PC and mobile phones share a common interest in gaming, but are there actually any reasons to choose one over the other? Here's our side-by-side comparison of the two popular platforms.

Why Play on Mobile?
Convenience is at the heart of the mobile ecosystem. You can play in bed, in the bath, on the train, or in the greenhouse on a summer’s afternoon – let's see you try that with a PC. There’s an obvious trade off in power and battery life - there are only so many components you can stuff into a phone’s svelte body - but mobile processors get faster with each new generation; the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 has a clock speed of 2.4GHz, for example.

There’s also a much lower barrier for entry as far as buying games and technology is concerned. While phones themselves can be expensive, their near-necessity in the modern world means that most people have a device of some description, and the number of mobile gamers grows annually as a consequence. Statista forecasted 180m players in 2016 for 262m mobile owners, which means that 69% of Americans with a phone play games on it.

With the price of games usually no more than a few dollars, and many of them offering free ad or microtransaction-supported versions, it’s perhaps no surprise that mobile is the go-to mobile platform for such a large proportion of the population. The slightly odd statistic is that nearly a fifth of all people in the USA don’t have a phone at all.

Finally, let’s talk about creativity – mobile is home to some of the more innovative games on the market. Ignoring the obvious candidate of Pokémon Go, we can find innovation all across the board: mFortune, an iGaming brand unique for offering slots deposit by phone bill, has a new slot machine game – Hansel and Gretel – on mobile phones that dispenses with the reels altogether, while remaining true to its casino origins. The company is also offering 80 free spins on a similar title, Buster Ghost.


Why Play on PC?
The words anti-aliasing, post-processing, and anisotropic filtering might sound like something out of a biology textbook but, combined, they represent the number one reason for playing games on PC: scalable graphics. In 2016, it’s possible to modify The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim to include an almost photo realistic world, something that’s endemic to the PC platform. The reverse is also true; the player can remove shadows (for example) to allow a game to run faster on a low-end system.

With the above in mind, customization is arguably the PC’s most attractive feature, and running four monitors at once is just as achievable a goal as turning every dragon in Skyrim into Macho Man Randy Savage. The platform also allows higher resolutions than consoles – up to 8k – and components can be upgraded on demand, rather than every four or five years when the next iteration of the PlayStation or Xbox is released.

PC also has a thriving indie developer scene, something that is simultaneously a positive and a negative trait. For example, it’s probably fair to say that the Play Store on Android features a lot of sub-par titles – but so is the Steam distribution platform. Valve’s beloved storefront has been around for 13 years, yet 64% of all titles on Steam appeared in the last two years, largely due to the Greenlight initiative, which allows independents to publish their own games on the platform.

On the plus side, players get to play indie greats like Clustertruck but the abundance of poorly-made and joke titles has turned Greenlight into the digital equivalent of a jumble sale – even though it costs $100 to list a title.

As a final point, there isn’t much of a real comparison to be made between PC and mobile, with the two platforms serving as means to very different ends, the former the home of hardcore gamers and the latter catering to casual players. The best and most honest advice out there is simply to play on both.