Asus just announced its 2019 gaming phone, the RoG Phone II, with the aggressive style of Asus' RoG gaming laptops and, as of July 23, 2019, the most powerful hardware seen in any Android phone to date. But what is a 'gaming phone' really, and why should you consider buying one? Or, to lay our cards on the table, let’s look at why most of you shouldn’t.
Six key elements add to the Asus RoG Phone II’s gaming credibility, if we ignore looks that could have been designed by a focus group of PC gaming forum users. Let's call them the six gaming pillars.
The screen is likely to be one of the most commonly discussed. It’s a 6.59-inch OLED of 2340 x 1080 pixel resolution. There’s no notch and it’s not particularly high-res either. Asus says the extra bits of border surround are kept there deliberately to give your thumbs a place to rest, but it hardly gives the Asus RoG II the most cutting-edge front-on look.
Screen refresh rate is the one stand-out spec here as this is a 120Hz screen. Most phones have 60Hz screens, and this is the first with a 120Hz OLED panel, following the LCD-based 120Hz Razer Phone 2. “120Hz” means the display image is refreshed 120 times a second.
We noticed the difference a higher refresh rate offers in the 90Hz OnePlus 7 Pro. It makes the scrolling of your homescreen and apps menu look much smoother. But will it do the same for games? Not really. High refresh rate displays are popular among PC gamers who have paid for hardware powerful enough to play games at frame rates higher than 60fps. It doesn’t have as grand an effect if, like a phone playing a high-end game, you rarely reach 60fps.
Frame rate tells you the speed at which a console, computer or phone can play a game. Refresh rate shows your display’s ability to render those frames. Put it this way: 120Hz won’t make Ark: Survival Evolved look smoother on the Asus RoG II. It should, however, reduce screen tearing. This is where the refresh rate clashes with the frame rate, and you end up with a screen image where, for example, half the screen shows the last frame rather than the current one.
Next up in 'gamer roulette' is the processor. The Asus RoG Phone II is the first phone to have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC, a rare half-generation upgrade over the Snapdragon 855 other current 2019 top-end phones have. Its CPU and GPU are roughly 15 per cent faster than the standard Snapdragon 855’s.
To call it a gamer SoC is a little too generous, though. Upcoming high-end phones with Qualcomm processors, like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10, are likely to use it simply because it exists. Demand almost £1,000 for a phone and it had better have the latest processor. There is no dedicated core mobile gaming hardware, because 'normal' phones snap up the most powerful chipsets available almost as soon as they leave the production line.
Asus also added 'invisible' shoulder buttons to the RoG II, for more gamepad-like control. But two of the most meaningful uprated gamer features are some of the least “expensive”. Asus says it has made the original RoG’s solid stereo front speakers even louder for the second generation, and it has a huge 6,000mAh battery. Any phone with a mid-range CPU or better and a battery that still lasts a full day after 30 minutes of play is a good phone for playing games. But none of this is really enough. Handset alone, the Asus RoG II can seem like a normal high-end phone playing dress-up in its parents’ clothes.
Avoiding this exact scenario is the purpose of the Asus Kunai gamepad, a $130 (£104) accessory. It can be used as a standalone Bluetooth controller, or split up like the Joy-Cons of a Nintendo Switch and attached to each side of the Asus RoG Phone II. You get dual analogue sticks, a D-Pad and standard array of buttons. But it might not be in Asus' best interests to invoke this obvious comparison to a Switch.
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The Asus RoG II has a more advanced screen than the Switch, eight times the storage and more power. Nintendo’s Switch has a Tegra X1 processor Nvidia announced for mobile devices in 2015. Even after you remove the overheads of Android, the Asus phone is almost certainly significantly more powerful. The upcoming Switch Lite does use a newer version of the Tegra X1, expected to use a more advanced architecture to (in part) improve battery life. But a true second-generation Nintendo Switch is not coming this year according to Nintendo.
So why does the comparison not help Asus? The topic often left out of the discussion of gaming phones is what people intend to actually play on them. “It's still a phone, and it plays mobile games,” says Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, the publisher of some of the most ambitious and interesting indie games of the last few years including Hynospace Outlaw and Descenders, due for release on Switch but not mobile. Why not?
“Since they're mobile games, they need to be designed and priced in an entirely different way to Switch games,” says Rose.
“When you're looking through the Switch eShop, you're looking at $20-40 (£16-32) titles, and you know when you buy one, you're going to be spending the next few days or weeks with it. When you pick up a game on the Asus RoG 2, it'll be mobile game priced (probably free-to-play) and come with all the elements that mobile games thrive on -- 'energy' mechanics, microtransactions, bumping you constantly to get you to buy more things.”
Free games come at a price. And while there are exceptions on mobile, such as Stardew Valley, Minecraft and The Room series, they are rare next to the waves upon waves of microtransaction funded titles.
You can find mobile gaming execs talking at conferences about strategies to “hook whales” on YouTube. These are the big spenders who might sink thousands of pounds into a “free to play game”, which is hard not to see as an exploitation of addiction, or at least compulsive behaviour.
The gambling effect has long since infected some top-price console games, but it is the primary money-making technique on mobile. It moulds gameplay mechanics, even in Nintendo’s own mobile titles. And its roots are most players’ unwillingness to pay “real” money for mobile games, a condition at least as old as app stores.
“A device like the RoG 2 isn't going to all of a sudden make people want to spend more money on the base price of a game, and that's why I imagine we won't be going near it with our games,” says Rose. “We care about the value of our games too much to stick them on a device for peanuts. That's why tons of people won't care about this device, and will stick with 'proper' gaming devices like the Switch.”
The Asus RoG II has the hardware, but it doesn't have the content. This leaves the phone a simulacrum of a gaming portable, one with a potential fad factor akin to 3D TVs, mobile VR headsets and home popcorn makers.
This should not detract from what mobile gaming does well, of course. There are countless brilliant casual and puzzle games on mobile, and small armies of Pokémon Go players (of all ages) can still be found roaming around parks on the weekend. Development platforms like Unity also make it relatively easy to port indie games to mobile. But this is not the Asus RoG II angle. A £200 phone can play almost all of the best mobile games as well as this one.
A 'gaming phone' is a thin concept, thinner than you might assume. But it’s not Asus’s fault, and the company is not alone in trying to make smartphones that seem to be custom built for 3D competitive games like PUBG and Fortnite (which is still only available through the Epic Games website). In launch events, 5G demos at trade shows and advertising, phone manufacturers are shifting their marketing from an all-out focus on phone photography to how their hardware is the best for mobile gaming.
The OnePlus 7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10 family, among others, have “gaming” modes that tweak phone behaviour during play. Honor’s GPU Turbo feature improves performance in optimised games, including PUBG. That the Asus RoG II is a bad gaming phone is not the argument here, rather that its distinctive advantages are likely to be better on paper than in person. And while the $130/likely £130 Kunai gamepad is interesting, its appeal is almost non-existent when a Nintendo Switch Lite will cost £199.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
