For a few years now I’ve been trying to make mobile and cloud gaming an option for me…. I started writing this post with examples, information and more.
Instead I’m going to put it quite simply: the game industry needs a clue bat to the head, a complete gutting of leadership and massive studios broken up (lol @ that thought given the Microsoft/Activision/Blizzard deal being approved).
I’ve spent years fighting the inaccessible nature of mobile, cloud and PC gaming. I went deep enough down this rabbit hole to deploy my own cloud based compute environment, I sorted workarounds for all the things so I could continue to use strong passwords and I’ve found bugs with controllers that claim mobile support. I even put up with the random UI overhauls that broke every one of my workarounds that allowed me to actually use the software being pushed by studios and others.
I spent years on this because it took all my mental energies to study, decipher and ultimately put dozens of workflows and workarounds in place to make things usable.
The game industry doesn’t put accessibility first and what little accessibility has been afforded to gamers is highly specific and rarely applied to mobile or cloud gaming endeavors at a meaningful or useful level for folk with access needs.
I’m giving up. I’m tired of fighting a toxic industry that can’t seem to move the needle with any kind of reasonable pace or seriousness.
A massive fuck you to Valve and Nvidia for giving me hope and then making the software so overwhelmingly thinky and spoony it puts me off of gaming for days and weeks at a time.
I’d also like to aim a huge fuck you to devs who arbitrarily change UIs and make them less accessible. Eat shit.