Having spent the bulk of my handheld gaming time with the Steam Deck, it was a bit of a shock last year to discover that PC gaming isn’t just possible on Android phones and retro handhelds, it’s powering on in leaps and bounds.
I’ve seen so many different games running beautifully, from older AAA titles like Tomb Raider and Prey (2017), all the way to more demanding ones like RDR2 and even Cyberpunk 2077 (no surprise that the last one is still an imperfect experience, as things stand…but it is possible!).
GameNative lets you play all manner of PC games on Android from GOG, Epic, and Steam.
I reached out to my friend Utkarsh, who is the lead developer of GameNative to ask if he wanted to share his story and let me interview him.
His background in development and gaming through to how GameNative started and is built, all the way to what the future might bring for his program. This is an interview on what I think might be at least part of the future of handheld gaming, and I hope you find this interesting:
https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/
Bit of a conflict of interest from the quote, considering the quote in the title is from one of GameNative’s developers.
“North Korea will definitely be the most powerful nation in the world, that could replace every other country and government, says Kim Jong-un.”
I’m just wondering where the ‘conflict of interest’ is here?
It is a clear, attributable quote and perspective from the interviewee. What conflict?! Who else would the quote be from, when I am interviewing one person?
Edit. Yeah, doesn’t seem like you understand what a ‘conflict of interest’ actually is.
GameNative is a FOSS project. I think you’re confusing it with GameHub.
Good job on the headline, made me click. I found the full quote interesting:
Do you think GameNative might in some way redefine the way people think about PC gaming on portable devices?
Utkarsh: Yes, I do, and that’s the reason I’m choosing to work on it! I genuinely feel that in the next year or two, GameNative is going to become a complete replacement for handheld PCs like the Steam Deck, and in the medium-long term make expensive, bulky gaming PCs an anachronism.
This seems overly optimistic and there’s no mention about Valve actively working on fex as a possible precursor to the Deck2 or Deck3 being an arm powered device. Then there’s the problem of heat dissipation in devices that haven’t been designed with that type of sustained usage in mind. Will people buy bulkier phones without water and dust resistance in large enough quantities to be sustainable?
I’ve been excited about PC emulation on my phone and it has been a surprisingly good experience for most non-AAA games (except for the hit on battery life), but it’ll never be able to duplicate the immersion that only becomes possible on a large display with the necessary horsepower to bring the game to life. PC gaming isn’t going anywhere and neither are dedicated handhelds.
and in the medium-long term make expensive, bulky gaming PCs an anachronism.
This claim is a ridiculous overreach. There’s only so much computing power you can fit in a small space due to heat dissipation. You can’t beat thermodynamics. You can get a lot of games to run on lower end systems, but only if you’re willing to make a ton of compromises.
In no way are you going to be running something like Cyberpunk at 4k 60fps on a phone within the next 10 years. Thats what the “expensive, bulky gaming PCs” are for.
And I don’t get why they’re painting a target on the back of high end gaming hardware or even the Steam Deck. There’s another target that would be more beneficial to society to take out: consoles, particularly their locked-in ecosystems. Democratize gaming.
Cyberpunk came out in 2020. Are there games from 2010 that you would be surprised to see running af full speed on a high-end smartphone?
Trying to push the narrative to focus on 2010 games feels a bit like moving the goalposts, but I’ll bite
Trying to run anything in 4k 60fps native still is challenging for a lot of systems today, even older titles. Anything with high fidelity like the Last of Us would be a problem.
Plus anything with a lot of characters on screen at the same time would likely be a struggle. I’ve done 4-person couch co-op of CoD: Black Ops Zombies on XBox 360 (the system it was designed for) and it got choppy due to the number of zombies and perspectives the CPU had to handle. Open world games could potentially end up in a similar situation.
Then you get games that usually end up modded a lot like Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas that would likely be trouble from the start, and modern graphics mods still require fairly powerful systems to handle well
Trying to push the narrative to focus on 2010 games feels a bit like moving the goalposts,
Why? Isn’t the comparable expectation for consideration of what high-end phones ten years from now could do with a six-year old game to ask what today’s high-end phones can do with sixteen year old games?
Moore’s Law was always a marketing gimmick, but progression of information technology has been a rather steady cycle of “next year’s model will be even better” that it strikes me as a good starting point.
Advances in computation have slowed significantly the past few years. Moore’s Law is generally considered to have been dead for the last decade. There’s a reason Nvidia keeps adding a higher and higher power requirement on their top-end cards the past 2 generations. They’re running out of potential for optimizations, and the main route for higher compute is to now throw tons of power at it.
A better way to look at it is the Steam Deck. It only works because the TDP is 15W. If you wanted to make it more powerful, you’ll need to figure out how to dissipate the extra thermal load. If instead you tried switching to ARM for increased efficiency, the extra layers of translation and emulation puts you about where you started, meaning you’d still need to throw more power at it to get more performance.
Metro2033
I’d prefer Linux over Android in this context 100% of the time
Gamenative is absolutely sick but Android is also a PITA for handhelds these days. The kernels are always dated, the task management sucks, the UX sucks, and everything has to be ported into an APK with cruddy Android API mappings.
I have Rocknix dual boot on my AYN Thor, and it is so much easier to run native emulators on linux then to run the Android counterparts, which are guaranteed to be missing features or are out of date with upstream releases.
I don’t see this replacing my Steam Deck, but it might open up some impromptu gaming here and there.
The Proton 11 beta already supports ARM and people are already playing games via Steam on ARM handhelds with Rocknix. GameNative is going to face an uphill battle. People are going to pick Proton over GameNative if it doesn’t have the same support and development as Valve dedicates to Proton.
It’ll continue being relevant for EGS, GOG, and Amazon games. I’m betting Valve is working on an Android app that makes the experience way smoother out of the box. Keep in mind that there’s plenty of games that aren’t looking like Ghost of Tsushima. There’s been a bunch of CRPG releases in the last decade. ARPG games too that aren’t hard to run. Victor Vran. Grim Dawn has an upcoming update
But there’s still enough hard to run games that games run through an x86 emulator will not be a real.replacement for the hard to run games. Going to at least need the day to come when devs commonly ship ARM binaries too
I don’t know about that. I’ve tried multiple games with it and none of them are working. I can get them working in Winlator, which GameNative is based on, but not GameNative itself. It’s possible that I could be using it wrong even though I’m using the same settings in both apps but I wouldn’t know because there’s no documentation for either of them.
The best I was able to achieve in GameNative was with a game made in a very old version of Ren’Py. I was able to get in game but I wasn’t able to actually play it because mouse inputs aren’t working and the controller inputs only work on the main menu. I know that the GameNative’s virtual mouse should be working because it works perfectly fine for closing error messages, it’s just not working in game for some reason.
It’s actually quite a shame that I can’t get GameNative working because it does have more options available than Winlator. This means that if I could get it working, then there might be some games that would better in GameNative than Winlator.
Have a look at my friend’s site:
It is a space where community members upload their experiences and ideal settings for the devices and games. I might be biased because he is a friend, but I can also say that objectively it is a wonderful space to double-check how you’re approaching things.
Filter your search by your device, and then on the far-right, click on each result’s ‘eye’ to see what the person’s recommendations are in there (I do hope this helps!)
I can try that website out. There aren’t that many entries for my device (Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE) and none of them are for games I’d want to play on android but I’ll try what they say and see if any of it helps.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE
Here’s the filter for just your device, if it helps:
https://www.emuready.com/listings?deviceIds=["fc4ef9e4-8df9-48b7-97b4-c9cace9a417f"]
I’m still not getting anywhere with the games I’m trying to play. None of them are listed, even for other devices, and I still can’t get any games working properly in GameNative regardless of whether I use the some of the configurations mentioned for other games on my device or the same settings I use in Winlator.
Also, that website seems pretty cool though. I’m not sure how much I’d be able to add because I’m limited to just Winlator for PC games on android until I can get a game working properly in either GameNative or GameHub but does EmuReady allow adult/NSFW games? I didn’t see any adult/NSFW games listed but I’m also not seeing anything about them either. Also, do they allow adding other emulators? There are several emulators and emulator-adjacent apps I’m aware of but aren’t listed.
I agree with this take, was playing Gravity Circuit via GameNative on my Pixel 9 and my GameSir G8 Galileo. I am portably gaming with OLED and Hall Effect and it felt fantastic. If you primarily play lower spec indie games, its a no-brainer as far as i am concerned.
Is there like a general guideline as to what games would be compatible with which device? For example, I have a pixel 8 pro, but I can’t seem to get anything to boot up. How can I tell, by the release year, that a game should be light enough for me to run on my device?
I’d recommend seeing what the community has shared, others may have uploaded their games/settings for that phone on EmuReady. The sites is maintained purely to share exactly that.
https://www.emuready.com/listings?deviceIds=["b600b2d5-3631-4f50-b235-a9d0d2559445"]
(here is the results filtered just by your handset, but these include all kinds of emulation, not just GameNative)
But by the same token, 99% of games which do (and don’t) run won’t have been shared there either. So it is a game-by-game basis.
A good one to start with would be a ‘light’ title like DREDGE, if you own it?
I’ll do a little checking and see what I can find on your phone though, will come back and edit with what I find soon!
Edit: Here is a post on Reddit where the OP asks the community how the Pixel 8 is for emulation in general. The top comment says that they’re using Winlator and have 60FPS/720p performance for BioShock, New Vegas, Wow with dx9/10 games. So these should translate to being the same performance/playability on GameNative (I’d hazard, anyway)
There’s also results in the GameNative Discord, but too many to share here. I do hope this helps, though!
Thanks! It seems like the Reddit thread person has gotten F:NV to work, which was one of the games I tried with Game native to no avail. Maybe I gotta try this Winlator thing? Thanks again for your help!
For a minute or so anyway, until the SoC overheats and thermal throttles.
You’re going to need a bigger battery and a real heatsink+fan if you want real gaming out of it, at which point it’s going to start getting to Deck size…
Uhm look at the Ayn Thor and Odin 3. It’s pretty much on par in a way smaller form factor. ARM is a game changer.
At this point in time, with how expensive the Ayn Thor has gotten and the downgrade from UFS 4.0 to 3.1 (WITH a simultaneous price increase), that console is dead to me personally, unless prices return to normal (which won’t happen).
However, the future of portable gaming is absolutely in ARM based consoles. Given that the upcoming Steam Frame will come with ARM to x86 translation (FEX), I think that Valve is also aware of this, and that the Steam Frame is the tip of the iceberg and will act as a sort of testing ground for ARM.
I’m hoping that Valve creates a variant of the Steam Deck that runs on an ARM-based chip, in addition to a true Steam Deck successor console running on a normal AMD processor and GPU. I think that Android also adds unnecessary overhead when gaming (latency and CPU cycles), and SteamOS is a great answer to that problem.
While I think Ayn is currently out of reach price wise, more competitors will begin to pop up making similar things (e.g. Retroid Pocket Flip 2).
Yeah the price increase on the AYN sucks, but I brought them up as examples of great devices that run PC emulation quite well in a very small form factor (at least compared to PC handhelds).
Also I 100% agree that ARM is the future here, and that Valve is probably testing the waters with Steam Frame. It all fits in just way too perfectly. That being said, while I would hope to be wrong, I could imagine them completely moving to ARM and just not release a true Steam Deck successor at some point based on x86. Valve is kinda making history with not making direct successors with the Valve Index -> Steam Frame.
ARM isn’t the reason why it won’t work for long.
It’s cooling, as soon as the phone thermal soaks it’s throttles down - phones can’t have a decent cooling system since they use power (fans EAT power), degrade water resistance and just add weight/bulk that most don’t want in a phone.
The handhelds you’ve listed aren’t phones. They’re handhelds that do in fact have heatsinks - they’ll work fine.
Again this isn’t anything against ARM, it’s the idea that a phone form factor with zero cooling considerations will somehow best a device with those considerations.
Here’s the thing: Game Native allows for this sort of emulation of PC games on those handhelds. Yes, it works for like 10 minutes on a normal phone with heavier titles, but these handhelds are easily half the size of a steam deck while giving comparable performance sometimes already on these devices. That’s what the conversation is really about I feel. I don’t think anyone would even want to to play cyberpunk on their phone.
Reliable Android emulation of Windows’-compatible work programs is, too, a rather interesting niche. Laptop-alikes of tablets with a keyboard are popular in lower budget segment, and if they become viable replacements for desk job workflows, that may cause corpos to consider that.
Russia has a couple of Linux distros and companies providing custom compatibility settings and wine prefixes to set a client with all the ancient accounting software they are used to work in, so there is a market, but the one completely unprepared for Android devices being capable of doing it as well as desktops.
I’d suggest the dev to look into it because, I suspect, when the turtles of corpo world would take a taste of that, they may form a competetitive market of providing GameNative’s tooling to their clients in exchange for extremely beefy contracts, while outsourcing resulting errors back to them to fix.
Last game I tried to install through GameNative on Retroid Pocket 5 was Granblue Fantasy Versus. It kept crashing on startup. Guess I’ll let it cook for a while longer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Yes, it’s very good!
Fuck android, last thing I want is more locked down devices bloated and filled with spyware.
GameNative is open-source, free, and 100% spyware free.
What on earth?! I’m confused, are you saying GameNative is locked down, bloated and filled with spyware? Or that users who are running Android shouldn’t have something that is open-source and spyware free? Just checking for some clarification here, since your rant seems a bit…off-topic.
He’s saying that Android is locked down bloated and filled with spyware.
I think it was the steamdeck comparison that is drawing this response, as gamers finally have a device that isn’t restricted to a single OS and is completely under the users control.
What’s the alternative? Keep in mind: we’re talking about a primary phone used for calls, texts, navigation, banking, payments, photography, and social media.
