidly, and the ubiquitous mobile Internet brought more diversified application scenarios to mobile phones, and more and more powerful hardware configurations also brought more possibilities to mobile phones. The growing mobile phone technology has given mobile games a richer space for development, but at the same time, diversified mobile application scenarios have also weakened the importance of games to mobile phones. Games used to be all about mobile entertainment, but now they are just one of the "more power-hungry" application scenarios. For the average user, it is obviously unrealistic to add 50% of the weight in order to not be high-frequency game scenes. It was also around this time that the game phone ushered in the first downhill road. Here's a very realistic example: In 2014, the most popular gaming phone was the iPhone 5s.
Since Xperia Play, the "function" of game phones has been integrated by flagship phones in most cases, for no other reason: regardless of the feel, the "competitiveness" of game phones at that time was only the performance configuration, and Android phones at that time had used qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series flagship mobile platforms. Since there is little difference between the two in hardware, consumers will of course choose the "all-round" flagship model that takes more care of the comprehensive experience.
Hardware homogenization makes the game phone scenery no longer
It was not until 2018 that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip was applied on a large scale by the flagship mobile phone, and the game phone once again appeared in the public eye. In April 2018, the Black Shark mobile phone was launched. In addition to the outstanding cost performance and relatively unobtrusive design, the Black Shark mobile phone aimed at the fever and frequency reduction problems commonly encountered by the flagship mobile phone when playing games at that time, and also set off the excellent tradition of the game phone focusing on heat dissipation.
In the subsequent product iteration, the game mobile phone began to take heat dissipation as the core of the product, and found a new route called "performance release" between Qualcomm and mainstream mobile phone brands, and the application of the vaporizer plate, liquid cooling heat pipe, active heat dissipation and other applications in the mobile phone field also successfully opened a new chapter for the game phone.
But unfortunately, taking "heat dissipation" as the core of game phones cannot fundamentally solve the problem of weak competitiveness of game phones. Many people like to compare gaming phones to gaming laptops, after all, both are optimized in terms of heat dissipation, screen and power supply.
But in fact, gaming phones can be said to have completely misunderstood the core of gaming notebooks: gaming notebooks are called gaming notebooks because they are fundamentally different from regular home notebooks in their core, such as powerful GPUs and unlocked multiplier CPUs. More powerful cooling systems are ultimately all for these "extra" hardware services.
However, the homogenization of chips makes game phones unable to take advantage of such hardware advantages, and the chips used in game phones are also used in flagship mobile phones. Coupled with the popularity of technologies such as high-refresh screens and fast charging, flagship mobile phones are often a more balanced choice without requiring high load cooling.
Of course, before the upstream manufacturers solve the problem of mobile phone chip power consumption, heat dissipation is still a good game for game phones. But heat dissipation is also the only competitiveness of game phones, and it also has to "watch the sky and eat". The core competitiveness of game phones only depends on whether the chip is "good or not", which also means that game phones have lost control of their own competitiveness. Assuming that next year's chip process is advancing by leaps and bounds, and the flagship mobile phone plays for an hour before the original god is only 30 degrees, the game phone will completely lose the ability to fight back.
Of course, game phones can also reverse the development of chips, allowing upstream manufacturers to launch more powerful game chips, fundamentally and flagship mobile phones to open up hardware advantages. But in 2022, when the chip performance is seriously excessive, rather than launching more powerful game-specific chips, upstream suppliers and mobile phone brands are usually more willing to cooperate with game manufacturers at the software level, optimize software, and find ways to play excess computing power, otherwise it is only a matter of time before the game mobile phone market is swallowed up by flagship mobile phones again.
The concept of gaming phones is contrary to mobile gaming
If the hardware configuration with the same height as the flagship mobile phone is only the direct reason why the game phone "does not work", then from the core point of view, the classification of "game phone" itself is contrary to the foundation of mobile games. The reason why mobile games can achieve user coverage far beyond PC games and console games is inseparable from the more than 5.22 billion mobile phone users worldwide. Compared with high-performance PCs and game consoles, smart phones at your fingertips provide more room for mobile gaming.
But the "game phone" category wanted to isolate games from ordinary mobile phones from the beginning, and limited mobile games to a limited number of mobile phones. This from the beginning went against the concept of "group routes" in mobile games. Even if the future upstream suppliers really launch a high-performance chip based on the ARM architecture that can run the Android system, so that the game phone can really lead the flagship phone in hardware, the product created based on this platform will not be a game phone, but another "Android handheld".
With that said, is the route of the game phone doomed to fail, and the related brands are also destined to be acquired? Apparently not. Sales are the best report card of mobile phones, and from the perspective of sales data, gaming mobile phones that are more recognized by consumers often do not have those "fancy" "player designs". Pressure rather than physical shoulder keys, external rather than built-in radiators, convergent and unobtrusive design, coupled with a qualified daily experience without playing games, these are the directions that game phones should currently develop.
In addition, games can also develop towards the perspective of game accessories and even game "handhelds", abandon the obsession with mobile phones and daily use, push game equipment to the extreme from the three directions of feel, performance and power, and abandon the mobile phone market to enter the market segment of game equipment.
From a consumer perspective, I certainly hope that the mobile phone industry can flourish and the degree of homogenization can be further reduced. But in my opinion, gaming phones are "good at everything, just not like mobile phones".