There was once a time when having a full-blown computer in your pocket was still a fairly novel concept, and game developers, publishers, and console-makers were all too eager to find ways to work their existing products and franchises into mobile apps. Some of these were terrible, offering cheap imitations of their big siblings and often charging exorbitant prices for microtransactions, but there were also a whole bunch that took a different approach. Around the end of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation, developers often found intuitive and genuinely helpful ways to pair mobile apps with their games. No longer did they feel like cash grabs–instead, they showed how mobile devices could enhance and supplement the traditional gaming experience.
And then they started disappearing.
Much like Kinect functionality, DualShock 4 touchpad support, and motion-control spin-offs, the mobile companion app slowly went the way of the dinosaur. The catalyst for writing this piece came when I decided to load up the Battlefield Companion app. It was a great way to check statistics and fine-tune loadouts, saving time that could then be spent actually playing games like Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1. It’s something I sorely miss in Battlefield 6, as taking time to change my loadout means I either need to leave matchmaking and delay the fun, or spend the first moments of a Conquest game swapping out gun parts, hoping my teammates don’t hate me.
When Battlefield 4 released–broken as it was at launch–it even included a tablet-specific feature that let mobile players act as a commander, giving them a map-view perspective of the action while players on console and PC duked it out below. Was it an essential part of the experience? Certainly not, but it was an undeniably positive addition, and it no longer exists for little reason other than cost and resource allocation.
Call of Duty did almost the exact same thing with its own companion app. Sure, there are the very popular full-fledged games Call of Duty: Mobile and Warzone Mobile (itself later sunset), but these largely scratch the same itch as the console/PC titles. A companion app doesn’t try to replace the original, but instead aims to make the experience better. We all think about how we could make that one sniping loadout a little bit stronger when we’re not sitting down at the keyboard. Why jot a few ideas in the Notes app when we could just swap out a gun or an attachment immediately?
Of course, these apps weren’t just limited to competitive shooters; everything from action-adventure games to RPGs tried out their own versions during this period. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag offered an interactive map and–my favorite part–unlocked sea shanties after getting them in-game, letting you play the singalong pirate music wherever you happened to be. Mass Effect 3: Datapad offered the game’s codex so you could read up on various plot elements while on the go, and its Galaxy At War component let you actively prepare your squad for the final mission. I have fond memories of doing this on the long bus ride to school every morning for weeks, and now it’s simply not an option for new players.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the decline of companion apps being to games’ detriment is with sports. We saw it used in a limited fashion on Madden via Xbox’s SmartGlass app, but we’re still in an era where the honor system has to be used when playing a local competitive football game. You have a perfectly good phone in your pocket–why we haven’t made phone-based playcalling a standard feature in Madden by this point is beyond me. This option wouldn’t be a gimmick, but an objectively fairer and more realistic way to play competitive football.
Rather than choosing from a few selected plays on screen and hoping your friend can’t figure out which one you actually picked, you’d have access to your entire playbook.
The proliferation of smartphones might be the reason we’ve seen companion apps dwindle over the years, however. With the rise of cloud-gaming services, more and more titles are playable entirely on a phone. Why just check statistics or swap a loadout when you could be playing the entire game on the go? There are lots of reasons why you would still want to do this, of course, but they don’t seem to be of the utmost importance to those making decisions. Services like Xbox Cloud Gaming aren’t even limited to phones, either–you could be accessing a cloud-based Xbox game on a console or a smart TV while still having access to your phone! If we want games on more devices, like Microsoft seems so enthusiastic about, it will certainly do that.
Not every companion app has been a success, of course, so this isn’t a call for every developer to find a way to shoehorn in some sort of functionality. That’s what Nintendo attempted to do when the company, in its infinite wisdom, separated voice chat from game applications themselves on Nintendo Switch, instead requiring a separate connection to its Nintendo Switch Online app. It makes the experience messier, resulting in very low usage among players, which is one way to make sure younger players aren’t subjected to vulgar or offensive language … it just also makes sure older players also aren’t subjected to vulgar or offensive language.
It’s very possible we eventually see the pendulum swing back to widespread companion-app support, provided the industry has moved past whatever its latest C-suite-directed obsession happens to be. Regardless of whether companion apps can be cool again in the age of useless AI and metaverse integration, however, they deserve to be cool again. Don’t rob us of the simple joy of playing a sea shanty at full volume in a coffee shop to show your friends how good you are at Assassin’s Creed, or of switching that under-barrel foregrip attachment for a slightly different under-barrel foregrip attachment at 2 AM after you woke up to pee. This is what gaming is all about.
