Mobile is the new PC, but not how you think

"In my opinion mobile is the new PC," Niklas Smedberg, senior engine programmer at Epic Games, told a gathering a developers during this week's GDC Europe.

"In my opinion mobile is the new PC," Niklas Smedberg, senior engine programmer at Epic Games, told a gathering of developers during this week's GDC Europe.

As with computer games, mobile games have to function on an increasingly wide range of phones of varying power. The best solution, Smedberg said, is to allow mobile gamers to tinker with the settings of the games themselves.

"There is a wide performance range, so we have to be able to scale our graphics," he said. "We have to be able to scale from the very high end to the low end.

"All of those kind of PC settings you see in PC games, those have to come to mobile. It's not so much yet, but those should come to mobile."

That could mean gamers would be able to use sliders, or buttons to switch between pre-defined performance settings, a move toward a degree of customization found in many computer games.

"Very few people go into the user settings, but it's like customer service," he said. "You can tell them in support to go in and chance resoluton settings."

The performance issue is more notable on Android devices, which aren't as pre-defined as iOS devices, he said.

"On iOS it's kind of easy because we have all of these scalability settings hardcoded," he said.

Epic Games' Infinity Blade and Infinity Blade II created a stir in the mobile community with their high-end graphics, when the games hit iOS devices.