[HaloZero]

You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.

[isodev]

But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it. I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people

[agoodusername63]

mobile gaming is much bigger than HN would believe.

A lot of people do in fact, play more than a couple forever titles.

I know multiple weebs that want more powerful ipads to play mobage.

[theshrike79]

People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.

Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.

And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.

If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.

They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.

There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.

[Cthulhu_]

Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.

But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.

[michaelmcdonald]

On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!

[HaloZero]

But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.

[stingraycharles]

You’re forgetting just how convenient a tablet is and how little average people care about the latest and greatest triple-A games.

[sheiyei]

I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.

[theshrike79]

Just browsing the web on the couch. It's so much better to have a 10" screen than whatever your phone has.

And even on an iPad you can put a video running in the corner while you browse HN or Lobste.rs.

[bensyverson]

I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.

[Cthulhu_]

> But the iPad is not a console

This is a very naive take - the iPad and iPhone are both multibillion gaming devices, and to dismiss it is short-sighted.

I'd even claim (but can't look up statistics due to a restrictive company network) that singular mobile games like Honor of Kings generate more revenue than 95% of Steam games. Yet a lot of people that style themselves gamers (like myself) never even heard of it.

[boplicity]

Remember, the reason the iPad doesn't do Steam is because Apple won't let it. It is perfectly capable otherwise.

[raincole]

> iPad is not a console

Exactly. Mobile gaming is a far bigger and more profitable market than console.

[bigyabai]

Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.